The Futility Infielder

"Any time a billionaire asks you for my phone number, go ahead and give it to him. I'll sort things out later." Those were the words of sabermetrician Bill James to ESPN's Rob Neyer after being informed that his protegé had passed his contact number to John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox. Last week, Neyer found himself with quite a scoop when he reported that his mentor will join the Sox front office as a senior advisor. James will officially be introduced by the team on November 15.

Bill James being hired by the Sox is another sign of the foothold that sabermetrics has gained in baseball's front offices. Make that a toehold -- after all, James has been influencing the game for 20 years from the outside with his revelatory takes on statistics, while most "baseball men" resisted what he had to say. Statheads can fondly point to Oakland GM Billy Beane and Toronto GM J.P. Ricciardi in part because there simply aren't that many sabermetrically-inclined baseball execs. Which isn't to say that they're completely alone or unprecedented. Neyer offers up a rough history of sabermetrics in the front office, starting with the work of Branch Rickey and statistician Allen Roth (Rickey's proto-sabermetric essay for Life magazine in 1954, "Goodby to Some Old Baseball Ideas" introduced On Base Percentage and Isolated Power as meaningful statistics, and pointed to the predictive power of run differential with regard to a team's success; Roth, employed by Rickey when he ran the Brooklyn Dodgers, pioneered the tracking of situational statistics, or splits).

Among those Neyer writes about in his sidebar are James' peer Craig Wright, author of The Diamond Appraised, who worked for the Texas Rangers; Eric Walker, who worked for the Giants and A's in the '80s and now runs a baseball analysis site called High Boskage House; Eddie Epstein, who worked for the Orioles and Padres and more recently co-authored Baseball Dynasties with Neyer; Mike Gimbel, who worked for GM Dan Duquette in both Montreal and Boston, and about whom Neyer wrote one cautionary tale of a sidebar, and Keith Law, who last season left Baseball Prospectus to work for Ricciardi in Toronto.

Even James himself has worked within baseball before, or at least skirted its perimeter. In the '80s he worked in salary arbitration cases representing players, and he worked as a consultant for his beloved Kansas City Royals in the late '90s. His relationship with the Royals bore little fruit, however, and the typically small-minded team never found a way to bring him fully into the fold. Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski writes that the team's attraction to catcher Brent Mayne is what finally broke him:

Mayne is a fine fellow. But he's also a 34-year-old catcher who hit .236 with no power, ran like he was a mime fighting the wind, guided the Royals pitchers to the second-worst ERA in baseball and got paid $2.5 million.

This year, the financially strapped Royals will pay him $2.75 million.

Meanwhile, catcher A.J. Hinch, who hit .298 the last two months of the season, banged the ball with significantly more power than Mayne and had a much better record behind the plate -- plus, he's a bright, loyal team player who got paid $250,000 -- was cut during the off-season.

And that's when James threw his hands up in the air. It's not that he thinks Hinch is Johnny Bench or that he blames Mayne for the Royals' downfall. It's not that this was the dumbest thing the Royals have done, or even in the top 100.

No, it's just another spectacularly illogical move by a team that has become the new sports leader in spectacularly illogical moves. This is just the move that finally pushed Bill over the cliff.

The news that James was hired by the Red Sox was greeted with particular elation among Sox fans at Baseball Primer, as readers threatened public drunkenness and all but fit their Beantown team for World Series rings. But how much impact will he really have? Assistant GM Theo Epstein stressed that James' role would be significant but limited, telling the Boston Globe, "Bill James will represent one voice in a chorus that includes all our major league scouts, the GM, the assistant GM, and our manager. We've added an important voice but by no means is his voice going to shout over everybody else's.'' Epstein was more specfic in discussing James' potential role with Neyer:

I think he's going to be most valuable in the areas where we do a good job of keeping him up to speed with current information. For instance, we might point out to him that there is a certain opportunity for a trade, or a certain way we can use a player. Then he comes back with an initial reaction based on a quick study. Next, we might play the devil's advocate by giving a traditional baseball response to his commentary, or asking if there's a general rule that we can take from this conclusion. And then he goes off and does a tremendous amount of research, after which we may end up with something very useful that we didn't know before.

Over on Baseball Primer, Charles Saeger, who's done some extensive work in defensive analysis which runs parallel to James' recent work, put himself in the man's shoes. His hypothetical agenda: steering the Sox away from poor gambles, ridding them of bad prospects ("pitchers who strike out 4 men a game, the outfielder who walks 16 times a year in AA, the player who had a good year at A ball at age 23 and the scouts are gaga about"), and using "sabermetric darlings" to fill minor holes ("The Bill James Red Sox would stress walks and knuckleball pitchers for these guys. They might take a chance on a pitcher who had many hits allowed the last year but whose other stats are okeh, or a player who hit poorly in 136 major league at bats but who had hit well in AAA for many years."). Solid suggestions not out of line with Epstein's remarks.

Myself, I have mixed feelings about James' hiring that hearken back to the way I felt back in the early '90s when Nirvana and other indie-rock bands broke through to the mainstream and became household names. If every front office takes on a sabermetrician, then a sabermetric approach may effectively be neutralized. It won't be a competitive advantage for a team to horde high-OBP players (for example), and we may well be left with too many teams which emulate Oakland's occasionally less-than-scintillating wait-walk-wallop brand of baseball. And we statheads won't have sabermetric illiterati such as Allard "Lets Sign Donnie Sadler" Baird and Randy "Let's Trade for Brad Ausmus" Smith to ridicule, no Bob "Bunt 'Em Over Unless It Breaks Up a Perfect Game" Brenly or Tony "Twelve-Man Bullpen" La Russa to second-guess. If a perfect world leaves us without any targets for our barbs, then it's not a very perfect world, is it?

Given the glacial speed and lack of foresight with which "baseball men" move -- we're in the Age of Selig, after all -- I'm not too worried. James may bring some new thinking to the Red Sox which, in time, could give the team a leg up. Along with the impressive signs Ricciardi's Jays are showing, that may make for a more competitive AL East. God forbid the Sox actually win anything, it might bring James a smidgen more credit than he's gotten from the general public ("Can Bill James Lift the Curse of the Bambino?"). But if he's not the GM or the manager, he's not going to be the lightning rod for the Sox success or failure (and neither is Billy Beane, apparently), particularly if he heeds the painful lessons of Mike Gimbel and avoids shooting his mouth off.

I do think sabermetrics has more to give the game than just a competitive advantage to the Sox, the A's and the Jays and anybody else who's on board (Brian Cashman and the Yankees organization have been ahead of the curve with their recognition of the importance of OBP, among other things, but they don't pay quite the lip service to it than the aforementioned orgs do). I think that an understanding of the major tenets of James' work (for example) is THE key for teams to hold down payroll costs, as they gain a better understanding of the market for replaceable talent and avoid paying past-prime ballplayers huge, franchise-crippling salaries. If that contributes to a healthier, more stable pastime, I'm for it.