The Futility Infielder

The world of baseball lost a giant of a writer and its foremost expert on financial matters on Friday when Doug Pappas passed away while vacationing in Texas' Big Bend National Park. The cause was heat prostration. He was 43 and is survived by his mother, Carolyn Pappas.

As the chairman of the SABR Business of Baseball Committee and a writer on economic matters for Baseball Prospectus and his own site, Doug's Business of Baseball Weblog, Pappas combined eloquence, passion, humor, intelligence, outrage, diligence, righteousness, and about twelve other virtues into his writing, making the seemingly mundane stuff of balance sheets, labor relations, contraction and Collective Bargaining Agreements as compelling to read as last night's box score. He was Bud Selig's worst nightmare, an astute investigator who understood exactly how to cut through the smokescreens and lies perpetrated by the game's commissioner and his flunkies. As Selig's sworn enemy, his blog had -- still has -- a countdown to the end of Bud's term. Once, he even got to go mano à mano with the Bad Rug, having spooked the commissioner with his dogged pursuit of the truth about MLB's finances.

Doug Pappas would have made a great commissioner himself.

I didn't know him personally, having missed the opportunity to connect with him at a few local BP Pizza Feeds (he was a Manhattan lawyer specializing in civil and commercial litigiation, according to his SABR obituary). He certainly wasn't lacking for people to chat with at those affairs, and somehow I just ran out of time before getting to shake his hand and tell him what a great admirer of his work I am. I feel a bit small for not doing that, but I take great solace in the fact that like many others, I knew a part of him through his writing. I'm a better informed writer because of him, and if you can find any baseball blogger who wouldn't say the same, chances are you're wasting your time reading that person.

Pappas' "The Numbers" series for BP in 2002 was the most comprehensive dissection of Major League Baseball's finances to be found, and remains absolutely essential reading for any fan of the game old enough to buy a ticket. Anyone who read him during the buildup to the narrowly-averted strike at the end of that summer came away a more intelligent fan, one capable of refuting the bullshit fed to him or her on a daily basis by Bud and by the lazy reporters who put his words in their morning papers without ever questioning them. Pappas' analysis of a team's economic and on-field efficiency, measuring marginal dollars per marginal win, was cited by author Michael Lewis in Moneyball, and it cuts to the core of what Lewis strove to illustrate about the Oakland A's:

A leading independent authority on baseball finance, a Manhattan lawyer named Doug Pappas, pointed out a quantifiable distinction between Oakland and the rest of baseball. The least you could spend on a 25-man team, if everyone was paid the minimum salary, was $5 million, plus $2 million more for players on the disabled list and the remainder of the 40-man roster. The huge role of luck in any baseball game, and the relatively small difference in ability between most major leaguers and the rookies who might work for the minimum wage, meant that the fewest games a minimum-wage baseball team would win during a 162-game season was something like 49. The Pappas measure of financial efficiency was this: How many dollars over the minimum $7 million does each team pay for each win over its 49th? How many marginal dollars does a team spend for each marginal win? Over the past three years Oakland has paid about half a million dollars per win. The only other team in six figures has been the Minnesota Twins, at $675,000 per win. The most profligate rich franchises--the Baltimore Orioles, for instance, or the Texas Rangers--have paid nearly $3 million for each win, or more than six times what Oakland paid. Oakland seemed to be playing a different game from everyone else.

In other words, the man played a crucial role in influencing the most popular baseball book since Ball Four. That's worth something.

Pappas could be over the top; a recent recent blog entry covering Ralph Nader's high-profile objection to ads on uniforms included a response that Nader could "best serve his stated causes by blowing his brains out with a shotgun," but in typical Pappas fashion, he broke down Nader's open letter to Bud Selig with typical smarts and style. An ugly debate with former major leaguer Mike Colbern over a pension suit (in which he was accused, of all things, of being a shill for MLB's attorneys) disarmed Colbern's emotional and irrational responses by cutting to the factual chase, citing judicial precedents and doing the kind of homework that made him the great writer he was.

Like many others, my heart is heavy due to his loss even though I never met him, and I can only imagine how much more it must ache for those closest to him. My deepest condolences go out to his family and friends, as well as his colleagues over at Baseball Prospectus. The Baseball Primer thread devoted to his death contains a small sampling of the high regard with which his work was held; drop by there or post a comment at his blog to pay tribute if you feel like it, and if you need a smile in these dark hours, check out the wonderful photos and artifacts of Americana Doug unearthed for his Roadside Photos site.

On some level, all writers hope that someone might read their words long after they've passed from their time on this rock. For myself, this was one of the reasons I began building my site a few months after my grandfather -- a great baseball fan who saw Ruth and Gehrig and who claimed that seeing Babe Herman hit on the head by a fly ball was what made him a Dodger fan -- passed away; someday, I hope my grandchildren and their grandchildren are interested enough to read about what I saw that made me love this game.

In Doug's case, there's no doubt his writing will live on. So long as men are paid to play baseball, it will have relevance. May he rest in peace.