The Rookie
For 34 years, the Texas Rangers have struck out in their quest for a World Series title. Can they be saved by a 28-year-old general manager from New York whose only experience comes from the fantasy leagues? At this point, I’m willing to try just about anything.
(Page 3 of 3)
Though Hicks has made it clear that Daniels is the man, the 59-year-old venture capitalist remains the commander in chief and the final word on all decisions. “I keep Tom abreast of what I’m doing,” Daniels told me. “And when it comes to a head, when it’s time to push the button or back off, I call him. He says, ‘Give me the baseball rationale. Give me the business rationale. How does this affect our big picture?’ That relationship, that system of checks and balances, makes us make better decisions.”
In Moneyball, Lewis writes that big-league baseball has structured itself more like a social club than a business, that “there is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated” in the front offices and that even when heads roll, “they don’t roll very far.” Just so, Hart has stayed on as a senior adviser to his former flunky. Daniels told me that Hart “is part of my inner circle.” Hicks said, “J.D. trusts Hart’s instincts, his sixth sense. Now, they don’t always agree.” For example, Hart strongly opposed Daniels’s proposal a few months ago to trade two of the Rangers’ best young players, Blalock and minor league pitcher John Danks, for Florida Marlins pitcher Josh Beckett. Hicks stayed out of the dispute, though everyone knew that any final deal was subject to his veto. But in the end, Beckett signed with Boston, so Daniels courted and signed Kevin Millwood. The club agreed to pay Millwood $60 million over five years, despite Hicks’s vow that he’d never again sign a pitcher to a five-year deal following the ill-fated Chan Ho Park experience.
Free-agent pitchers have avoided the Rangers like a plague since the club decided to enclose the area behind home plate at Ameriquest Field to build a private club, inadvertently creating a jet stream that carries routine fly balls over the wall in right center field. That’s why it’s so extraordinary that in his short tenure, Daniels has been able to land three battle-tested major league pitchers: Millwood; Eaton, who comes from the pitcher-friendly ballpark in San Diego; and Padilla, a former Phillie. Millwood is a legitimate front liner, but so was the man he replaces, Kenny Rogers, who went nuts last June and assaulted a television cameraman. Millwood knows that his ERA will suffer in Arlington, but he can also be certain that the Rangers will provide far more offense than his teammates did last year at Cleveland. Teixeira hit 43 home runs, and six other Rangers hit at least 20, including second baseman Alfonso Soriano (36), outfielders David Dellucci (29) and Kevin Mench (25), Blalock (25), Young (24), and catcher Rod Barajas (21). Except for Soriano and Dellucci, all the sluggers return this season.
You never really know how pitchers will fare in new ballparks, much less a new league. Millwood at least pitched in the American League, but the two National Leaguers are strangers to the designated-hitter rule, which makes the batting order deeper and hardier. Both have other “issues”: With Eaton it’s health (he had surgery on the middle finger of his pitching hand on the same day he was supposed to make his debut as a Ranger), and with Padilla, a former All-Star, it’s an old drinking problem. Nevertheless, Daniels’s wheeling and dealing has sparked considerable excitement in Arlington. Galloway, who admits that he never spoke a word to Daniels during the young man’s four-year apprenticeship, told me, “Adding three major league—tested guys in the rotation—that’s fantastic. I give him an A plus for that.”
More than anything else, though, Daniels has brought a sense of calm to the Rangers clubhouse. The anger and panic that at times seemed certain to blow up the locker room when Hart was calling the shots appear to have vanished, or at least retreated to the deep shadows, awaiting new developments. With this franchise, that is no small accomplishment.
AFTER A LONG conversation with J.D., I concluded that, like most people new to a business, he doesn’t know yet how much he doesn’t know. That’s good, I think. A central theme in Bill James’s philosophy is that most traditional baseball wisdom “is ridiculous hokum.” James concluded years ago that baseball insiders weren’t capable of being reasonable, that the principles of sabermetrics were understood almost exclusively by outsiders. People who have played the game or worked for years in the major leagues believe their own experiences are typical, but James tells us that they are wrong. As a result, traits like foot speed, fielding ability, batting averages, and even raw power have been dramatically overpriced: The statistic that matters most, according to James and his disciples, is on-base percentage. In the long run, hitters who know how to wear down a pitcher are more valuable than home run hitters. Above all, the new philosophy teaches that change is good. “If you challenge the conventional wisdom,” James says, “you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.” Having an outsider such as Daniels at the controls may be exactly what the Rangers need.
Daniels has read some of James’s famous Baseball Abstracts, and he read Lewis’s Moneyball. Though he agrees that teams must survive by finding cheap labor, he doesn’t appear impressed by what he read. “People who think Moneyball is about on-base percentage miss the point,” he told me. “It’s about finding market efficiency. On-base percentage became the thing after that book was published, but by now everyone in baseball knows about it, and it has been priced out of the market.”
Nevertheless, Daniels did show some Jamesian thinking in at least one of his moves—the controversial trade that sent Soriano to the Washington Nationals for outfielder Brad Wilkerson. The club acquired Soriano from the Yankees in 2004, partly as a means to dump some of A-Rod’s burdensome contract, and Soriano hit with power, as advertised. But he had a low on-base percentage, struck out a lot, and hardly ever walked, which under the Jamesian concept meant that he was overvalued. Soriano was indicative of what has been wrong with this ball club: The Rangers hit the second-most home runs in major league history yet were essentially out of the race by the end of August. Wilkerson is a master of the strike zone who tires out pitchers and knows how to get on base. What at first looked like a bad trade may turn out to be a smart move after all.
“I’m a centrist,” said Daniels. “Computers can get you only so far. You don’t buy a house without a walk-through or without a spec sheet, do you? I respect Bill James and what he has done for the game, the doors he has opened. But that’s only one side of it.” Hicks isn’t overly impressed with sabermetrics either. The position of sabermetrician does not exist with this franchise, and the Rangers have only a part-time consultant to analyze the stats. Daniels assured me that they weren’t “missing anything.” When I asked how he knew they weren’t missing anything, he gave me a blank look.
But Daniels does think that the next frontier in sabermetrics is defense, an area that teams like the A’s and the Red Sox are focusing on. This is a tricky area, because the traditional measure of defense—the number of errors on a player’s tab—is a judgment call and of no use to a sabermetrician. “You can’t do it with over-the-counter metrics,” Daniels said. “You can’t find it in statistics. But there are proprietary ways to evaluate defense. We chart everything that goes into a play: where the ball is hit, how hard it’s hit, how the defense is positioned. Some players are more gifted than others, but if you have a better coaching staff to put players in the right position, then defensive statistics will account for certain things that are out of a defender’s control.”
I’m not sure I understand that, but no matter. My gut tells me this man is on to something. The Rangers have steadily cultivated a solid core of position players: Young and Teixeira are All-Stars. Even if the three new pitchers don’t work out, the Rangers are loaded with good young arms in their farm system; Danks, Tom Diamond, and Eric Hurley were all first-round draft picks. “We have half a dozen really good young pitchers,” Hicks told me. “We’ve never had that before.” Given time, Daniels can get this club back to the playoffs, and maybe even the World Series. Or such is my fervent hope. If the Rangers are ten games under .500 by the All-Star break, well, let’s just say I’ve been wrong before. My grandchildren will have to deal with it.
My Library
