The Economic History of Baseball, Part 6: How Moneyball Helped Wreck the Game's Future and How The World Ignored Steroids Until They Couldn't - And Blamed The Players

 

 

When I began this series several months ago before being diverted to other things, I had every intention of making the next-to-last article entirely about steroids. However, in hindsight I think that something was eventually as damaging to the long-term health of baseball occurred around the same time the steroids scandal was coming to light and may have, in the long run, done just much damage. In both case, I think major league baseball allowed a false narrative to be told about both stories.

In an article I wrote on Aaron Sorkin’s Moneyball several months ago, I expressed several of my doubts about whether the system that had truly benefited anyone. There is one person is clearly benefited: Billy Beane. He got to be the hero of baseball executives because he came up with a winning strategy. He got to be the lead character of a best selling book and played by Brad Pitt in a film nominated for Best Picture. He helped dozen of statisticians earn jobs in major league baseball. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment, considering his strategy was a complete failure when he put into practice.

Because, lest we forget, Beane has never won the World Series in his tenure at Oakland. He has never even got the A’s to win an American League pennant. The strategy of Moneyball never got the A’s any closer to the World Series than when they were spending big money on free agents. The A’s attendance was never high even when they were doing well, and it has dropped to the bottom of the league. The A’s themselves are, as of this writing, on track to have one of the worst seasons in major league history and will leave Oakland for Las Vegas in three years. If the goal of baseball is to win the last game of the season, one truly wonders how Beane kept his job for twenty years because he is no closer to that than when he started.

What has become the myth of Moneyball’s success was that Theo Epstein used Beane’s methods to win the World Series with the Red Sox in 2004. That was hard for me to accept when I heard the story told in the film and I still don’t entirely buy it. The 2004 Red Sox were essentially the same team that they were when they lost Game 7 of the ALCS in 2003, with the exception of the free agent signing of Curt Schilling. Theo Epstein when he took over the management spent much of the off-season trying to hire big free agents: the Yankees and Red Sox got into a bidding war with Alex Rodriguez that the Yankees won after offering ten years and over a quarter of a billion dollars.

And the idea that somehow Billy Beene’s strategy when it came to buying and selling players was responsible for the great comeback in postseason history is actually kind of offensive. The post-season turned on a stolen base in the ninth inning of Game 4 by Dave Roberts that led to the Red Sox tying the game and winning it on Ortiz’s home run in extra innings. In case you’ve forgotten, the idea of the stolen base was essentially verboten in the idea of Moneyball, nearly as much as the sacrifice.

I watched almost every inning of the last four games of the 2004 ALCS with bated breath, at least until Game 7. Was there some hidden player or strategy involved that somehow proved Epstein’s – and by extension, Moneyball – was responsible for what happened? All members of Red Sox Nation, I’m not saying that Theo Epstein doesn’t deserve every bit of credit for breaking the Curse of the Bambino but does that mean Billy Beene gets credit by default?

I honestly think that professional baseball chose to design this narrative after the fact. Make no mistake, had the Red Sox been swept in four games in the ALCS Epstein would never have even tried to use Beene as a business model going forward: he would have been run out of Boston on a rail. The idea that somehow math could be a destiny that had been cursing the Red Sox for eighty six year is a nice idea, but that’s all it is and to think so, basically is a counternarrative to every argument the press, the players, the owners and baseball have been putting forth for its existence.

I think the truth is simpler. The owners did not want to pay millions of dollars for free agents. The idea of spending less money on specialists rather than superstars must have appealed to the greedy owners for several reasons. By saying that major statistics such as batting average, runs scored and stolen bases are irrelevant to the game, you take away the idea that one’s individual achievements are important. Therefore, a players superb stats – one of the key elements to negotiating a salary – are automatically diminished because management now has a ready made excuse to say that they don’t help the team win and just as much say that the player is not valuable because they didn’t contribute.

By having relief pitchers constantly come in, starting pitchers can’t have as many complete games, innings pitched, and are likely to have fewer wins. They have less room to negotiate they have value to a team. Similarly because for years, there were no stats for a reliever who held a lead, but neither won nor saved, management could argue that they didn’t contribute as much. Only in this form of baseball could you argue that wins matter more for your team in one breath but not for a pitcher in another.

So every team following Billy Beane Ball argued that they were following a successful business model even though there was no evidence. And because they all were, things that made the game more exciting – the stolen base, the bunt, the pitchers’ duel – all began to disappear. All games were more or less about hitting home runs and nothing else. Over the last decade, the game has fundamentally been suffering a crisis because much of baseball has become less interesting to young fans. Why should it be? When you’re basically just waiting around for players to hit home runs, when games go three to four hours and it seems to take forever for the pitcher to throw one ball, of course it’s less interesting. I am a huge baseball fan, but for the last decade the Moneyball driven version of baseball has become a huge drag. Hell, even Theo Epstein admitted as much in a recent article in The Atlantic.

But that is the problem with ownership. As long as they make as much money as possible they don’t care what kind of product they produce. That is, in a sense, what led to the other major crisis that had been unfolding for a while during this same period: steroids.

I have to say that, unlike practically every other scandal that baseball has dealt with during its existence, management’s handling of it was by far the most excusable and the eventual public reaction the most hypocritical. Indeed when Ken Burns revisited Baseball in 2009, I found his treatment of what happened remarkably nuanced and shed a light on it few fans and scholars want to consider.

Many writers and historians pointed out that cheating in baseball has always been tolerated on other levels, particularly things like sign stealing and trick pitches. They pointed that had steroids existed in the era of Mickey Mantle or Babe Ruth, there is no doubt players would have used them, particularly if it might extend their career and make sure that they could support their family. Chris Rock perhaps summed it up the best when he said: “If you could take a pill that would make you do your job better, you’d take that pill.” Few would argue with any of that.

Furthermore, big league management’s decision to not take any direct action and indeed to try and punish writers and those who wanted to bring the truth to light is more understandable then in other cases given the fact that the rise in steroid use began not long after the 1994 Players strike. The game’s attendance and standing in the national mood was suffering and the home run chase of 1998, where both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were clearly juicing up, was the kind of thing the sport needed.

And let’s not kid ourselves: there is an unindicted co-conspirator for the entire era: the baseball fan. I was no different. I followed every moment of the chase in the summer of 1998 with the excitement of the devout fan, waiting to hear every night what had happened. Had someone told me at the time that two of the major participants were using performance enhancing drugs, not only would I have rejected the concept I would certainly have shot the messenger.

At its height, from the mid nineties until 2006, I think I like the rest of America, was in a state of denial. It was the kind of thing that was glaringly obvious to anyone who even looked at someone like Jason Giambi or Manny Ramirez between seasons but we all chose to ignore what was right in our faces. We didn’t want to know.

The Tenth Inning also goes out of its way to paint a very sympathetic picture of Barry Bonds during this period. Few people would dare argue that Bonds was the greatest player in baseball during the 1990s. He had won the MVP award three times in a four year period from 1990 to 1993. In 1996, he became the first National League hitter to drive in 150 runs in thirty four years; he drove in 145 the next year. In 1998, he became the first player in history to hit 400 home runs and steal 400 bases. Had he retired at the end of that season, no one would have argued his place in Cooperstown.

And yet that historic event brought him no press compared to the achievements of McGwire and Sosa, who were strictly one trick ponies. Bonds had suffered his entire career from a bad press and his surly reputation no doubt diminished America’s capacity to appreciate what was in front of their noses this whole time. His decision to start taking steroids was no doubt influenced by his determination to make sure the country could not ignore him.

And then when the Senate pronounced its findings Bonds became the face of all that was wrong with baseball. I remember the New York Post, never subtle, putting up the record numbers of homeruns he hit after 2005 in hypodermic syringes. (To be fair, they ended up doing the same with other players with questionable records such as Alex Rodriguez.)

And because baseball creates its heroes as much as its turns on them, we began to celebrate record holders that who, when they had set their marks, were the subject of national loathing. Roger Maris, who had been excoriated by the New York Press when he broke Babe Ruth’s single season record, became the subject of lionizing when the truth about McGwire and Bonds was publicly learned. Hank Aaron, whose achievements had been dismissed as little more than a statistical fluke even after he broke Babe Ruth’s lifetime mark, had been subject to racist threats and little respect in Aaron’s time at Atlanta, was deified by the public. Aaron’s decision not to publicly follow Bonds as he chased his own lifetime mark was celebrated by millions as a stand of integrity.

But it was Bud Selig’s decision to not follow Bonds from park to park that I consider truly hypocritical. As Commissioner of Baseball Selig had to have aware of what was going on in front of his eyes. He and his fellow owners were clearly willing to let this phenomenon to go on as long as it didn’t effect their balance sheets. They did everything in their power to stomp down every rumor that came out: when Jose Canseco published a tell-all about this subject, they did everything to call him a liar. It was not until the truth of this reached Congress that they finally reacted. And to be clear, their drug testing laws were strict enough to punish the players but to this day, we have no idea how strongly they are being enforced.

Furthermore, when it comes to how the Hall of Fame should regard so many of the players who were either guilty or might well have been using steroids, Selig remained equally silent. No players were judged ineligible for the Hall of Fame or ever officially punished. The Sportswriters have been forced every year to make their own judgments, something that many of them openly resent. There is much outrage that Selig left the Commissioners Office and let the cup pass to their lips.

As to how we deal with so many of these players as regards to Cooperstown, I have no clear opinion. But I have much clearer attitude about something Cooperstown should do, kick Bud Selig out. Selig was voted in to the Hall in 2017 and I have been angry about it ever since. As I said, I don’t blame the players for what they did or baseball for letting it happen. But to decide that Selig – who spent years at best being willfully blind to what was happening and at worst was an unindicted co-conspirator, and whose only reaction when the truth came out was akin to “I’m shocked – shocked! – that gambling is going on in this establishment” – is worthy of Hall of Fame induction and that players like Bonds, who followed the example he and his fellow owners celebrated, are stained and unworthy, is one of the great hypocrisies in the history of a sport full of them.  In his time as Commissioner Selig did more to hurt the integrity and reputation of the sport than any single player ever could. He doesn’t deserve to have a plaque within a hundred miles of Henry Aaron.