Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers, The (27 page)

Now, you cannot announce publicly that your ex-manager is welcome to return, and say privately something else. Suppose that Dressen then called a press conference and said, “Okay. I don’t want to be stubborn about this; I’ll come back.” What could they have done, except to take him back?

What I’m saying is, there was a ton of newsprint invested at that time in why the Dodgers
really
wanted to get rid of him, what the subtext was. The reporters just couldn’t relate to the explanation that O’Malley gave, so they started making up stories as to why O’Malley wanted to get rid of Dressen. What the Dodgers wanted was for Dressen to return.

Dressen went back to Oakland for a year, won another pennant out there, then signed a multi-year contract to manage the Washington Senators. Did Dressen sincerely believe that he could make a winner out of the Senators? I think he did. He said he did; I believe him. The Senators—you probably don’t remember this—had finished at or over .500 in 1952 and 1953, for Bucky Harris. They had slipped to sixth in 1954, but this was Chuck Dressen’s chance to prove that
he
could do what Harris could not: win with the Washington Senators.

He lost 196 games in two seasons, started out 5–16 in 1957, and the team decided it was time to let somebody else finish out his contract.

Dressen was a nomad after that. He returned to the Dodgers for a year, as a coach. The reporters were sure he would soon replace Alston at the Dodger helm, but then, the reporters never did understand what O’Malley was doing. He got the Milwaukee job, after Fred Haney screwed it up in 1959, but Dressen wasn’t much better, and the team’s moment had passed. He moved on to Detroit, where he took on another underachieving team, which continued to underachieve.

There is little doubt that, had he just been able to swallow his pride, Charlie Dressen would be in the Hall of Fame today. Dressen had already won two pennants with the Dodgers. The team, under Walt Alston, would win two more pennants in the next three years, and would win six more pennants before Dressen died in 1966, a seventh within a couple of months.

At three key points in his career, Charlie’s ego overwhelmed him. First, when he was in line for the Yankee job in 1949, his mouth cost him the opportunity. Second, when he had the best job in the National League, he gave it away in a fit of pride. Third, when his reputation would have gotten him almost any job, he chose one of the worst jobs in baseball, the Washington Senators assignment, because he failed to recognize the limits of what a manager could do.

I use the story of Charlie Dressen to teach my children the difference between security and self-confidence. Dressen was unquestionably a smart man, and a fine manager at least until 1953. On the surface, he boiled with self-confidence. He thought he knew more about baseball than anybody else in the world, and he couldn’t resist telling you this. Had he not been quite so insecure, he could have resisted. I suppose one could say the same about Billy Martin or about Richard Nixon, but had he not been so insecure, he could have resisted the self-destructive excesses which gradually destroyed him.

One of the fundamental questions of baseball is “What percentage of baseball is pitching?” Connie Mack made the argument that baseball is 75% pitching; other people have said 90%, 60%, 30%, whatever.

I used to make a living, sort of, by trying to devise ways to work these things out mathematically. In that line I once had the idea that one could solve this problem by studying pitchers who were traded or sold from very bad teams to very good teams, or who made similar moves as a free agent. Whenever a pitcher goes 9–16 or 11–17 or 8–13 for a bad team, announcers will say that he could turn that record around if he pitched for a better team. Whether this is true or not, there are always people ready to find out. The St. Louis Cardinals, one of the best teams in the National League in the 1960s, used to trade annually for a starting pitcher from the New York Mets, the league’s worst team. Roger Craig, after going 10–24 and 5–22 for the Mets in their first two seasons (1962–1963), was traded to the Cardinals, where he went 7–9. Tracy Stallard, after going 6–17 and 10–20 with the Mets (1963–1964), was traded to St. Louis, where he went 11–8. Al Jackson, after going 8–20,13–17, 11–16, and 8–20 with the Mets (1962–1965), was traded to the Cardinals, where he went 13–15.1 think we’ve discovered a pattern here.

Anyway, it seemed to me, thinking about this, that one should be able to use these cases to figure out what “percentage” of a pitcher’s record is controlled by his own pitching. If baseball were 100% pitching, then the pitcher’s won-lost record should not depend at all on the team that he pitches for. His winning percentage should be 100% determined by his own performance. In this case, we should expect that a pitcher’s winning percentage should not improve
at all
when he moved from a bad team to a good team.

If, on the other hand, baseball was zero percent pitching, then one would expect that a pitcher’s winning percentage would improve by as much as the difference between the winning percentage of the teams. If baseball was zero percent pitching, then we would expect that a pitcher who moved from a .350 team to a .650 team would tend to improve his winning percentage from .350 to .650.

So if baseball is 75% pitching—that is, if a pitcher’s winning percentage is 75% determined by his own performance—then we should expect that a pitcher’s winning percentage should change, in moving teams, by only 25% of the difference between the teams. If baseball is 50% pitching—that is, if the pitcher’s winning percentage is one-half determined by his own performance—then we should expect that a pitcher’s winning percentage, when he changes teams, should improve by one-half of the difference between the teams. This, at least, was the theory.

I was never able to make the study work, for various reasons which can be summarized as “it was a naive study designed to test a naive assertion.” There are many roadblocks to making the study work, two of which are just not going to be moved. Those two are:

1) A pitcher’s won-lost record often isn’t a good indication of how well he has pitched, and

2) A pitcher’s performance level is not a constant. A pitcher who pitches well one year often will not pitch well again the next year, whether he changes teams or not.

Anyway, in 1953 the St. Louis Browns came up with two rookie pitchers with great arms, great stuff. The two were Don Larsen and Bob Turley. In 1953, the Browns’ last year in St. Louis, Larsen went 7–12, and Turley, getting out of the army in midseason, went 2–6 but with a good 3.30 ERA. In 1954, in Baltimore, Turley led the league in strikeouts (185) and kept his ERA at 3.46, but also led the league in walks (181), and wound up 14–15. Larsen was 3–21. This is not a misprint; three-and-twenty-one. He led the major leagues in losses, and posted one of the ugliest won-lost records in modern history.

After the 1954 season Turley and Larsen were traded to New York for a collection of players including Gus Triandos and Gene Woodling; actually, it turned out to be a pretty good trade for both teams. Both Larsen and Turley, in their first four years with the Yankees, had overall winning percentages in Whitey Ford territory. Larsen from 1955 to 1958 went 39–17 (.696), while Turley was 59–30 (.663). The success of these two pitchers was a key part of Casey Stengel’s second four-pennant string, as they accounted for more than one-fourth of the Yankee wins in those years. In 1959 both men pitched poorly, and this was a key to bringing the four-year pennant run to an end.

Anyway, what I wanted to direct your attention to was that while Larsen and Turley were with St. Louis and Baltimore, their winning percentage was
worse
than that of the team they pitched for.

But when they moved to the Yankees, Turley and Larsen were better than the rest of the Yankee team:

How is this possible? How can two pitchers who are so bad that they drag down the performance of the league’s worst team move to the Yankees, and be better than the rest of the Yankees? It’s counterintuitive. From the standpoint of the issue raised before, it seems to indicate that the percentage of baseball success attributable to the pitcher is
less than zero
.

We know, instintively, that this can’t be right—but how do we explain it? You can write it off as a fluke, but then, what about Tommy Byrne? Tommy Byrne was a wild, hard-throwing lefty who had been with the Yankees earlier, but was traded to the Browns in 1951. With the Browns in 1951–1952 he went 11–24, a.314 winning percentage, essentially the same as Brown and Turley. Returning to the Yankees in 1954, he went 26–10 in his first three seasons back in New York, a .722 winning percentage. Like Turley and Larsen, he was worse than the Browns when he was with the Browns—but better than the Yankees when he was with the Yankees.

Part of the explanation for this is relatively simple: the Yankees had better coaching than the other teams. From Dom Forker’s
Sweet Seasons
, the interview with Bob Turley:

The Yankees got better effort from many players than did other teams, because their players expected to win. Better effort and better coaching led to better performance.

A second part of the explanation is that the won-lost records of these pitchers are, in a sense, misleading, because of the way that Casey Stengel manipulated his pitching staff. Stengel liked to pitch certain pitchers against certain teams. In the years 1953–1960, for example, Whitey Ford had 40 decisions against the Chicago White Sox (he was 23–17), but only 15 decisions against Detroit (he was 8–7). The Tigers had a right-handed hitting lineup led by Al Kaline, Harvey Kuenn, Ray Boone, and Frank Bolling, and weren’t a particularly good team. Casey preferred to go after them with somebody like Larsen, Turley, or Johny Kucks, and save Ford to pitch against Chicago. The White Sox and Indians were by far the best “other” teams in the American League over those years, accounting, between them, for nine of the ten best non-Yankee records of those years. Stengel pitched Ford a good bit against the Indians, but the Indians did have many right-handed hitters (Al Rosen, Rocky Colavito, Bobby Avila, and Al Smith). While the White Sox had both more left-handed hitters and more speed.

If Ford had simply pitched in rotation, taking his spot whenever it came up, he would have had as many decisions against one team as he did against another. He had more than twice as many decisions against Chicago as he did against Detroit, close to three times as many.

In the eight years 1953–1960, Ford had 37 decisions against the best non-Yankee team in the league, usually Chicago or Cleveland. He had 31 decisions against the second-best non-Yankee team, and 26 decisions against the third-best. He had 25 decisions or less against the fourth-best, fifth-best, sixth-best, and seventh-best teams.

Ford’s record in those eight years is impressive enough on the surface; he was 124–58, a .681 winning percentage. But as good as that is, Ford (with the Yankees behind him) was really better than that. His winning percentage was depressed by the fact that he was pitching a disproportionate share of his games against the best teams in the league, probably to a greater extent than any other pitcher in baseball history.

Larsen, on the other hand, never beat the Cleveland Indians in his five years as a Yankee; he was 0–4 against them. He was just 4–4 against the White Sox. He was 12–3 against Baltimore, the team from which he had been acquired, and accounted for more than 70% of his wins against just three teams: Baltimore, Boston, and Kansas City.

It’s not that Larsen
never
pitched against good teams; he did, after all, pitch in the World Series. He pitched against Brooklyn because Brooklyn balanced the percentages: They were a good team, but they were all right-handed except for the Duke.

After the Yankees fired Stengel, Ralph Houk put Whitey Ford in a straight four-man rotation, and let him take his turn on the schedule against whoever was due up next. Ford, who had never won twenty games for Stengel, went 25–4 in 1961, then 24–7 in 1963.