Baseball's Last Suckers

It doesn't matter if you think baseball analytics are petulant gobbledegook that nerds made up during long, lonely basement hours of not-getting-laid, or whether you have some serious questions about the different coefficient weights between the Steamer and PECOTA projection systems. We can all agree on one thing: it will take more than one seriously wild happenstance for the Arizona Diamondbacks or Philadelphia Phillies to finish better than fourth in their respective divisions in 2015. And you can even pencil them in—or, what the heck, use ink—for similar fates in 2016.

The tie that binds these two franchises, save their similarly abundant swathes of stretch-out space at nearly every home game, is their shared relationship—confrontational-unto-hostile is one way to describe it—towards the idea of making analytically informed baseball decisions. While the jury is still out on a few other teams (here's looking at the Seattle Mariners and Miami Marlins), these two clubs are among the last blubber-burning Mennonites remaining in a baseball world lit by electricity.

Not that the D-Backs and Phillies are abstaining for religious reasons. Like a veiny-eyed newspaper editor screaming that the internet is a fad as his circulation plummets, these two teams have picked their battle, and their battle is the futile defense of a vaguely old-fashioned, pre-Bill James way of life. The self-inflated, perpetually offended characters who operate and play for these teams would be just a few years away from being portrayed by a goateed and exasperated Will Ferrell—or would be, if Ferrell had not already brought us Danny McBride as Kenny Powers in "Eastbound and Down."

In Philadelphia, General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr. was an assistant GM when the Phillies won it all in 2008, and they made it back to the World Series in '09, his first year running the show. Given these first few outstanding résumé entries, it would only be human nature for Amaro to end all analytics-leaning discussions by thwacking his ring on the table. He has, and still mostly does, and the fall has been swift: last year the Phillies went 73-89 with the fifth-largest payroll in baseball. For this year's expected last-place finish, the Phillies' payroll will be somewhere around tenth-largest, which qualifies as a step in the right direction.

Erroneous investments of this magnitude count as a fireable offense in most every industry. Fortunately for Amaro, the Phillies like to keep their pals in the fold. Several of the triumphant Phillies of 2008 will actually take the field for the Phillies of 2015, not necessarily as the All-Stars they once were—although Cole Hamels and Chase Utley are still pretty good—but definitely grayer at the temples, and significantly better-paid. This isn't a reunion tour as much as it's been an uninterrupted still-a-union tour.

Amaro would love to offload some of these now-burdensome contracts in exchange for a sucker's prime prospects before Opening Day. There are precious few of those suckers left in baseball's front offices, though, which means Amaro will likely have to foot the bill for generous portions of said contracts while meekly accepting mid-tier prospects in return. This is not optimal, obviously, but it is also the consensus best strategy available to the Phillies right now.

In Phoenix, the Diamondbacks have slid from winning 94 games in 2011 to winning just 64 in 2014, which was as good a cue as any for some uninspired firings and hirings in the front office and coaching staff. The old regime, headlined by manager Kirk Gibson and general manager Kevin Towers, was baseball's equivalent of Disney villains—appropriating their employees as confrontational baddies; diligently opposed to fun in all its forms; inevitably and justly doomed. As David Raposa described the pair in the 2015 Baseball Prospectus Annual: "A compilation of the duo's greatest hits reads like the unhinged rantings of an end-of-the-bar loon three beers past his cutoff point trying to tell people who aren't listening how much he's packing in his pants."

The Diamondbacks, having noticed how darn difficult it was to win consistently, instead decided to militantly enforce a penal code of "unwritten rules," a piece of (imaginary) legislation as conservative and unforgiving as the (actual) bylaws of the state the Diamondbacks call home. In practice, this means the Diamondbacks reveled in throwing baseballs at opposing batters, as hard as possible, for crimes against etiquette that amount to misdemeanor party fouls. As the old saying goes: if you can't beat 'em, angrily try to irreversibly injure 'em. This regime fell, and deserved to.

But this does not mean that things have turned around in Phoenix, though. New Chief Baseball Officer Tony La Russa did what all forward-thinking bosses do and hired some old personal friends to fill some vacancies. The Diamondbacks' new director of baseball analytics is an old veterinarian—La Russa has always loved animals—and their new general manager is Dave Stewart, who was an All-Star pitcher for La Russa's late-80's/early 90's Oakland Athletics teams, and who has not served in a baseball front office since 2000, having been working as an agent.

Hopefully Stewart and the veterinarian are still getting along: Stewart clumsily introduced himself to a new generation of baseball fans by proclaiming that then-free agent James Shields should prefer to sign with the Diamondbacks because the Diamondbacks do not place a focus on analytics. Even ignoring, for just a second, that Shields has spent the majority of his career enjoying success with the supremely analytically savvy Tampa Bay Rays, this is a statement that makes precious little sense even if it is interpreted as Stewart using the media to spread a piece of posturing gamesmanship.

As these two teams frantically try to avoid losing 100 games late this summer, they will also provide a meaningful control group when it comes to the real impact of analytics in today's MLB. Implementing analytically sound decision-making processes does not mean your team will rocket from worst to first, and failing to do so doesn't mean that your team will fall into a bottomless chasm of 120-loss seasons. In Paul Goldschmidt and Cole Hamels the D-Backs and Phillies employ two of the finest players in the game, and their elite efforts alone have gone and will go a long way in keeping their teams from setting all-time marks in futility.

The thing is, even we can identify, from our ear-poppingly high seats, the rare player who distinguishes himself as exceptional. For all the willful misunderstanding and disdain that defines both sides of this non-debate, analytics are finally just another (more state of the art) tool to help do baseball's oldest front-office job: assembling a roster of 25 that can win. The leap from batting average to wOBA is actually not that big. And nobody is saying advanced stats exist or must exist in a vacuum. But they do exist, and to ignore them is willful ignorance.

When teams like the Athletics or Pittsburgh Pirates make the playoffs while spending some of the smallest sums in the MLB, it looks like a miracle because we don't recognize any of the names or faces. But it only looks like a miracle: each and every Athletic or Pirate—some of them the exact same dudes who looked lost as Diamondbacks or Phillies—is put in a position by their team to succeed. Talents are maximized. Weaknesses are balanced out.

This is a small thing, and it really isn't. If the ceaseless pursuit of a tiny edge sounds like a trivial pursuit—something beneath the Men Of Gut And Intuition that have the wheel in Arizona and Philadelphia—it's worth remembering that the game of baseball has never really been about anything else. Whether that edge comes from a crafty scouting report, or few extra percentage points doesn't really matter, does it?