Welcome To The New Age Of Information

Myths are so ingrained in baseball that even the accepted origin of the game is untrue. Consider Abner Doubleday your leadoff hitter in a deep lineup chock-full of falsehoods and fables dressed up as conventional wisdom. Doubleday's supposed invention of the sport in the late 1830s was debunked at least as far back as 1936, yet the myth endures because nostalgia is baseball's oxygen and inertia its defining property. Change is to be resisted.

Thus batting average, a statistic introduced in 1880 to measure the value of a hitter, is still embraced as the ultimate arbiter of the "batting champion." The sacrifice bunt, a weapon of the Dead Ball era a century ago, remains a paragon of smart, fundamental play. And the Cubs and the Red Sox are fated never to win the World Series because of the imprecations of a farm animal and a long-deceased pot-bellied slugger, respectively.

Well, be careful not to choke on your Cracker Jack, because much of baseball's beloved conventional wisdom is crumbling. All it took was a technology-fired information age that, among other things, has put personal computers in 60% of U.S. homes. With a few clicks of your mouse you can discover that the rain in Spain does not stay mainly on the plain. (The inland highlands get 50 centimeters annually, the coastal plains much less.) Even Old Man Baseball, gray, handsomely wrinkled, clothed in flannel and set in his ways, cannot escape being redefined by the information age—like it or not, and there are plenty of traditionalists on the side of not.

"Emotions are often the true cause of these myths," says Ron Antinoja, a computer scientist schooled in artificial intelligence who four years ago started Tendu, a state-of-the-art baseball information service that supplies data by subscription to a handful of major league clubs. "When something happens to human beings in stressful situations, it causes a stronger memory and a bias about those facts."

After lefthander Tom Glavine signed as a free agent with the Mets in December 2002, he told New York's pitching coach at the time, Vern Ruhle, that he almost always gets ground-ball outs with his changeup. It sounded good—Glavine's changeup, his signature pitch, runs down and away to righthanded hitters—but it just wasn't true. Not even close. Ten years ago no one would have argued with Glavine. Ruhle did. He checked with Tendu, which spat out the cold reality, based on an analysis of 83% of Glavine's pitches in 2002: Of the total plate appearances ending on changeups only 25% resulted in ground outs.

"In God we trust," says new Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, a Tendu disciple with the Athletics last year. "All others must show data."

Statistical information, along with the dissecting of that information, often referred to as sabermetrics, is be coming the coin of the realm, as embraced by the As and highlighted in last year's best-selling book Moneyball. In some cases it is replacing the subjective analysis of scouts; the number-crunching Blue Jays, for instance, have cut 85 of the 123 staffers in their scouting department since general manager J.P Ricciardi arrived two seasons ago—but more often statistical information is supplementing the subjective analysis.

A scout might advise his team to pitch carefully to Alex Rodriguez and keep the ball away from him. Tendu, however, can define precisely how sharp his batting eye is: Of the 139 first-pitch fastballs thrown off the outside comer of the plate to Rodriguez last year (based on 83% of his total at bats), he swung at only 15 of them. Good luck getting A-Rod to chase early in the count. And anybody with an Internet connection can tell you that Rodriguez was a much better hitter after the first pitch was a ball (.325) than when it was a strike (.257).

Tendu is far from the first or only such service. The Elias Sports Bureau, STATS Inc. and Inside Edge, for instance, have been offering their own informational mining operations for years. Tendu, however, drills deeper, revealing such buried treasures as pitch sequences (what a pitcher tends to throw, for example, after he starts a hitter with two straight fastballs) and specific hitter weaknesses (e.g., low-and-away sliders on 2-and-2 counts).

Marlins manager Jack McKeon, the 73-year-old Yoda of the dugout, might have little use for that kind of data after years of trusting his gut (page 67). For that matter, Cubs manager Dusty Baker and Twins manager Ron Gardenhire treat such quantitative analysis as a five-year-old does a plate of lima beans. But these are men raised on the game's myths and legends. Antinoja has found that the younger generation, which considers computers as familiar as toasters, more readily accepts data. New Red Sox manager Terry Francona, for one.