He Does It By The Numbers

2) Speed? The Twins were third in steals in the American League the season before Martin took them over, but fell to fourth with him. His division champion Tigers stole only 17 bases all season long. The Rangers barely improved their league ranking under Martin, moving from sixth to fifth. The Yankees did jump from sixth to third in steals during Martin's first year as their manager, but fell to seventh the next season, when he won his world championship in New York.

3) When Nolan Ryan shifted from the California Angels to the Houston Astros after the 1979 season, the experts produced an amazing statistic that keeps cropping up: in games he started in which he held a lead in the eighth inning, Ryan had won 109 times and lost only twice, a startling .982 career percentage. Wow! However, all American League starters in 1979 who held a lead in the eighth inning won 586 times and lost 18, a percentage of .970, or [12/1000] worse than Ryan's. That means that the average starting pitcher underperforms Nolan in the late innings about once every 80 or 90 starts, or not quite twice in four seasons.

4) Although Ryan led the staff in per-game attendance on the road, more folks per start came to the Astrodome last year when Joe Niekro pitched—or, for that matter, Vern Ruhle—than when Ryan started, which is nothing new. In California in 1976 Nolan was outdrawn in per-start attendance by such Angel stalwarts as Don Kirkwood and Gary Ross. In 1978 he was the fourth-most-watched pitcher per start on the Angel staff.

5) The Expos may finally win the NL East, but September hasn't been the problem in the past. The Pirates in 1979 and the Phils in 1980 did edge ahead of them near the wire to win the division, but in those two seasons the Expos had an admirable 44-22 (.667) record beginning Sept. 1. In fact, only once since 1973 have the Expos failed to play better than their season-long percentage in the stretch.

6) The man who picked the Phils to finish fifth last year is also responsible for the iconoclastic information detailed in the answers to 1), 2), 3), 4) and 5). His name is Bill James, and he lives in Lawrence, Kans., where he digs through mountains of baseball statistics and comes up with out-of-the-ordinary conclusions. Some of these he prints in magazine articles, but most of them are saved for an annual he calls Baseball Abstract, of which he is owner, publisher, editor, statistician and staff. Sometimes James gets carried away and makes extravagant statements, even errors, but he ought to be forgiven them because most of the baseball tidbits he comes up with—some speculative, some factual—are fun to chew on (lefthanded pitchers throw more double-play balls than righthanders do; power pitchers tend to have longer careers than control pitchers; base stealing, even when it's successful two-thirds of the time, doesn't add much to a team's run total; managers who get close to their players and exhort them may have early success, but they often aren't as successful in the long run as those who don't get emotionally involved; contrary to accepted belief, it's not essential that a relief pitcher be able "to come in there and throw strikes"). As with Babe Ruth, when James hits one it's a beauty, and even when he strikes out it's worth watching.

Like this Phillies business, for instance. James ordinarily doesn't care to make flat-out predictions. "I have never told anybody, any time, any place, that I could predict who was going to win a pennant race," he says. "The reason I sometimes make predictions is that people who run what I write insist that I do, or they won't pay me."

Still, the world champions fifth? James says he had good reasons for denigrating the Phillies before last season began. As he wrote then, "The starting eight of the Phils has nearly 100 years of professional experience, which would be wonderful if they were in the real estate business. There is a tunnel at the end of the light, and it is not far off." In short, the Phils were a very old ball club, and very old ball clubs tend to fall abruptly.

What happened? James, entranced by numbers even when they're not at all what he anticipated they would be, sifted through the stats to find out: "You hear baseball people say every winter that this player is going to make us 10, 15, 20 games better. No player in the history of the game has ever been 20 games better than the average player at his position, not Babe Ruth, not Ty Cobb. The difference between a Most Valuable Player and an average player at the same position is as little as three games in some seasons, usually five to eight, maybe once in a decade 10. But what happened in Philadelphia in 1980 was unprecedented. Three players—Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton and Tug McGraw—made up virtually the entire difference between the world championship team and a contender for last place.

"The Phillies had only one player, Schmidt, who was able to combine the accomplishments of batting as high as .260 and hitting as many as 10 home runs. Schmidt batted .286 and hit 48 home runs, or 41% of his team's total. Only one other time since 1950 has anyone on a world championship team had more than 30% (Willie Stargell nosed past that figure 10 years ago with 31% of the 1971 Pirates' homers). Yet Schmidt had 41%! It's so far out of line, it's off the chart.

"Now Carlton. The Phils were 91-71 in the regular season, or 20 games over .500. Only three Phillie pitchers were able to win more than seven games, but Carlton was 24-9, or 15 games over .500 all by himself.