The Biology of Baseball

When did managing become so damned hard? Was it the intorduction of free agency and multi-million dollar salaries and payrolls that brought on the difficulty? Was it the first time a DH stepped up to the plate in the AL that made it such a hard job? Or has it always been so hard to come up with a formula for winning a baseball contest. The guess here is that it probably was this hard the day the New York Nine played the New York Knickerbockers at Elysian Fields back in the nineteenth century.
The problem with coming up with a winning formula for baseball is that baseball isn't physics or chemistry or gemometry. It cannot be the subject of a hard scientific axiom. There is too much life in it. Not only does the game itself have a life, which grows and changes and develops moment by moment, but individual contests and even more so individual players have lives which go through the same mutations, all at different rates and many of them -unpredictably so. Just look at Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. Two years ago these two were no questions asked the best players in the National league, two years ago their combined age was 80! Who would have thought a sport dominated by yound men, a sport when hitters reach their peaks at 27, would be dominated by two guys near 40? Nobody can predict such performance, and so no shard facts can be stated about the way the contests will play out, the way the league will develop, or the way players will grow or decline. If this could be devised then we'd all be out there reading about it making tons of money on our fantasy teams.
GMs can't therefore, just enter in the formula in a little machine and say okay well our club has x amount of money to spend, we need y and z types of players to compete, and preferably v,w,y and z to win it all, so who's available to us? Managers likewise can't enter a calculation into little machines of their own and say ok in this situation we need this situation we need this outcome and to get there we just need to find the variable in the equation, which is the proper player to put in. Baseball, for all its numbers, just isnt made like that. By its nature it is not subject to specific formulae.
Does this mean everyone has to throw their hands up in the air and say "well, we can't really do anything to affect the outcome, so lets just do nothing"? Of course not. While nobody can concretely predict the outcome of a baseball game, or the course a team will take over a number of years, or how a player will develop, there are trends, and there are ways to at least passively check if a player is matching any of those trends. In short, though baseball is not physics or geometry or chemistry, it might be rather akin to biology.
You see biology studies life, and studies the way it changes and grows. It studies the different patterns life takes, and indeed the exceptions to every one of those patterns that exist in every form of life. After making such observations it comes up with rules, soft rules of course, because the first thing it realizes is that the subject of its study -life- can predictably do one thing throughout its many forms -change.
If baseball is approached this way, then we have a certain ability to notice trends, see skill in some individual that is like someone else's skill, and apply our knowledge to that with the full idea in mind that we are not guaranteeing a certain outcome by taking a certain player in free agency, by calling for a certain pitcher in a certain game, or by introducing a certain rule into the sport of baseball in general. What we or rather what managers and GMs and other baseball executive types are doing by applying this biological study to baseball is attempting to make our desired outcome more likely by believing in the science that studies baseball.
As it happens, like biology, the results are at times inconclusive as to how one might act in certain situations, because things change and sometimes they change so dramatically there is nothing anyone can say. This is why it is so difficult for decision makers in baseball to make the right decisions all the time, there are just so many abberations that the rules of the science, which are flexible anyway, must be flexed even further.
Of course there are studies of baseball. There have been forever. There are two main schools in the baseball world now however. Both of these are biological studies at their heart, but one might say one (traditional style) is a more anthropological study based on the observation of living things by other living things, and the other (sabermetrics) is more laboratory-based examining the numbers of the product of what these living things do and drawing their prized information from there. Some baseball teams take a liking to both styles of study, others prefer only one and viciously hate the other school of baseball research.
There are arguments to be made for each one of these studies, but like biological research, no school of study is perfect. The traditionalists, with Baseball America, Joe Morgan, the Los Angeles Angels, Minnesota Twins, Atlanta Braves, baseball scouts, and many others behind them will point to how their systen has worked for so long. It isn't as if the common wisdom and trends used for decades in baseball have just sprung from one generation of scouts, they have sprung from generations of scouting and playing baseball games and observing the trends in outcomes both at large and situationally. Also, they point to the continued success of their system. In an age where more and more teams are espousing sabermetrics, only one arguably has gone on to win the world series, the 2004 Boston Red Sox. Only two such teams have even reached the post season, though both with a degree of regularity, Oakland and Boston.
The Sabermetricians and their adherents -Baseball Prospectus, the Oakland A's under Billy Beane, the Boston Red Sox under Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer with the help of Bill James, the Cleveland Indians under Mark Shapiro, the Toronto Blue Jays under J.P. Ricciardi, and recently the Arizona Diamondbacks and Texas Rangers- can make their own case. Once Beane was able to impose his system and take over drafts, he has had an astonishing rate of success at producing talent out of his farm system. The same goes for the Red Sox, though we are just seeing the first fruits of their effort develop now, and the Indians, which have the same issues. The other teams that subscribe fairly exclusively to statistical analysis of baseball have either changed to this method too recently or simply gotten unlucky with certain of the mutations in players and the sport, it is argued. The Dodgers of last year were also one of the teams under a Sabermetrician GM, and he as well as others believed they were poised to win many games until the unpredictable and unprecedented happened in the living organism that is baseball- a huge amount of players (10) missed a large portion of the season. Besides this though the regular season totals piled up by the As and the Red Sox and Indians are rather impressive evidence. The Blue Jays too, while not competing in the same class made strides to improve under the sabermetric science. The other teams remain to be seen, but all could be poised for big upswings in performance as the new school of biological observation displaces the old in each of these clubs.
The criticisms the sabermetricians hold against the traditionalists is that they don't reduce the game to what it takes to win and lose, but rather concern themselves with aspects of the game that really contribute very little to the outcome. They say that if one looks at baseball one sees that two things are most necessary to win a baseball game: runs and run prevention. That is one team has to score runs and prevent the other team from scoring if that team wishes to come out on top. All their statistics and averages are concerned with these two goals. Meanwhile the traditionalists are concerned with lots of other aspects of how a player performs, how durable that player seems, if the player can bunt, or steal bases, or throw hard, or do many things that do not themselves directly contribute significantly to making runs and saving runs, they say.
So even among those biological scientists who study the game so hard and devote their lives to it there is no concensus on what the proper action is in any given moment of a game, in the course of a season, or even in the growth of a player. This is because it all comes back to the recognition by the biological scientists that, above all, the living game they study and know so well changes.
SO next time you want to question a managers move to the bullpen, or a GMs trade for a guy you see no value in, remember that lightning does strike, and sometimes it strikes twice, but often there is no lightning at all.