Part 25 (2/2)

__The Yankees still had hope. After all, Carmona, the Cleveland pitcher who had allowed only two hits over eight innings, would have to deal with the midges himself in the top of the ninth inning while facing the top of the prodigious Yankees lineup.

”I was standing there coaching third base,” Bowa said, ”and the next thing I knew it was the return of these bugs. I said, 'What the f.u.c.k are these?' And the third baseman said, 'Oh, they come out every now and then.' I mean, I could hardly see. And they're all over your skin. They weren't biting or anything. It was just a nuisance. Hindsight being 20/20, we should have said, 'Everyone get off the field.' It would have been like a downpour, where you say, 'We can't play in these conditions.' ”

Something very strange happened, though. Carmona pulled his cap down a little lower and threw the baseball as if the midges around him and on his face and neck did not exist. He gave the appearance of a man in a crisp suit walking down the street in a rainstorm, oblivious to the extreme conditions. Behind him, the Cleveland infielders gave none of the burlesque histrionics seen from Jeter and Rodriguez. The swarm had not minimized, but the Indians gave the appearance otherwise.

”I thought there were clearly differences to how the two teams were reacting to it,” general manager Mark Shapiro said. ”But our year had been one to give our team multiple valid excuses. Snow-outs, home games on the road, home games in Milwaukee, no off days in forever . . . our guys just never gave in to it, which was an affirmation to what tough players they are. You talk about tough players and a team approach, that's what we hope to build here as a culture. It's less about feel good things, less about objective things, and it is the manager that can help implement that culture in a clubhouse.”

Carmona would have to face the best Yankees. .h.i.tters in the ninth inning of a tie game in the playoffs with insects surrounding him and sticking to him. What happened next was a triumph of the Cleveland Indians organizational intellect. As much as any other, this one inning would confirm exactly how a middle-market team erased the compet.i.tive advantage the Yankees enjoyed in their champions.h.i.+p seasons over the rest of baseball, and the Indians had done so with a payroll that amounted to less than one-third of what the Yankees were spending on players.

_The postmodern general manager prototype, Shapiro, in his wrinkle-free crisp khakis and sports s.h.i.+rt, sits at his sleek desk in front of his computer, navigating through his team's propriety and copyrighted software program, DiamondView, the program so valuable that the Arizona Diamondbacks once only half jokingly were asked to consider trading it for Carlos Quentin, their top power-hitting prospect. Not even a server to be named later could have convinced Cleveland's general manager to give up the computational brains of the organization. Shapiro looks as if he might well be running a private hedge fund or operating a technology startup from his office above Progressive Field in Cleveland.

Fueled by bottled water and energy bars, Shapiro spends every day searching for any ground, everywhere from the sandlots of the Dominican Republic to the kudzu-like blogosphere, for any incremental edge that will make the Indians better and more efficient than they were and, in turn, bring them closer to cutting into the huge advantage the Yankees enjoyed because of their revenues.

Shapiro, Princeton-educated, the son of a powerful sports agent, a history major who played collegiate football but not a day of professional baseball, was exactly the kind of hands-on, business-savvy chief executive that has become necessary for teams to cut into the Yankees' advantage. The general manager genus that existed when the Yankees were winning champions.h.i.+ps was marked by men who would make baseball decisions by the seat of their pants-or perhaps a barstool-and knew little about the business side of the organization. These were baseball men, and proud of it, whose responsibility rested almost entirely with player acquisition. They sought or kept almost no business intellect.

”At some point owners.h.i.+p decided with all the dollars at stake they wanted to talk with someone-not all owners.h.i.+p-that they had a comfort level with from a business standpoint,” said Shapiro. ”That doesn't diminish the human side of the game. It doesn't diminish the necessity for baseball ac.u.men or scouting to play a role in decision making. But at the top a lot of owners.h.i.+ps decided they wanted someone that had a combination of skill sets, instead of just being one of evaluation, of just picking 25 players. That's the delineation here. The job s.h.i.+fted, from picking 25 guys to building and running an organization. A CEO of a baseball organization.”

In 2002, Shapiro's second year as general manager, the Indians spent $24 million on player development and scouting, more than all but two teams in baseball and a 50 percent increase in their R&D from three years earlier. They obtained 22 prospects from outside the organization that year alone, including Sizemore, Phillips, Lee, Travis Hafner, Coco Crisp and Ben Broussard, all of them soon to be bona fide big leaguers. The Indians knew that the currency of information was gaining in value around baseball. If ball-clubs could not match the Yankees' resources, which allowed New York a wide margin of error, those teams could use intellect-specifically, the gathering and a.n.a.lysis of information-to operate more efficiently.

Shapiro made some mistakes early in his tenure, but learned from those while building an organization that was at the cutting edge of the information age that was just dawning in baseball. For Shapiro, it wasn't just about getting information; it was also about using it wisely and efficiently.

”Somewhere along the line we realized you have so much information that we were spending approximately 50 percent of our time a.s.sembling it and 50 percent of our time a.n.a.lyzing it,” Shapiro said. ”That's when we created DiamondView, and DiamondView really evolved where now we spend 10 percent of the time a.s.sembling the information and 90 percent of the time evaluating it.”

The Indians created DiamondView in the spring of 2000, though it began as a rather simple venture. Shapiro wanted an easy way to track and rank the major league and minor league players in every organization as a way to identify players the Indians might pursue in trades. DiamondView originally relied only on the reports from Cleveland scouts to grade the players. Over the years, however, DiamondView has grown into a complex, vast program to compile, store and a.n.a.lyze all kinds of information. For example, every morning at 6:45 DiamondView electronically collects game information, injury reports and transactions on the nearly 6,000 players in professional baseball and updates the profiles on those players.

”For any player . . . ,” Shapiro explained. ”So you pull up, say, Jared Weaver of the Angels. It's got your basic biographical facts, the history of all the reports on him, going all the way back to his time as an amateur in college. You can actually pull up one of those reports and look at it . . . here's our scouting director's report on him. He was obviously a little bit light. Our area scout was more accurate. So that's the actual report on him. Again, it's a question of what's available to us here . . . There are journal entries, which could be anything from Baseball America Baseball America articles to a spring training look to blog reports, to the 16PF test-a psychological test in college-and we actually have our own psychological test in there also . . . Now these are newspaper articles that might contain something interesting toward building a biographical background on the guy . . . physical attributes . . . when he hit different top prospect lists. . . . Now this happens to be a guy who we haven't had any trade discussions on, but I'll show you a guy that we have.” articles to a spring training look to blog reports, to the 16PF test-a psychological test in college-and we actually have our own psychological test in there also . . . Now these are newspaper articles that might contain something interesting toward building a biographical background on the guy . . . physical attributes . . . when he hit different top prospect lists. . . . Now this happens to be a guy who we haven't had any trade discussions on, but I'll show you a guy that we have.”

Every conversation with player agents about players is also logged into DiamondView. ”When we talk about a guy, we have a history of every agent's conversation,” Shapiro said, ”like when a guy's a free agent. Every conversation. So you have a history and start to learn who's lying and who's not lying. You can say, 'Okay, we know this agency. They lie. They told us this was out there.' We have it. We recorded the conversation afterward, just in notes. And there's a clear pattern here. It's good information.

”So it's not a question of having the information. Every organization has it. It's a question of having it accessible quickly. I think there are at least 15 teams that have a lot of objective a.n.a.lysis, their own proprietary smart guys, mathematicians, smart guys turning out stats . . . How much they factor in decisions and how much they weigh it, how they use it, I'm not sure. But how accessible is it? How many teams have everything together: stats, scouting reports, video, contractual information, the history, college stuff . . . I don't think very many have that all together in one place.”

The Indians, of course, also have their own proprietary information, such as the psychological tests, which they give to every player in their system. They also try to give it to amateur players that they scout, though resistance to the test from agents and colleges often forces the club to approach the players about it in summer leagues, such as the Cape Cod League.

”Now you start to get into what kind of things we do that are creative,” Shapiro said. ”Stats, objective a.n.a.lysis . . . There's a lot of unique, proprietary information. Very unique. It's all mixed in here.”

The Oakland Athletics found an inefficiency to exploit almost a decade ago with an emphasis on on-base percentage while the rest of baseball remained focused on batting average. The Indians exploited an inefficiency by using DiamondView to quickly collect and a.n.a.lyze the flood of information pouring into the game. Like marine recovery teams searching for buried treasure in the vastness of the oceans, smart ballclubs constantly are looking for the next inefficiency to exploit.

_With Carmona on the mound in Game 2 of the 2007 ALDS was every incremental improvement by Cleveland-advanced medical and prehabilitation systems, proprietary software, statistical a.n.a.lysis, biomechanics, sports psychology, a holistic approach to player development, a redefining of the general manager as a CEO, and more money to invest in those developments because of revenue sharing and central fund distributions from revenue streams that didn't exist when the Yankees were winning champions.h.i.+ps.

All of that happened while the Yankees, in a relative sense, slept. The Yankees' response to the growth of revenue and intellect around the game had been to keep patching the roster with expensive veterans, regardless of what they may bring to the clubhouse culture. A barren farm system had given them little room to consider much else.

The Indians signed Fausto Carmona as a free agent out of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on December 28, 2000, three weeks after he celebrated his seventeenth birthday. He was a tall, skinny kid-six-foot-three and only 160 pounds-with an 83-mph fastball. The Indians gave him a signing bonus of $10,000.

”It wasn't brilliant scouting,” Shapiro admitted.

Carmona was nothing special. Every year the Indians, like most teams, would sign about 15 of these raw, mostly underweight kids from Latin America, the same way somebody might buy 15 lottery tickets. The investment was a pittance to major league teams-$150,000 for 15 players-but the potential payoff was enormous if even one of those fliers made it to the big leagues.

If anyone wondered why professional baseball was acquiring a more Latin American presence, the decisions by the Indians on amateur players in 2000 provided one clue. Teams like the Indians knew Latin America offered a much bigger bang for the player development buck than the stateside high school and college kids who went through the First-Year Player Draft. The Indians spent a combined $2.25 million just on their first two picks of the draft, Corey Smith, a high school shortstop from New Jersey taken 26th overall, and Derek Thompson, a lefthanded high school pitcher from Florida selected 37th overall. Neither of them ever played a day in the big leagues for Cleveland. For a fraction of the money they burned on those two top picks-less than 7 percent-the Indians could sign 15 players 15 players out of Latin America, including a future 19-game winner who would finish fourth in the American League Cy Young Award voting. out of Latin America, including a future 19-game winner who would finish fourth in the American League Cy Young Award voting.

”You don't sign anyone for $10,000 anymore,” Shapiro said. ”Now it's 50. The new $10,000 is $50,000.”

The Indians kept Carmona in his home country for his first professional season, a.s.signing him to the Dominican Summer League. The next year he reported to Cleveland's minor league camp in Winter Haven, Florida, where the education of a pitcher truly began. The Indians provided English cla.s.ses for Carmona and other young Latin players. (They have since added the equivalent of secondary school education programs for such players. The players attend these schools in the Dominican in the off-season to earn the equivalent of a General Education Degree.) They provided nutritional and dental a.s.sistance. (Carmona had significant dental issues that compromised his eating habits, not an uncommon trait from a part of the world where good, affordable dental care is not readily available.) A nutritionist provided educational seminars for the Latin American players and even escorted them on field trips to local grocery stores to teach them how to shop and what to buy.

The Indians a.s.signed Carmona to Burlington, where he pitched well and showed exceptional control for a teenager. The next year they sent him to Lake County in Cla.s.s A ball. ”That's when he jumped up,” Shapiro said. Carmona went 17-4 with a 2.06 ERA. This was 2003, when Moneyball Moneyball began to change the vocabulary of scouting and player development, so at first blush Carmona's numbers might have been met with some skepticism because he was not a big strikeout pitcher, a preferred trait among the statistical a.n.a.lysts. But Shapiro saw the value in his entire statistical profile rather than one column. began to change the vocabulary of scouting and player development, so at first blush Carmona's numbers might have been met with some skepticism because he was not a big strikeout pitcher, a preferred trait among the statistical a.n.a.lysts. But Shapiro saw the value in his entire statistical profile rather than one column.

”You look at the strikeouts to innings pitched,” Shapiro said, referring to Carmon's pedestrian 5.04 strikeouts per nine innings in 2003. ”But he had few walks and was an extreme groundball pitcher. Pure objective a.n.a.lysis? Some people would devalue him to some extent because his strikeouts were not that great. But the walks were still low and the groundball to flyball rate was so high.”

Carmona continued to improve and grow. He impressed his coaches with his work ethic. Even after clocking in his usual six innings or so of work, Carmona, rather than retreating to the training room for the usual ice therapy for a pitcher's arm, would run or bike for another 15 minutes. The Indians' attention to prehabilitation also helped his development. Indians trainers found that Carmona had a slight sway in his back, which would likely compromise his back and shoulder health over time, so they a.s.signed him specific exercises to improve his core strength and posture. By 2006 Cleveland decided that Carmona, now 22 and about 220 pounds, and throwing his fastball 95 miles per hour, was ready for the big leagues.

Carmona initially had disastrous results. Pitching mostly out of the bullpen, Carmona went 1-10, becoming only the eighth pitcher since 1901 to post a winning percentage worse than .100 in his first big league season.

The worst of it for Carmona was when the Indians, desperate for late-inning help, decided to try him as a closer in the middle of the season. Carmona blew ninth-inning leads in three straight appearances, losing each one of them on a walkoff extra-base hit, twice in Boston to the Red Sox and once in Detroit to the Tigers. It was the sort of nightmare that can ruin a career, especially for a rookie. What was happening to him? The Indians again put their holistic approach to work to find an answer. They looked for an objective reason why Carmona was getting hit so hard and they found it: a study of the digital video files of his outings revealed that his sinker had straightened out. And why had it straightened out? The same reason why the Indians wanted to try him as a closer in the first place: they knew he was wired to be a fierce compet.i.tor. In this case, given the high leverage created by a ninth-inning lead, Carmona was victimized by trying too hard to succeed. The harder he tried, the more his release point dropped, and the more his release point dropped, the less sink he generated on his pitches.

”His strength worked against him,” said Shapiro. ”So we didn't try to sc.r.a.p everything. We just said, 'Hey, you need to recognize when your mental condition works against you, when you're delivery breaks down, and what happens in your delivery.'”

After Carmona's bullpen meltdowns, the Indians sent the rookie righthander to Triple-A Buffalo to start games, not finish them. They called him back to Cleveland as a starter, then sent him to the Dominican Winter League to start some more, the better to develop the greater stamina needed by a starting pitcher after spending most of 2006 in the bullpen. In 2007, in the seventh year of Carmona's holistic development-mental, physical, h.e.l.l, even dental-the Indians' little $10,000 investment had become a workhorse major league starter. Carmona threw 215 innings. He finished second in the league in wins (19) and second in ERA (3.06). Trying to hit his power sinker was like trying to hit a bowling ball. n.o.body threw more double-play grounders (32). He had, by far, the best groundball-to-flyball ratio in the league (3.28). The Indians had themselves a young pitching star.

The Indians had won the lottery.

_When the kid from Santo Domingo took the ball for the ninth inning of Game 2 against New York-the game tied, the midges swirling madly, the Yankees sending Johnny Damon, Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu to the plate, with Alex Rodriguez waiting in case any of them reached base-Carmona's task would test every bit of that holistic development. No Cleveland pitcher this young ever had thrown nine innings in a postseason game. No starting pitcher had lasted nine innings against this formidable Yankees lineup all year. Carmona pulled his cap down a little lower, ignored the midges and went to work with the calm purposefulness of a diamond cutter.

Damon grounded out. Jeter struck out. Abreu reached first base on an infield single, to shortstop, then promptly swiped second base on the next pitch. The must-have game for the Yankees had come down to this: Rodriguez, the most expensive player in baseball, against Carmona, the erstwhile $10,000 kid, with the potential winning run at second base. Rodriguez, for all of his 156 runs batted in during the regular season, was in need of some serious holistic postseason help himself. He was 0-for-5 in the series (without getting the ball out of the infield) and had four hits in his previous 49 postseason at-bats with the Yankees, including 27 consecutive at-bats without a hit on the road. Rodriguez did see nine pitches, but it ended badly for him. Carmona, with his 113th of the night, buzzed a ferocious sinker under the hands of a swinging Rodriguez for strike three.

When Carmona marched into the Cleveland dugout, Indians trainers were amazed at what they saw: his face and neck were covered with hundreds of midges. Not once had he taken a peeved swat at any of them. It was as if they were never there.

The midges left a short time later, their 45-minute window to wreak havoc on the Yankees and help close the curtain on the Torre Era having expired. Rivera did provide two shutout innings, but as soon as Torre had to go to anybody else in the bullpen, and in this case it was Luis Vizcaino, the game was over. Vizcaino walked the leadoff hitter of the 11th inning, the preamble to an eventual game-winning single by Travis Hafner.

_The Yankees were one game away from elimination. The same could be said for Torre. Steinbrenner made sure the world knew it, too. On the morning of Game 3, Steinbrenner, out of nowhere, was quoted in the Bergen Record Bergen Record explaining that Torre was gone with one more loss. explaining that Torre was gone with one more loss.

”His job is on the line,” Steinbrenner said. ”I think we're paying him a lot of money. He's the highest-paid manager in baseball, so I don't think we'd take him back if we didn't win this series.”

The bl.u.s.ter would have been normal procedure from Steinbrenner 10, even five, years earlier. But in 2007? It was shocking. Steinbrenner's handlers had kept him away from the press all year. He communicated with the media only through carefully worded statements from his public relations representative. When writer Franz Lidz, a.s.signed by Portfolio Portfolio magazine to write a piece on the Yankees' owner, breached the protective wall around Steinbrenner by visiting him that summer unannounced at his Tampa home, the description that emerged of The Boss was a pathetic one. Steinbrenner was portrayed as barely lucid, mumbling and repeating himself. Steinbrenner was well enough to make only three games in New York all year before this series. And now, with his team on the brink of elimination, he had suddenly found the old gusto? magazine to write a piece on the Yankees' owner, breached the protective wall around Steinbrenner by visiting him that summer unannounced at his Tampa home, the description that emerged of The Boss was a pathetic one. Steinbrenner was portrayed as barely lucid, mumbling and repeating himself. Steinbrenner was well enough to make only three games in New York all year before this series. And now, with his team on the brink of elimination, he had suddenly found the old gusto?

Ian O'Connor, a columnist for the Bergen Record, Bergen Record, had called Steinbrenner at his place in the Regency Hotel. It was a play taken from an old Yankees beat writer playbook: call Steinbrenner when the team is playing poorly and you just might get yourself a headline if The Boss decides to pop off. In the 1980s the beat writers used to call Steinbrenner ”Mr. Tunes,” because getting outrageous quotes from him was as easy as dropping a quarter into a jukebox and making your selection. Many of the quotes were as familiar as. .h.i.t records, straight from the Steinbrenner catalog. But this was 2007, and Steinbrenner's declining health had rendered him little more than a figurehead who was barely seen or heard from. Indeed, not more than a week later the Yankees would announce that Steinbrenner officially was no longer actively running the team, but would serve as a kind of patriarch to the operations. had called Steinbrenner at his place in the Regency Hotel. It was a play taken from an old Yankees beat writer playbook: call Steinbrenner when the team is playing poorly and you just might get yourself a headline if The Boss decides to pop off. In the 1980s the beat writers used to call Steinbrenner ”Mr. Tunes,” because getting outrageous quotes from him was as easy as dropping a quarter into a jukebox and making your selection. Many of the quotes were as familiar as. .h.i.t records, straight from the Steinbrenner catalog. But this was 2007, and Steinbrenner's declining health had rendered him little more than a figurehead who was barely seen or heard from. Indeed, not more than a week later the Yankees would announce that Steinbrenner officially was no longer actively running the team, but would serve as a kind of patriarch to the operations.

There was no answer on Steinbrenner's phone. O'Connor kept calling. No answer. Another call. Then suddenly, Steinbrenner picked up the phone. He answered questions. O'Connor decided that Steinbrenner sounded lucid enough for the quotes to have merit. He had his headline. It was big news. Torre found out about Steinbrenner's win-or-be-gone edict on his drive into Yankee Stadium for Game 3. He always did hate having his job security become a public issue around his players, but now it had become the the issue. At his scheduled pregame news conference, Torre took 13 questions. Nine of them were about his job status and Steinbrenner's comments. issue. At his scheduled pregame news conference, Torre took 13 questions. Nine of them were about his job status and Steinbrenner's comments.

”You don't always get used to it,” Torre said in response to one question about his reaction to Steinbrenner's comments, ”but you understand if you want to work here, and certainly there's a great deal of upside to working here, that you understand that there are certain things you have to deal with. You know, that's pretty much where I am.”

Cashman sought out Torre behind the batting cage during batting practice.

”I'm sorry,” Cashman said. ”I had nothing to do with it.”

”I'm p.i.s.sed about the timing of it,” Torre said. ”We don't need this.”

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