When I was twelve, my family stopped by a bookstore on vacation to use the bathroom, and my 15-year-old brother noticed a book called “Feeding the Monster” by an author named Seth Mnookin. The book was an inside look at the Red Sox’ rise and pitfalls from the beginning of John Henry’s ownership through the 2005 season. It’s been more than a decade now since I read that book, but for a few years, I’d read it every summer, fascinated by the inner workings of one of my favorite major league franchises.
The book, as I recall, begins with a brief recap of the Red Sox’ history, with special attention paid to the late 1990s, when general manager Dan Duquette assembled much of what would become the 2004 Opening Day roster. As a Duquette-friendly Wikipedia editor will readily tell you, Duquette was behind the acquisitions of Pedro Martinez, Tim Wakefield, Johnny Damon, Jason Varitek, Manny Ramirez, Derek Lowe, and—of course—Nomar Garciaparra, the face of the Boston franchise whom Duquette’s successor, Theo Epstein, would trade away at the deadline in that fabled 2004 season. It was a move which, though it would have been incomprehensible just a few years prior, became seen as an act of front office courage largely responsible for the Red Sox winning their first World Series in 86 trying years. Even in Garciaparra’s absence, he helped acquire some of the pieces which ultimately brought the trophy home.
To credit Duquette for that 2004 title would be a stretch. Duquette didn’t acquire David Ortiz. He didn’t acquire Curt Schilling. He didn’t acquire Kevin Millar or Bill Mueller or Orlando Cabrera or Keith Foulke. Duquette did, though, set the table for Epstein, and to fully credit Epstein would be a lesser degree of stretch but a stretch nonetheless.
After Epstein moved on from Boston for the second time—the permanent time—it was a disciple of his, Ben Cherington, who was left to run the team. Epstein had won two titles, and Cherington would win a third, but Cherington also finished last in the AL East three times in his four seasons, the last of which saw Dave Dombrowski brought on as the president of baseball operations in August, a move which prompted Cherington’s resignation as GM. For the 2016 season, Dombrowski would work with Mike Hazen, who had worked under Cherington. After 2016, Hazen went to the Diamondbacks and the Red Sox didn’t hire a new general manager, leaving the reins fully in Dombrowski’s hands.
We conduct this brief history of Red Sox front office leadership not in order to remember a very good book—though I should stress again that it is a very good book, at least for a baseball-loving 12-to-15-year-old—but because it, in combination with Chaim Bloom’s now-finished tenure, charts a course this franchise has followed, turning from what either Jake Mintz or Jordan Shusterman termed a gunslinging front office to what I would term an analytical front office and then back and forth and now potentially back again. Duquette? Gunslinger. Epstein and Cherington? Analytics. Dombrowski? Gunslinger. Bloom? Analytics. It’s not that Dombrowski eschewed analytics or that Epstein or his ilk lacked courage, but rather that there are a few different approaches to running a major league franchise. One of them—Dombrowski’s, Duquette’s—is to use all assets aggressively and try to win with haste. One of them—Epstein’s, Bloom’s—is to try to build an operation which consistently churns out cheap, young talent. It’s the win–now philosophy vs. the championship–window philosophy, and turning to the Red Sox ownership, it is fascinating that they’ve been willing to try some of both. John Henry’s group, which came in and immediately canned Duquette, was supposed to be all analytics. Then, the Dombrowski era happened, and a World Series title was won. A year later? The franchise became analytics-first again, hiring Bloom. Now, perhaps they’ll pivot once more, with it remaining to be seen whether Bloom’s successor will fit more neatly into Dombrowski’s clothes or Epstein’s.
What’s fascinating about this is not necessarily that Henry and his team have waffled on their approach. What’s fascinating is that it’s worked so well. Since John Henry bought the Red Sox, no other team has won as many World Series titles as the Henry administration has won in Boston. And so, looking back to Duquette, I wonder: Is there something to be said for sequencing these approaches? Duquette set the table for Epstein. Cherington set the table for Dombrowski. Bloom has likely set the table well for whoever comes next, with the Red Sox’ farm system well-regarded and the budget flexible and strong.
I love the Epstein approach. It’s how I used to build franchises in video games. It makes all the sense in the world on paper. It doesn’t always, though, work perfectly in the real world. There are factors at play in baseball which have not yet been distilled upon a spreadsheet. Forced to choose simply between one and the other, you’d be a fool not to choose the Epstein approach over gunslinging, but something a lot of recent World Series champions have done well is seize opportunities when they’ve come, leaning in and throwing some caution to the wind. There is luck involved, there is so much luck involved, and yet: Sometimes, you need to throw the ball downfield.
The Braves’ Quiet Dynasty
Speaking of teams who win a lot, the Braves clinched their sixth straight NL East title last night, and I am surprised that the number is that high. I didn’t remember that they started doing this in 2018. I didn’t remember right away that they’d won 97 games in 2019. I didn’t remember that they’d won the division en route to that Dodgers NLCS comeback in 2020.
The Braves are unquestionably the best baseball team in the world right now, with the approach of developing young talent and then aggressively pursuing extensions, well before free agency, in full blossom at the moment. They won 101 games last year, and they’re going to win more by the time this season is up. To bring this back to luck, though, it’s worth remembering that the only World Series the Braves have won—and the only time they won the pennant—they finished the regular season with 88 wins, sat below .500 at the end of July, and relied on heroics from Eddie Rosario and Jorge Soler to capture the crown. The worst of these six division champion teams was the only one so far who won it all.
This is not to call the Braves “lucky.” Winning 101 games and then getting surprised in the NLDS by a division rival is decidedly unlucky. It goes back and forth (this supports Epstein’s hypothesis that winning World Series titles is an exercise in maximizing playoff appearances). It’s more an observation on the fickleness of baseball. Baseball is lucky. Or it’s magical. Or maybe a little bit of both. Anyway, congratulations to the Braves, who have managed to win a division over three other large-market teams an astonishing six years in a row. That is a lot of years.
What if It’s the Pitches?
Sandy Alcantara strained his UCL, and thankfully, it’s not a tear, but the fear is obvious for Marlins fans, with the news coming at just about the worst possible time. The Marlins lost today, and they’re now going to be either even or one game back in the loss column against the NL’s current 6-seed. Alcantara hasn’t fully been their ace this year—Jesús Luzardo has been more valuable despite throwing fewer innings—but the reigning Cy Young winner’s arm is hurting, and some are going to blame the pitch clock, and some are going to blame how many innings the guy has thrown these last few years. (Since Alcantara’s rookie year, the man has finished twelve complete games. No one else has thrown more than six.)
With UCL injuries up across the board, though, and with a few high-profile injuries accompanying the banning of “sticky stuff” a few years ago, here’s another theory: Maybe the recent gigantic increase in velocity and pitch movement, both things that have to come from the human body, are corresponding with an increase in strain on the human body. This really is only a theory, and I know I’m not alone in throwing it out there, and I know it’s probably only part of the explanation. But. As baseball players get stronger and stronger (Jasson Domínguez is also experiencing UCL issues, scheduled for Tommy John surgery this offseason), I wonder to what extent the increase in injuries is due to ligaments just not keeping up.
What if the NL Cy Young Race Is Good?
A narrative has formed that the NL Cy Young race isn’t a good one, because the pitchers involved aren’t as good as the pitchers we normally see in such things. Usually, the Cy Young winner has at the very least amassed around six WAR. It is very rare for a Cy Young winner to not have hit that number. Heading into this weekend, the NL WAR leader among pitchers is not on that pace.
But just because the race isn’t between as good of pitchers doesn’t mean it’s not a good race. Strong cases for a few guys:
- Zack Wheeler leads all MLB pitchers in fWAR, at 5.4.
- Blake Snell leads the National League in bWAR, at 5.3, and leads qualified NL starters in ERA, at 2.43.
- Spencer Strider leads qualified NL starters in FIP, at 2.83, and is first in strikeouts by a fifth of the next-closest guy’s total.
- Alexis Díaz and Tanner Scott have each added more than one win more in win probability than the next-closest National League pitcher.
- Justin Steele is second in both ERA and FIP and seems like a cool guy.
The fWAR vs. bWAR debate is important. It holds WAR back as a stat in a significant way, because sometimes—this time—the numbers can be very different for the same player. What fWAR does is rely heavily upon FIP, a metric that takes the results of balls in play out of the equation and cares only about walks, home runs, and strikeouts. FIP’s strength is that it’s more predictive of future performance than ERA is. It removes a lot of luck from the equation and hones in on how well, exactly, a pitcher pitched. bWAR, meanwhile, cares more about how many runs cross the plate. It’s very results-oriented.
A big part of why I personally prefer fWAR is that if the ultimate result is the point, I don’t understand why people would care more about ERA than WPA, win probability added. The innings Díaz and Scott have thrown have mattered a lot more than Snell’s, and given each pitcher’s relative position in the Wild Card race, that consequence only multiplies. I don’t think WPA should be viewed as the most important stat in baseball, but it more fully quantifies what bWAR is getting at, while fWAR more fully quantifies how well a pitcher pitched, isolated from the context.
So, if I were voting right now, my five NL pitchers, in order, would be Wheeler, Strider, Steele, Zac Gallen, and Logan Webb—the fWAR leaders. But if I were to go fully by results, I don’t think there’s actually much logic to put Snell ahead of Díaz and Scott. Plenty disagree with me. That’s part of what makes it a good Cy Young race.
Hockey to Atlanta?
The NHL’s deputy commissioner, Bill Daly, spoke positively to ESPN recently about the potential of another franchise going to Atlanta down the line. This was a theoretical conversation, there’s nothing imminent, but Daly cited how much the city has changed demographically since the Thrashers were trying to carve out a home for themselves, and he talked about how well the suburbs have treated the Braves from an attendance perspective.
I’m not from Atlanta, and I’ve never lived in Atlanta, but I’ve spent a good amount of time there, and something I think is true of that city is that more than any other metro of its size, it has a white part and it has a Black part. This isn’t formal segregation (it’s partially a legacy of it), but the city has white things and it has Black things, and the Black part of the city is larger than the white part, numerically and culturally. Atlanta is the informal capital of Black America. Within white America, Atlanta is kind of small.
The Braves are a white thing. Baseball is more popular among white Americans, and the Braves are more The South’s team than any other franchise in sports, making them proportionally less of an Atlanta institution than the Hawks or the Falcons. The Braves are plenty popular in Black Atlanta, but “Braves Country,” as it’s known, stretches from the Mississippi River to the Outer Banks. That’s not how it works with anything else in the city. So, it makes sense that the team enjoys such support in the Atlanta suburbs, which are whiter and more a part of The South than the city itself.
What I’m curious about with a potential Atlanta NHL expansion franchise is how it would balance suburban support with not being The South’s hockey team. There’s established professional hockey in Nashville and Raleigh already. The suburbs can do a lot—my impression is that they’ve been responsible for a lot of Atlanta United’s attendance success in Major League Soccer, even with the team playing inside the city—but are they enough to make hockey succeed where it hasn’t before? Bill Daly seems to think so. I think he’s probably right. Population growth and economic growth can do a lot for an expansion franchise, so long as it’s run decently well. I have a hard time believing that Seattle is a better place for professional sports expansion than Atlanta, a metro more than 50% bigger in population, a comparably-sized economy, and a part of a more sports-interested culture than the Pacific Northwest.
How About That Matt LaFleur?
Matt LaFleur’s getting a lot of praise for what his offense did to the Bears on Sunday, and I don’t think he doesn’t deserve that. Making any NFL defense look that inept is impressive. It’s the NFL. There is a high floor. But hearing LaFleur’s reaction to Aaron Rodgers’s injury brought to mind something that’s been simmering for the last few weeks: LaFleur did something his buddies haven’t. He coached an established quarterback among the three or four greatest of his generation.
On the one hand, this should be a very easy job. A whole bunch of how the NFL works is that if you have a great quarterback, you will have a good team. It’s probably overstated, but quarterbacking matters immensely. On the other hand, though, imagine having to manage a quarterback whose ego has—understandably, if sometimes detrimentally—grown as big as Rodgers’s had grown by the time LaFleur arrived in Green Bay. LaFleur, of the school of coaching whose members are schematically focused and not of a mind to cater to stars (think Epstein, not Dombrowski, to go back to the Red Sox talk from up top), coached Aaron Rodgers for four full seasons, and it went pretty well. The Packers won thirteen games three times in a row and came one game away from four straight playoff appearances. They were among the last four NFL teams playing twice, and among the last eight one additional time. Most notably, for all the Rodgers drama in the offseasons, the two managed a reasonably cordial relationship.
This implies impressive things about LaFleur’s soft skills—his ability to foster an environment conducive to winning. Traditionally a weakness of the analytically inclined (we mentioned this possibility regarding David Stearns yesterday), LaFleur seems to navigate interpersonal relationships successfully with a variety of people. That’s a valuable attribute in a head coach. It’s not the most important thing, but it’s the sort of thing that can finish the job for a franchise that has the pieces in place. Hopefully, that’s what happens over the next few years in Green Bay.
