Free Scorecasting by Tobias Moskowitz

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    La Russa seized on an idea: Why not take his nine pitchers and establishthree-man pitching “units” in which each pitcher would throw only 50 tosses, usually within three innings? The thinking was simple: The pitchers would take the mound every three games but would be fresher since they’d throw fewer pitches per outing. Also, the opposing batters would be unable to establish much comfort, since they might well face a different pitcher every time they came to the plate. It turns out that baseball statistics back this up. Major League batters hit about 27 points lower the first time they face a pitcher in a game. Their on-base percentage is about 27 points lower and their slugging percentage is 58 points lower the first time they face a pitcher. This could be because the pitcher’s arm is fresher or because the hitter needs to see him more than once to figure him out. Either way, La Russa’s idea would capitalize on this effect.
    There were other potential advantages, too. By having essentially all your pitchers available to you each game, you have more options to choose from in any situation. In addition, the most expensive pitchers tend to be starters who go deep into the game,pitching seven or more innings and throwing 120-plus pitches per game. Turns out the key difference between star pitchers and other pitchers is the stars’ ability to pitch effectively for longer. In the first couple of innings, the differences between star and nonstar pitchers are much smaller. In La Russa’s experiment, for the first three innings he might get comparably effective results from journeyman pitchers who came at a fraction of the cost of the star pitchers, thus leaving extra money to spend on other players—or, in the case of the Oakland A’s, allowing them to remain competitive despite a much smaller budget than some of the big-market teams, such as the New York Yankees.
    It was a radical strategy, but La Russa had the status and standing to try to pull it off. He’d been the Oakland manager since 1986 and had taken the team to the World Series in 1988, 1989, and 1990. In 1992, the previous season, he had been named manager of the year. With his accumulated goodwill (and his team in last place), he wasn’t risking much by departing from conventional wisdom.
    Unfortunately for La Russa, his chemistry experiment fizzled. Why? The starting pitchers hated it. Publicly they claimed they had a hard time finding a rhythm and settling into a groove. Privately they complained that the 50-pitch limit precluded them from working the requisite five innings to get a win, yet they were still eligible for a loss. (Because future contracts were tied to wins and losses, their manager was potentially costing them real money.) After five games, four of them losses, and a lot of grumbling from the pitchers, La Russa cut bait and returned to the traditional four-man, deeper-pitch-count rotation. It was a reminder: You may have a better strategy, but if the athletes don’t buy in, it’s probably not worth deploying.
    Here is a cautionary tale of what happens to a risk-taking coach on shaky employment footing.Paul Westhead, coach of theLos Angeles Lakers, was fired 11 games into the 1981–1982 season, in part because the team’s point guard,Magic Johnson, thought the coach was, of all things, too rigid and restrictive. “This teamis not as exciting as it should be,” the Lakers’ owner, Dr.Jerry Buss, said at Westhead’s firing. By the end of the eighties, Westhead, a Shakespeare scholar who looked the part of a professor, was coaching at the college level, at Loyola Marymount. There he deployed a strategy based on many of the same principles that Kevin Kelley uses in Arkansas: The more offensive opportunities and attempts, the better. The statistics support attempting lots of “big plays”—three-pointers in basketball. The unconventional approach upsets the opponents’ preparation routines and displaces them from their