Deferring to success became an untenable strategy in 1995, when Walter Haas died. His estate sold the team to a pair of Bay Area real estate developers, Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, who were, by instinct, more businessmen than philanthropists. Schott and Hofmann wanted Alderson to continue running the team but on a much tighter budget. “We had new owners who weren’t going to spend any money,” said Alderson. “They made it clear that this had to be a business. And so we suddenly were put in the position of: we can only afford a one-tool player. Which tool is it going to be?” What—and this is what the question amounted to—was the efficient way to spend money on baseball players? The first, short answer, according to a pamphlet commissioned by Alderson, was to spend it on hitters. The pamphlet was written by a former aerospace engineer turned baseball writer, Eric Walker. Fielding, Walker wrote, was “at most five percent of the game.” The rest was pitching and offense, and while “good pitchers are usually valued properly, good batters often are not.” In Walker’s words:
Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away—far, far and away—the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. Anything that increases the offense’s chances of making an out is bad; anything that decreases it is good. And what is on-base percentage? Simply yet exactly put, it is the probability that the batter will not make an out. When we state it that way, it becomes, or should become, crystal clear that the most important isolated (one-dimensional) offensive statistic is the on-base percentage. It measures the probability that the batter will not be another step toward the end of the inning.
Alderson’s reference point for running an organization was the time he’d spent as an officer in the Marine Corps. He approached the A’s farm teams the way the Marine Corps approached its boot camps. The individual star was less important than the organization as a whole, and the organization as a whole functioned well only if it was uniformly disciplined. Once he decided that hitting was the most important tool and everything else was secondary, Alderson set about implementing throughout the organization, with Marine Corps rigor, a uniform approach to hitting. The approach had three rules:
Every batter needs to behave like a leadoff man, and adopt as his main goal getting on base.
Every batter should also possess the power to hit home runs, in part because home run power forced opposing pitchers to pitch more cautiously, and led to walks, and high on-base percentages.
3. To anyone with the natural gifts to become a professional baseball player, hitting was less a physical than a mental skill. Or, at any rate, the aspects of hitting that could be taught were mental.
By 1995, Alderson had created a new baseball corporate culture around a single baseball statistic: on-base percentage. Scoring runs was, in the new view, less an art or a talent than a process. If you made the process a routine—if you got every player doing his part on the production line—you could pay a lot less for runs than the going rate. Alderson was building a system with Marine Corps intolerance for exceptions to the rules. “Sandy produced this long paper about the pros and cons of selective hitting,” recalled Karl Kuehl, who was in charge of implementing Alderson’s rules. “He wanted to really push the kids coming up through the minor leagues. No one had ever heard of on-base percentage, but when your being called to the major leagues depends on your on-base percentage, it gets your attention.” The system’s central tenet was, in Alderson’s words, “the system was the star. The reason the system works is that everyone buys into it. If they don’t, there is a weakness in the system.” The unacceptable vice in a minor league player was a taste for bad pitches. The most praiseworthy virtue was the willingness to take a base on balls. No player was eligible for minor league awards, or was allowed to move up in the system, unless he had at least one walk in every ten bats.
The effect of Sandy Alderson’s new rules was interesting to anyone who believed the pitcher, not the hitter, was chiefly responsible for the base on balls. More or less overnight, all of the A’s minor league teams began to lead their respective leagues in walks. To ensure they never lost that lead, Alderson routinely reviewed the batting statistics of the teams, and leaned on managers whose teams were not walking. He noticed, for instance, that the Oakland Double-A affiliate was the exception in the organization: its players weren’t drawing walks at the same frantic rate as the A’s other minor league teams. “I got my reports,” he said. “I can see they aren’t taking any walks. I called the manager and said, ‘They go up or you’re fired.’ And they went up. Quickly.”
Even after the Marine Corps had come to the Oakland A’s there remained a weakness in the system: the major league team. The mere presence of a free-swinging light hitter like Billy Beane on the big club in 1990 proved that Alderson’s views were not the controlling ones. Around the big league clubhouse the GM trod more gingerly than around the minor league clubhouses. Alderson didn’t march into Tony La Russa’s office and tell him, “The walks go up or you’re fired.” No one did. There was no very good reason for this; it’s just the way it was, because the guys who ran the front office typically had never played in the big leagues.
The need to treat the big league team as the sacrosanct province of people who had played in the big leagues struck Alderson, who liked the idea of order and discipline cascading unimpeded from
