Notes: A Whole Different Ball Game

— Rocky Bridges,
manager, the San Jose Bees

NOT LONG AGO, as spring training was about to commence, I had breakfast at a fashionable Washington hotel with the energetic young owners of a local baseball franchise. They talked with refreshing candor about the season just past and the one soon to start.

“Compared with everybody else in the league, I don’t think that either Brian or I was too knowledgeable about baseball,” Mark London, a Washington lawyer, admitted. “I mean, we knew how to puff cigars and hang tough and negotiate, and that’s how we got Rickey Henderson. But we weren’t really knowledgeable about baseball. At least not this kind.”

“I think we’ll smoke Churchills at the next draft,” added his co-owner, Brian Kelly, a journalist who lives in Chicago. “We’re just going to sit there and blow smoke, and it will drive the others crazy.”

“We did come pretty close to the money, though,” London continued. “The entire year we hovered around the money, and in the end we were only two RBIs away. Two RBIs. You know what two RBIs is? Two RBIs . . .”

“Two RBIs,” Kelly interrupted, “is a single with the bases loaded in a game that gets rained out and doesn’t count.”

London and Kelly own the Washington, D.C., Amazons, which they acquired in 1984. Last year the Amazons finished behind five teams but ahead of six others in the Washington Ghost League. That is a respectable effort for a young ball club, but Kelly and London believe that the Amazons came closer to the pennant than the final standings suggest. They concede that their own inexperience proved costly. Key trades fell through or were somehow sabotaged by the competition. The Amazons were plagued as well by untimely injuries. Prolonged slumps beset several ballplayers. But just as troublesome was the inherent quirkiness of the game—Rotisserie League baseball—that the twelve clubs in the Washington Ghost League play.

“We had, on paper, a team with a tremendous amount of talent,” London explained. “We had Rickey Henderson, who is one of the greatest players in baseball. For seventy cents we got Andre Thornton, who had thirty-three homers and ninety-nine RBIs last year. We had Mike Easter, the Hit Man, who batted .313 and knocked in ninety-one runs. We had people like Gary Pettis, who we bought for twenty cents and, as it turned out, was the third leading base stealer in our league. For a very low price we got a guy named Gary Ward—a tremendous home-run hitter for Texas who batted .600 in the second half of the season.”

“We had Aging All-Star Don Baylor,” Kelly said.

“Right, we even had Aging All-Star Don Baylor. But unfortunately some of the big guys didn’t do what they were supposed to do. You pay them all that money and they still don’t come through for you. We bet and lost on “Clams” Castino, who is a really fine second baseman for the Twins. He cost us ninety cents, and then he hurt his back. Tim Hulett is a Chicago infielder whom we needed to fill a hole, and the Sox ended up sending him to the minors after a month. For a dollar we signed Dave Stegman, of the White Sox, who had shown some promise again, and Stegman immediately turned around and went south.”

“A complete nose dive,” Kelly said. “I’d seen some of the stats on Stegman during spring training, and he made a couple of appearances at the beginning of the season, looking good. I talked him over with Mark a couple of times and then, when we needed to fill another hole and I wasn’t around, Mark drafted the guy as a kind of present, thinking, ‘Brian’s in Chicago, maybe we ought to have a Chicago guy he can watch on television.’ ”

“Roy Smalley was another disaster,”London said.

“Smalley cost us,” Kelly agreed. “Smalley hurt us badly.”

“And we made some mistakes, like taking Teddy Simmons as a designated hitter. Simmons has those great, droopy eyes, like Dick Barnett, who used to play for the Knicks. At two dollars and thirty cents, we thought he was one of the steals of the draft. Simmons had never had a bad year, really. Sure, he’d been up and down, but never a bad year. ”

“Until this year.”

“Yeah, until this year.”

“Then there was the pitching,” Kelly went on. “Mark and I came into this thing realizing that neither of us was very smart about pitchers. We ended up paying four dollars and ten cents for Floyd Bannister, and he had what for other pitchers would have been a good season—fourteen wins. For Bannister, fourteen wins was mediocre. He must have been suffering from post-pennant withdrawal, like the rest of the White Sox.”

“And because we weren’t real smart,” London said, “we went for some established names in pitching, and most of them were over thirty-five. You know, guys like Paul Mirabella, who never made it with anyone, really, and certainly didn’t make it with our club. And Larry Gura, who was a young ‘phenom’ for the Yankees, except I neglected to remind myself that I was growing up at the time.”

“The problem,” Kelly explained, “is that you get stuck with some of these guys. They’re on your roster and you just can’t get rid of them.”

ROTISSERIE LEAGUE baseball is a game of statistics. The mature form of the game owes its existence chiefly to Daniel Okrent, the editor of the magazine New England Monthly, who describes the typical Rotisserie League franchise owner as someone who would rather think about baseball than watch it. Okrent and some friends formed the first Rotisserie League in 1980, over lunch at a Manhattan restaurant called La Rotisserie Franchise. Today the New Yorkbased Rotisserie League Baseball Association (RLBA) boasts 157 affiliated leagues, in every state of the Union except the two newest ones. Sandlot versions of the game engage thousands of other teams around the country. An entertaining rulebook—Rotisserie League Baseball. edited by RLBA commissioner Glen Waggoner and with an introduction by Okrent—was published last year; some 30,000 copies are in print.

Like chess, the game is simple until it becomes complicated. To start a Rotisserie baseball league, round up a group of fellow owners—nine others if you wish to use National League players, eleven if, like Kelly and London, you prefer the American League. The next step is to conduct an auction—ideally in April, on the first weekend after Opening Day, though provisions exist for starting much later. It will take about a day and put friendships to the test. Limit the amount each owner can spend for all the players on his team to a specified sum—$260 is suggested by the RLBA. {The frugal owners in Washington play with $26 apiece, but the ceiling in at least one league is rumored to be $2,600.) Then start the bidding. Pay no attention to the guy smoking Churchills or you will lose Rickey Henderson. Proceed with the auction until each owner has filled a twenty-three-man active roster. Because Rotisserie leagues play with two fewer teams than their major-league counterparts, and with two fewer players on their rosters, many active majorleague athletes will go unchosen in the draft. They constitute a free-agent pool from which owners can draw talent throughout the season. At season’s end the receipts from the April draft, along with league levies on trades and other transactions, will be distributed—unevenly—among the owners of the four teams at the top of the standings. The league champion gets half the pot.

Rotisserie League standings are based on team statistics, which are based in turn on the performance (as reported weekly in the tabloid The Sporting News) of the major-league players on each roster. Thjs is the point at which the actual and the mythical—reality and Rotisserie—converge. If in real life Rickey Henderson steals a base for the Oakland A’s, his Rotisserie League counterpart steals one for the Amazons. If Boston’s Bobby Ojeda is relieved with two men on base and the relief pitcher gives up a home run, Bobby Ojeda of the Amazons as well as the other Bobby Ojeda gets charged with two earned runs. If Milwaukee’s Bill Schroeder is bumped from the starting lineup because the firststring catcher, Jim Sundberg, has come off injured reserve, the Amazons’ Bill Schroeder is bumped too, and he makes no contribution, statistically, to the team.

Game after game, from April into October, the statistics are tallied. There are eight categories: total number of team home runs, total runs batted in, total stolen bases, composite team batting average, total number of team wins, total saves, composite earned-run average, and team pitching “ratio.” (The ratio is computed by dividing the total number of walks and hits a team gives up by the total number of innings pitched.) Compiling weekly league standings is a chore, even with a computer. For a fee, each league in the RLBA may avail itself of the association’s statistical service.

“Basically, Rotisserie League gives you a completely new perspective on real baseball,” Kelly told me at our breakfast.

“In one way,” London added, “real baseball doesn’t even exist. There were times last year when I knew the statistics of nearly every player in the American League but had no idea what the actual standings were.”

“For us,” Kelly said, ”an inconsequential game in the majors can be of consuming interest. Last September how many people were holding their breath whenever Cleveland played Chicago? Well, we were. We had four Indians and two White Sox on our team. When you see one of your guys, like George Vukovich, coming up to bat against another of your guys, like Floyd Bannister, you have to wonder, What do we want to have happen here? Do we want a home run or a strikeout? Do we want more RBIs or a better ERA?”

“We learned a lot from our first year,” London said. “I’m reluctant to let out all our secrets, but what the hell. We’ve discovered that, statistically, starting pitching is the most overrated commodity in the league. The way this game is skewed, stolen bases are disproportionately important. So are home runs. So are saves. Thanks to Amazons Rickey Henderson and Gary Pettis, who between them had 114 stolen bases, we led the league in that category in 1984. We finished second in home runs. But we were seventh in saves, and we would have been ninth except for Ernie Camacho, whom we got in a midseason trade. That’s why relief pitching is a priority for us. So one thing we have to do this year is put together the nucleus of a good pitching staff. Another thing is, we have to get more players who are regular starters. In this game a guy who hits .300 but has only fifty ‘at bats’ is not all that helpful. His average may be high, but his seasonal output of home runs and RBIs is pretty low.”

“You always have to remember,” London went on, “that while this game depends on what actually happens in major-league baseball, the game itself is still Rotisserie League baseball. The dynamics are different. So you’ve got to develop a Rotisserie baseball mind. In Rotisserie ball you don’t care about the guy’s leadership qualities or his sense of humor or his fielding percentages.”

“You don’t care,” Kelly said, “how avidly an outfielder attacks the wall, except insofar as he may hurt himself doing it and you may have to replace him in the lineup.”

“And as far as pitching goes,” London continued, “Rotisserie baseball is a whole different ball game. You’ve got to worry about the all-important question of ratio, which is a pretty obscure statistic.”

Ratio is a handy gauge of a team’s defensive capabilities. If a team’s ratio is 1.3081, as the Hamilton Burghers’ was in Washington in 1984, then that means the team allowed an average of only 1.3081 walks and hits per inning, which is not bad. (The ratio of the world-champion Detroit Tigers last year was 1.26.) The Burghers, led by Bill Hamilton, a financial writer for The Washington Post, had the best ratio in the Ghost League; when the final stats were compiled, the club was awarded twelve points for its performance in that category. The Mattadors, owned by Matt Potts, of New York City, who does market research for Business Week, received eleven points for having the second-best ratio (1.3105). Kelly and London’s Amazons had the worst ratio of all twelve teams (1.4263) and garnered only one point.

Points are allotted, on the same descending scale, for home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, composite ERA, saves, and the other indices. The team with the most points overall becomes the league champion. Henry’s Youngmen, managed with nervous elan by Neil Henry, claimed that honor last year in Washington, with eighty-one points. Ben Weiser’s Owls were firmly in second place with sixty and a half points. The Amazons finished with fifty-three points, a mere half point behind the Burghers and within two points of both the Tom Toms, owned by Tom Lippman, and the Silver Spring Chickens, owned by Dave Maraniss and his thirteen-year-old son, Andy. Gildea’s Diners, led by Bill Gildea, owned the basement with a scant thirty-four and a half points. Gildea has turned his franchise over to Mike Weisskopf, a Post correspondent recently returned from China. (Gildea, Maraniss, Lippman, Weiser, and Henry also work for the Post, in whose newsroom the Washington Ghost League was founded, in 1984.)

WERE THE LAST-PLACE Diners— now the Peking Ducks—just plain unlucky? Rotisserie baseball is, without question, a game of chance. Much lies beyond anyone’s control. But the owners are by no means passive spectators. To begin with, they are responsible for their choices in the draft. Signing up a team takes special skill, because there are never enough great athletes to go around. Every owner must seek to build “depth” in his team, partly by picking the right mix of average players. What’s more, luck is something that can be prepared for, even invited. In a bold stroke last year Neil Henry paid ten cents in the draft for Kansas City’s Willie Wilson, who had been in jail on a drug conviction and was still under major-league suspension. He could have been out for the season. But no, the suspension was lifted in May, and Wilson went on to hit .301 and steal forty-seven bases, leading Henry’s Youngmen to the pennant. All for a dime.

Once the twenty-three-man roster is selected, moreover, the owners do not just sit on the bench and chew tobacco and wait for October. On certain occasions and in several ways, and almost always in return for small fees paid into the pot, the owners can influence the season’s outcome. Until noon on the Friday following June 15—the actual major-league trading deadline—the owners may consummate trades with other ball clubs. To back up their active rosters they may set up a small farm system consisting of minor-league players selected in a separate Rotisserie League draft. If one of those minor leaguers is promoted to the majors, his Rotisserie League duplicate is eligible to take the field. In stipulated circumstances owners may place an athlete on waivers or release him outright. All of these moves will, of course, influence the final standings.

Keeping abreast of developments in the major leagues is paramount. If a reallife ballplayer is sent down to the minors, placed on the disabled list, or traded to the other league, then the same happens to that player’s Rotisserie League equivalent, and he vanishes from the lineup. His “salary”—the amount paid for him at auction—is credited to the owner. Rotisserie League teams lose players continually. Those players have to be replaced, sometimes from the farm system, more often from the free-agent pool. Because there are strict rules about how many of which kind of ballplayer must play for each club—there can be only one second baseman, for example, and there have to be two catchers, five outfielders, and nine pitchers—a club’s options are often limited. The owners must be on their toes, alert to possible pitfalls and opportunities, ready to scramble for the best players available.

They do so with a consuming intensity. Owners pore over the daily team reports in USA Today. They harass or cajole one another by post and telephone. They make deals. They posture. Exquisitely sensitized, they can detect the merest whiff of a trade. If a rumored transaction between others in the league is not to an owner’s liking, he may try to interfere—to dissuade one of the parties or counter with a deal of his own. During the off-season, owners take a hard look at their lineups. Some use computers to swill the data, test hypotheses, and speculate about what might have been.

For example, what if the Scrubbers’ owner, Mark Potts—Matt’s brother, a Post financial reporter and the Ghost League statistician—had not traded ace pitcher Dave Steib, over the vocal objections of everyone, to Ben Weiser’s Owls? The Potts Scrubbers, it seems, would have finished in third place and the Weiser Owls in tenth, instead of the Owls in second and the Scrubbers in eleventh. In Rotisserie baseball one player can make all the difference. That is why, when spring training begins, Ghost League owners try to get to Florida or Arizona to check up on their boys. Has Roy Smalley gotten his weight down? How is Don Aase’s elbow this year? Did the rookie first baseman Fred McGriff, already six-foot-three, really grow another inch during the off-season? Such information can prove vital.

“Eternal vigilance is the key,”according to Kelly, who monitors ball games via short-wave radio and calls SportsPhone about seven times a day. “You’ve just got to be on top of this stuff. A couple of days can sometimes make a real difference.”

“For example,” London told me, “our first pick in the minor-league draft in 1984 was Roger Clemens, who’s this fabulous pitcher the Red Sox had on their number-one farm team. Our mistake was, when Boston brought him up from Pawtucket we activated him right away. The guy was a rookie. We should have put him on the roster but kept him in our farm system for a few weeks, let the real Clemens get used to pitching in the big leagues. As it was, Clemens had a rocky outing at the beginning of the season and it hurt our composite ERA. If only we’d waited a week.”

“In the end our ERA was off by only .002,” Kelly said. “If it had been .002 lower we would have jumped up a notch and been in the money.”

“Another mistake was, after September 1 you’re allowed to expand your roster by one player,” London said. “And we asked another owner if he thought we should call someone up. He said, Nah, it wasn’t that important. And we listened to him. Well, if we had called someone up we probably would have gotten two more RBIs. Two more RBIs and we would have moved up a point there and been in fourth place overall and in the money. You know what two RBIs is? Two RBIs . . .” Off-season adjustments in the major leagues, meanwhile, generally favored the Amazons. Rickey Henderson was traded by Oakland but remained in the American League and therefore on the Amazons’ roster. Owing to trades and injuries, more of the Amazons’ better offensive players are on the starting lineups in their real-life clubs, promising gains in the home-run and RBI columns. With Detroit’s third baseman Howard Johnson gone to the Mets, his former teammate Barbaro Garbey may see more playing time for Detroit—and thus for the Amazons, as well. Amazon Bill Schroeder was set to be starting catcher for the Brewers (replacing Jim Sundberg, who was traded to the Royals). There were some breaks in the bullpen and on the mound, too. For example, because Oriole Tippy Martinez had arm trouble, Don Aase (with seven saves last year during a brief, late-season stint as an Amazon) emerged as the Birds’ chief relief pitcher. And an operation on Milt Wilcox’s arm put Amazon Juan Berenguer in Detroit’s starting rotation, at least temporarily.

“Two RBIs,” Kelly said, “is a guy who could have gotten hit in the helmet, you know, with the bases loaded, and the ball goes away. And we would have been up there.”

“There were trades that went sour too,” London said. “We had one deal where in return for Willie Hernandez and Pete O’Brien, the Youngmen were going to get Barbaro Garbey and a starting pitcher of Neil Henry’s choice— maybe Steve McCarty, maybe Pommy John, maybe Larry Gura. And Neil Henry said, ‘Okay, let me sleep on it.’ And somebody got to him.”

“You can always detect the hand of Weiser.”

“Let’s just say somebody,” London said.

“Somebody,” Kelly agreed. “But we would have won the pennant.”

“Yeah, with Hernandez we would have won the pennant.”

THE AMAZONS’ OWNERS were not idle during the off-season. Rotisserie League teams are allowed to keep only fifteen players from one season to the next. Kelly and London retained even fewer, pruning deadwood and overpriced talent. Half of the pitching staff was either cut or traded; the hurlers who remained—Clemens, Juan Berenguer, Camacho, Aase, and Ojeda—represented a seemingly solid core. Teddy Simmons, Tim Hulett, Rob Wilfong, and Mike Hargrove, disappointments at the plate, were all let go, and Dave Stegman was sent down to the minors. (Shortstop Roy Smalley, after a poor showing in 1984, won a reprieve because he lost nine pounds, went to speed school, and was traded back to Minnesota, where he can play in a hitters’ ballpark.) Kelly and London also made two key off-season trades, adding Yankee catcher Butch Wynegar (.267 at the plate last year) and pitcher Jack Morris, a nineteen-game winner for Detroit. On the eve of the 1985 draft the Amazons were still in need of some middling, one-dimensional talent: a couple of decent relief pitchers; one more guy who could get from first to second before the throw from the plate; a fellow who could hit the ball into the stands from time to time.

All in all, the owners of the Amazons were optimistic about 1985 the morning we met.

“We’re in the money,” London predicted. “There’s no doubt. All we need is for people to hold true to form. And, you know, players don’t vary that much from the year before.”

“Except for everybody on our team last year,” Kelly said.

“Well, that’s true,” London conceded. “It’s an ironbound rule, except for everybody on our team last year.”

“But we’re feeling very strong.”

“Yeah, we are.”

That assessment was not unanimous in the Washington Ghost League when spring training got under way. The Scrubbers’ owner, Mark Potts, in a teamby-team analysis circulated among club owners, had this to say about the Amazons’ 1985 prospects: “Shudder. Strictly a rebuilding situation. ... It is said around the League that the best thing they could do is emulate the Oakland A’s and trade Rickey Henderson for a bunch of cheap talent to fill some of the holes.” This the Amazons will never do.

Other owners offered these insights. Neil Henry, the owner of the leaguechampion Youngmen, said: “The Amazons have a good team, but they need relief pitchers, which means they have to deal with me, because I’ve got five strong relievers. But so far I haven’t heard from them.” Ben Weiser, the owner of last year’s number-two club, said: “I keep hearing Kelly and London say they’re going to be in the money. The only thing they’re going to be in is debt. If the Amazons play as consistently as they have been managed, then I’m not worried.” Dave Maraniss, the co-owner of the number-three team in 1984, said: “The Amazons have good balance, good starters, and good power, and they’ve got some speed, but they won’t win the pennant. I think of London, in particular, as the evil empire. In this league, only nice guys win the pennant.”

London said: “The way I heard it, nice guys finish last.”

—Cullen Murphy