The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

People have asked for more on the process of getting the book published, so that’s what I’m doing today. The tale of that photo in the upper-right, and what ended up in the book, is funny and offers the opportunity to mock me, which is always good. Keep in mind these are all almost thumbnail, heavily compressed versions of the actual photos, and look even worse than the originals.

Usually, the publisher has someone local they work with. Not in Seattle, though, so for the advance copies and the Houghton-Mifflin catalog, they hit me up for any kind of decent photo. As a result, these feature a headshot of me, taken by my wife when we were in Trafalgar Square.

That works. For a photo to go into the book and so forth, my brother, who’s a fine photographer, took a couple shots while he was up here for a weekend.

I’d hoped I’d get a subtle plug in for a chunk of my book collection*.

There’s the mug-shot style

I’ll spare you the side view. We also did a three-ball monte thing.

and

That second one’s taken on a baseball diamond at home plate, for veracity’s sake.

The publisher didn’t like those, and wanted something more like a traditional headshot. And, because it was publishing, I didn’t hear back on that first batch for a while and ended up needing to produce a suitable set within days. I’ll talk about that whole part of the publishing experience later. I went to the guy who did a frankly awesome job on my wedding. I discovered that my really short hair shows a lot of scalp under studio lighting, but I didn’t have time to grow it out. Also, uh, my face is… anyway. We submitted four photos:

“I’m extremely difficult to photograph for a variety of embarrassing reasons”

Then there’s the friendly, “Do you like my book?”

The “I’m Bill Simmons’ long-lost younger, Germanic brother from a different mother”:

And the one I’ve got in my blogger profile:

I would bet you can guess which of those four the publisher decided was clearly the best, and will be on the back cover of the book.

*Top Shelf: Cobb, a biography, The New Biographical History of Baseball, The Worst Baseball Pitchers of All Time, Me and the Spitter, Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Baseball and Billions, The Hidden Language of Baseball, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Lineups, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Blunders, Baseball Dynasties, Baseball Signs and Plays, Saving the Pitcher, Baseball Between the Numbers, McGraw of the Giants, The Rules and Lore of Baseball, Curve Ball, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, Out of Left Field, Triumph and Tragedy, Spitters, Beanballs, and the Incredible Shrinking Strike Zone, 9 Innings, A Mencken Chrestomathy, the New Complete Joy of Home Brewing, the Thin Man, Houdini on Magic, The Big Knockover. Head shelf: Total Baseball, BP99-06, Ball Four (on top: Pool and Billiards), my head, Forging Genius, Weaver on Strategy, Wild, High, and Tight, Paths to Glory, Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers, Juicing the Game, Eight Men Out, Cap Anson 2 & 3, This Ain’t Brain Surgery (on top: ???, Green Cathedrals, Bringing Down the House). Bottom Shelf: The Baseball Encyclopedia, The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball, Moneyball, Dollar Sign on the Muscle, Game of Shadows, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, Baseball, Lords of the Realm, The Last Yankee, Tough Calls, How LIfe Imitates the World Series, Baseball: the Writer’s Game, A Great and Glorious Game, You Gotta Have Wa, The Glory of Their Times, How Con Games Work, Caro’s Book of Poker Tells, Winner’s Guide to Texas Hold ‘em, The Theory of Poker, Winning Low Limit Hold ‘em, Super System, Harrington on Hold ‘em vol. 2, Play Poker Like the Pros, (Lederer’s book?), Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players, Harrington on Hold ‘em vol. 1 (on top: Brew Chem 101, The Odds, The Big Sleep, Fortune’s Formula, The Intuitionist, Hold ‘em Poker, two Raymond Chandlers.

The worst part about writing the book was cutting it down. Early drafts were much, much longer than the final product, and even the final cut came down to my editor saying “I like this long chunk too much to cut, let’s go for it”.

This meant that a lot of fun stuff was left out, and I want to share those here in the hopes that you’ll like them enough to buy the book, which has the cream of the crop. (Pre-order now!)

The other problem, which I’m also going to try and address here, is there are many great cheating stories that I couldn’t find enough evidence for to include in the book, and I want to share those, too, and talk about how far I got if I researched them, and why they were left out, and how plausible they are.

The Story of Dick Williams and the Movable Second Base
Supposedly when he was leaving the Angels in 1976, he went out to one of the grounds crew and said “I don’t recognize you, are you new?” The guy said “Kind of, I’ve been around for a while (seasons/years).” And Williams said “Well, you can put second base back where it’s supposed to be, I had them move it two feet closer to first when I got here.”

Did Williams move the bases and, if so, how big of a difference would that have made?

Let me take the last one first. Two feet off a 90′ distance is significant – it’s a 2% reduction in distance, and that would indeed make it easier to swipe.

Say that it takes a player four seconds to go from his lead into second. Moving the base two feet closer reduces that to 3.9 seconds. That’s huge – teams time pitchers and catchers in order to determine how long their delivery time home and their time from catch to throw arrival at second is, and then knowing the speed of the runner, can make decisions on whether to send them. A consistent tenth of a second advantage sounds tiny, but in execution it could be huge. If one side knew and the other didn’t, that’d be a big advantage.

Did the Angels steal more? In 1973, they stole 59 bases (and were caught stealing 47 times), and only Sandy Alomar was any kind of threat on the basepaths. In 1974, Williams came in and managed the team for 84 games, and they stole 119 (and were caught another 79 times). 106 attempts went up to 198, but their success rate wasn’t great. In 1975, Williams’ first full season, we’d expect to see them steal like crazy, and they did – 220 stolen bases, 108 caught stealing (328 attempts!). 1976, he’s fired ninety games into the season, and they stole 126 and were caught 80 times. 1977, his first year gone, it’s 159-86.

1973 (no Williams) – 106 attempts, 56% success
1974 (half-season) – 198 attempts, 60% success
1975 (full season) – 328 attempts, 67% success
1976 (half-season) – 206 attempts, 60% success

Unfortunately, personell turnover makes this tough. Sandy Alomar was the team’s only real stolen base threat in 1973, but hardly played for them in 1974. Morris Nettles stole 20 bases in 1974 and 1975 but was gone in 1976.

Look at a player like Jerry Remy, a guy with speed. You’d expect that the team would make maximum use of their advantage by having their fast players attempt steals more often. But Remy’s attempts aren’t unusual in 75/76 compared with later years when Williams is gone.

The counterexample here is Mickey Rivers, who started to steal a lot more when Williams came to the Angels, peaking with 70 SB and 14 CS in 1975, and after 1976, post-Williams, throttling back significantly. Leroy Stanton’s the same way.

And that jump in success is interesting. I’d say statistically, this is plausible.

However, in practice, the chances he pulled this off take a hit.

First, moving second towards first seems to require that you move 3rd base towards home, too, creating a rectangle:

+-----+
|     |
+-----+

Where first-to-second and third-to-home are 88′ and home-to-first and second-to-third remain 90′. Otherwise, you could look straight over from second and third base would be off the line. But in total, it’s not that huge of an area reduction that it’d be obvious – 7,920 sq ft in the shaved version, 8,100 in the other. That’s enough that you probably wouldn’t notice it if you were looking at the whole diamond.

But what if you had an on-the-field view that would be particularly well-suited for this? For parts of three seasons, opposing catchers looked straight past the mound, a viewpoint they’d have grown used to over years and years, thousands of games, and seen that second base didn’t lineup directly behind the pitcher’s mound.

Catcher ----> mound ----> second base
        ~64'         ~64'

Two feet’s not going to line up from behind home plate. They could see, for instance, that instead of being about in the middle of the rubber, it was off towards the right.

But how much? I broke out the geometry and figured that it’s under a degree difference. Here’s the thing, though – the whole pitching rubber takes up about two degrees of their vision. So where second base is usually exactly in the center of the rubber as they look out, a two foot move means it jumps all the way to one side. I think they’d catch that. And catchers, as a lot, because they’re often enlisted in cheating, do tend to have a good sense for this kind of thing.

I was also unable to find any anecdotal evidence, in papers or biographies, for this story. However, I did hear it fairly late in the process, so it’s not like Tommy John’s ball-scuffing, where I could really go to town on it.

To sum up, then –
Could it have happened? It’s possible
Is it likely to have gone unnoticed for that long? I don’t think so

The news of the week is that there looks like there is, at least, a reliable test for HGH use. I wrote in the book:

Many players who used steroids have moved to hGH. While it doesn’t help building the massive muscle bulk that anabolic steroids do, it has many of the beneficial effects players, especially older ones, generally look to steroids for. It’s not that hard to get, though it can be quite expensive. Most importantly, while hGH is banned, there’s no proven test for it right now. If a test can be proven reliable, the players will almost certainly have to sign up for blood draws, which would have to go through the collective bargaining process, and while players as a whole were willing to concede to urine tests in order to help their sport, getting them to take regular blood tests could be another matter entirely.

Can I just say thanks for coming out with this news while the book’s at the printer? Great timing.

This test is a blood test, as everyone suspected would be the case, so there’s that barrier, but the short time window is an even larger problem. Players aren’t going to agree to a blood draw every three days.

The good news, from a detection standpoint, is that random tests in-season should still catch users. A normal dosage schedule of HGH for people taking it for general anti-aging purposes is an injected dose 4-5 times a week. We can figure that’s the minimum an athlete using the stuff is taking. The chance they’ll be on a course of HGH and dodge a test is pretty slim.

If baseball implements any kind of testing, the effect will be huge. As you probably know, in the Grimsley Incident, we heard that athletes who previously used steroids moved to HGH to get many of the same benefits (and without some of the more horrible side effects). If HGH is on the same punishment schedule, with a 30-day suspension for first detection, it’s unlikely players will take that chance, and we’ll see a mass abandonment of HGH. Considering that HGH was there waiting, undetectable, with open arms for players who were on steroids before, there’s a quite real chance that we’ll see the kind of performance crash that people thought would happen in the first year of penalty-phase testing for anabolic steroids.

But if we get random testing, and players abandon, what happens then? I’ll write more about the future of the arms race, but we know they’re not all going to stop using performance-enhancing drugs if they’re forced to give up any one.