Harry O'Shaughnessey, a Mets vicepresident, says, "We're recording data more at the box-score level for now; we're not looking for a system we can take into the dugout with us." To which Johnson adds, "At one point yes you'll see a terminal in the dugout, because nobody's memory's perfect, and there are times in a game when I'll want to go back [to my office] and study something. But that day is a long way off. I don't even take the machine on the road with me. I have to do my studying of printouts before and after ballgames."
While the Mets' field general may occasionally leave his own players wondering what he is up to, there is no mystery to his own fascination with the computer and its power to ingest and refine data. Johnson, surely the first manager in big-league history to grace the cover of his team's media guide sitting at a PC screen instead of berating an umpire, took an introductory computer course about 18 years ago and has expanded his studies ever since. A feisty second baseman with a college background in math and probability theory, he tutored under Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, baseball's contemporary Einstein of statistics and platooning, and wrote his first baseball program for Weaver. Called "The Optimization of the Orioles Lineup," the program challenged Weaver's assumptions about batting-order run production and recommended, inter alia, that Johnson himself bat second rather than sixth. (Earl smiled, and threw the report in the trash can.) Once his playing days were over, Johnson eventually took over a pair of Mets' farm teams and managed them to two pennants -- helped by a software program of his own design. Finally, after a dismal sixth-place showing in 1983, the Mets promoted him to the parent club, and Johnson convinced them to let him bring along his computer, too.
"We'd already been approached by a number of companies marketing sports-related software programs," says general manager Frank Cashen, "but to be quite honest with you, we weren't too interested. What most of these companies are trying to sell is really software programming they've designed themselves, not something that's tailored in detail for any individual team."
"The key thing," adds O'Shaughnessey, "is that the data produced by most of these programs is not worth much unless you have a manager with both the knowledge and the desire to use it. We didn't hire Davey because he knew computers. We hired him because he knows baseball. But we were receptive to his using [a computer] if he worked out the system himself."
Both Cashen and O'Shaughnessey cite the lesson of the Oakland A's, a team that embraced the data-feed principle with such fervor that they had a microcomputer in the pressbox recording every pitch and every result, home or away, during the 1983 season. The A's junked the system and went back to cruder hand charts after a year, however. In curtailing their effort, Oakland blamed both operational costs and the difficulty of obtaining pertinent data on rival teams. Some of the Oakland players, however, had also brayed loudly about the spectre of impersonal hardware dictating highly subjective field decisions. The anxiety level seems lower in cities like Chicago (the White Sox) and Seattle, where PC programming is also in use, and no factor at all for franchises like Atlanta and Toronto, where the first move -- just this year -- has been to computerize minorleague scouting reports and other playerdevelopment data for draft-session expediency. But the Mets knew, as Johnson knew, that the presence of a PC in the manager's office was a potent symbol. Johnson knew because he grew up, like his star pinch-hitter, in another baseball era.
"Baseball people were shocked when I set the single season record for most home runs [43] by a second baseman, back in '73 with the Braves," Johnson says from the dugout bench as he watches his team take infield practice one June afternoon. "But nobody had really studied my history. They'd changed my hitting stroke in Baltimore to make me more of an opposite field hitter, but when I went back to my old aggressive style, I began to hit home runs. One season, I had 15 at the All-Star break, before I got hurt. If you look at what I did after that, and what I did when I played in Japan, it wasn't really surprising atall."
Johnson sends a stream of tobacco juice between his cleats. Players are still meandering out to the batting cage from the clubhouse, down the long corridor and past the door to Johnson's office, through which are visible both the PC and a plethora of charts with titles like "Best Way to Get Batter Out" and "Best Way to Get GroundBalls."
"You talk to the old school of baseball men about computers," he continues, "and you're talking in an area that's really foreign to them. They know that so-and-so hits so-and-so, or that this guy's a high fastball pitcher and this guy's a low breaking-ball hitter. What they don't know is that you can be much more finite than that. You can compute, say, the probability of scoring X amount of runs against Steve Carlton over 5 starts, or 50 starts, using one lineup, and then see how you can score an average of 35 more with another. Thirty-five extra runs against Steve Carlton, even spread out over a couple of years, can win you a pennant.
