"Or," he says, "I might write a program for [Mets pitcher] Ron Darling, showing him the probability of a batter getting on base against him when his first pitch is a ball. Then I can show him similar numbers when the count runs to 2-0. Or when it's 01, or 0-2. That's where numbers are useful, and what the computer can do so well. If you can't apply the technology to your people, though, you'll only produce chaos and confusion. And you have to be consistent. In any management job, it's how you relate to what you're trying to accomplish, and I don't need the computer to explain my actions. I also don't need the computer to be a good baseball manager."
Darling, a former Yale University student, concurs. "Ever since I got up here [the majors], people have been telling me I think too much. That I should just pitch. So I don't pay much attention to Dave's computer. He's a good baseball man, the players like playing for him, and if the computer helps him, fine. I have to get Mike Schmidt out."
The question of PCs in the dugout and other revolutions in the grand old pastime have haunted a number of outside baseball experts ever since the great Oakland Experiment of '82. Bill James, the guru of armchair statisticians, suggests that a terminal by the bat rack would diminish the game's fan appeal by interposing a piece of alien hardware between the nuance of field strategy and the guy in the bleachers with his beer and his scorecard.
James, author of The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1984, adds, "I don't care how much you love that damn computer, it's still ballplayers who win ballgames for you. And in a business sense, baseball's practices haven't advanced all that much anyway. It amazes me how many professional teams exhibit no judgment whatsoever when it comes to evaluating their onfield talent. There's nothing you can feed into a computer, for instance, that will prove to you that [Boston Red Sox first baseman] Dave Stapleton doesn't know how to play big-league baseball, but he doesn't. That's an organizational problem, not a data-processing problem."
Frank Cashen stared down from the pressbox at the ballfield below. All seemed serenity and order. The Mets had the early lead on Montreal, I-0, and out on the mound one of his young pitching aces, Dwight Gooden, was blowing away Les Expos with a slingshot fastball and a kneelocking curve. Cashen, an affable emissary from a distant baseball generation, talked about modern times.
"When Davey played for us at Baltimore," he said, "he used to come into my office with a bunch of computer printouts to negotiate his salary. I had no idea what he was talking about. You have to understand that in those days anyone who even knew what a computer was thought it was this cumbersome thing that took up a whole room in a factory somewhere. Now fourth graders know more about these machines than some of the kids coming out of college. That's bound to have an effect on those of us who've been around the game a long time and are considerably behind in technology."
He paused as Pete Rose measured a Gooden heater and drove it off the pitcher's shinbone for a sharp single to right. Tying run aboard.
"Probably the biggest advance we're seeing now," he continued, "is in how we get our scouting reports. These things are still very subjective, but when you have to keep track of literally thousands of ballplayers at both the professional and the amateur level -- when 26 teams are drafting 40 deep each -- being able to instantly pull, say, the name of every left-handed college pitcher and his stats is enormously useful. If you keep all that information on file cards and lose a card, you've effectively losta player."
Andre Dawson took a strike at the knees as Rose danced off first.
"I was talking to Bill Stoneman, the assistant to the president of the Expos, just today. Stoneman was a pitcher who went into banking and learned a lot about data processing. He thinks, and I agree with him, that a lot of computer work will soon be focused on player arbitration and salaries, and that will have an impact, too."
Ball two to Dawson, a dangerous hitter when ahead of the count.
"What I really want to do," Cashen sighed, "is take six months off and study computers myself. Because otherwise I'm headed into the next century not really understanding a lot of the things that are going on at the present time. I marvel at what Davey does, but I marvel at what some of these young players are capable of doing, too."
Dawson, no longer a youngster himself, caught a letter-high Gooden fastball and drove it over the right-field wall, somewhere in the general direction of the Queens Botanical Gardens. Cashen blanched.
"Not the high fastball," he moaned. "Not to Dawson." Somewhere several floors below him was a database that no doubt agreed.
