Pitching, not Moneyball, leads to championships

Phillies pitcher Vance Worley is having a fantastic season. He’s 9-1 with a 2.65 ERA, 83 strikeouts and a 1.12 WHIP in 16 starts, and his team has won the last 12 games he’s pitched in, making him the first rookie to accomplish such a feat since Bobby Witt did it in 1986. And what makes Worley’s numbers all the more impressive is that he is easily the worst pitcher in the Phillies’ rotation.

Hence why the Phillies have an 83-44 record, 5.5 games games better than the Red Sox and Yankees for the best record in baseball. For all the mystique of baseball and the allure of 450-foot bombs like the one Brandon Allen hit at Yankee Stadium the other night, the game continues to be dominated by pitching. The Phillies lineup isn’t miserable by any stretch of the imagination. But they’ve succeeded with Chase Utley missing the first month of year, Shane Victorino absent between injuries and suspensions, Ryan Howard batting 22 points under his career average, Roy Oswalt threatening to retire because of the severity of a back injury, and closer Brad Lidge missing the first half of the year, not to mention Jimmy Rollins’ DL trip within the last matter of days and that prior to acquiring Hunter Pence, Ben Francisco and Domonic Brown were expected to be the team’s everyday right fielders.

This is not a team that’s benefited from a great amount fortune or consistency. Four different players have been used to close games. Joe Blanton, who began the year as the team’s No. 5 batter, hasn’t pitched since May and is likely out for the year. Raul Ibanez is currently out of the lineup with a groin injury, Howard has sat out a pair of games in the last week with a hand injury, and Jose Contreras, who began the year as the interim closer, will soon undergo season-ending surgery. For a team so dominant in the standings, they’re surprisingly average offensively, even with the name power that comes with Howard and Utley and Rollins. They’re fifth in the National League in runs scored, seventh in home runs, fifth in RBI, eighth in average and seventh in slugging.

So why are they in first place? Because the top three guys in their rotation may be best trio of pitchers we’ve seen in decades. Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels all have a realistic chance of finishing in the top five of Cy Young voting. They’re first in the NL in ERA, first in shutouts, first in quality starts, first in WHIP, last in walks, third in strikeouts and third in opponents’ batting average, and their 15 complete games are more than the Giants, Dodgers, Brewers and Braves have combined. That’s why even with the rest of the team in flux, they will easily be the prohibitive favorites heading into the playoffs. It’s why last year’s Giants, despite an atrocious offense, was able to win a world championship.

And yet that narrative doesn’t seem nearly as prevalent as it should. This is the age of Sabermetrics, the idea that all conventional wisdom can be refined and redefined by statistics, and with it, a certain romance that success can be achieved through numerical shortcuts, even without big boppers like Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder. After all, isn’t that why Moneyball, the flick about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, got made in the first place? No one would ever make a movie about a front office baseball executive, let alone having Brad Pitt of all people portray him, if he came by success conventionally. It’s that he did it without much of a budget, without very many resources, that makes Beane the subject of the biggest sports movie of the year.

However, Beane’s celebrations are misplaced. Moneyball wants to paint him as an innovator, that some of his tactics, like moving catcher Scott Hatteberg to first base and focusing more on runs and on-base percentage than batting average and RBI, was the decisive factor that made some of his teams competitive. It wasn’t. As always, pitching was the reason the A’s of the early 2000’s won three division titles in four years. They won because they had Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, three pitchers who all won 20 games in different seasons in Oakland. Their winning had little to do with the minutiae of Beane’s new-age philosophy, and everything to do with having a good pitching staff, to which Beane deserves only marginal credit. Hudson was already in the A’s farm system by the time Beane became the team’s GM, and Mulder and Zito were available to draft because the A’s were already bad enough to have high drafts pick -- not because of Beane’s ingenuity.

That’s not to say that he doesn’t deserve some credit, because he did get them into the playoffs awhile back with limited resources. But if he should be praised, he should be praised for giving the A’s good pitching, and criticized in recent years for his inability to replenish the rotation. What he thought of Scott Hatteberg’s on-base percentage was utterly inconsequential in the long run. The San Francisco Giants just won a World Series with nothing but Scott Hatteberg’s in the lineup. Last year’s Giants’ team had just one .300 hitter, one hitter with 100 runs, one hitter more than 10 steals and not a single hitter with more than 86 RBI. There wasn’t any secret to their lineup, other than that their pitching was so good that they won in spite of it. It’s easy to look at the A’s past success and attribute it to Beane’s strategies, but the bottom line is that virtually any lineup could have succeeded with Zito, Hudson and Mulder behind them, and that none of Beane’s teams have succeeded since they left.