On the Field

The game is easy: throw the ball, hit the ball, catch the ball. The difficulty lies in execution. Baseball is, after all, a sport played by men with human flaws and frailties, subject to the ebbs and flows of life.

Spring training traditionally breeds speculation. Teams are analyzed and scrutinized based on previous years’ performances. Prognosticators anoint their would-be champions, favoring those squads that look best on paper. The problem, as traditionalists will tell you, is that the game is not played on paper – victors are determined on fields of dirt and grass.

The human element of baseball comes to mind due to last week’s release of Moneyball, the Brad Pitt vehicle directed by Bennett Miller, of Capote fame. Based on an excellent 2003 book of the same title by acclaimed author Michael Lewis (whose take on the 2008 financial crisis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, appeared on bestsellers lists for several months), Moneyball relates the story of Billy Beane, long-time General Manager of the Oakland A’s, who successfully competed with large market teams during the early part of the new millennium by abandoning traditional scouting techniques and focusing almost entirely on statistical analysis.

Beane’s innovative twenty-first century approach, adopted by other small market teams in subsequent years, revolutionized a sport that, despite its glorification of records and numbers, had been reluctant to abandon the “gut check” method of scouting and player development. While the Yankees and Red Sox lured high profile athletes with big money and the promise of media exposure, Beane focused on less heralded college athletes who did not necessarily possess the traditional tools of the sport (such as power and speed), but who reached base often enough to earn high spots on the A’s unorthodox list of prospects.

The problem with Moneyball is that its principal premise is somewhat dated. After turning down an offer from the large market Red Sox to assume management of its front office (electing instead to remain in northern California, close to his daughter from an earlier marriage), Beane’s baseball success came to a halt. After trading away key players inherited from his predecessor with the A’s, Sandy Alderson (now General Manager of the large market New York Mets), Beane’s teams simply stopped winning. This unfortunate epilogue is conveniently omitted from the Hollywood version of the Billy Beane story.

The eventual dilution of Beane’s success is not surprising because, despite his efforts to prove otherwise, numbers in baseball do not tell the whole story. Quite often, the difference between winning and losing is a hard slide into second base to break up a double play, or hitting the cutoff man to keep the tying run from reaching scoring position – acts which take place on the field and can not be quantified or easily inserted into statistical columns. That is where execution and the human element assume paramount importance.

While the average fan may view baseball players as commodities to be preserved or discarded, depending on the needs of fantasy teams, the product which Beane puts on the field is a matchup of men against men. Beane’s men in recent years have lacked the skill of their opponents. Not surprisingly, the Oakland A’s have not fielded a winning squad since 2006.

This does not mean that Beane, a charismatic personality whose popularity will certainly be enhanced by his association with Brad Pitt, has failed. On the contrary, he will always be remembered as an innovator in a sport that has historically abhorred change – how else could one explain the sport’s refusal to accept black major leaguers until 1947?

Too much emphasis is placed on the off-field impact of men like Beane, whose success will always be measured by what takes place on the field. Players – not owners, managers or general managers – win games. The true role of back-stage players such as Beane is to select athletes, put them on the field, and let them do their thing – while trying to maintain a safe enough distance to avoid mucking things up.

Summer of '83

It was short commute, thirty minutes door-to-door. I hopped the A-train at 42^nd Street and emerged at Chambers Street to join a sea of grey and blue flowing in waves towards the city’s financial, business and legal centers.

One Hogan Plaza housed the offices of Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney for New York County since 1975. It was the summer after my first year of law school and I had been hired as an intern by Morgenthau’s office, a position that paid little but offered opportunities to delve into the law and observe trials. This was my first job within my chosen profession, and would help shape later decisions in my career.

I had been assigned to “Rackets,” a division housed by young, ambitious and idealistic professionals with the unenviable task of attempting to control the city’s organized crime. I was one of three interns with the Division. The others were Lisa, a pretty first-year student from St. John’s who, for some reason, spoke with a British accent despite her Brooklyn upbringing, and Jerry, a second-year student from Brooklyn Law, whose father was a judge in a civil division. We worked together in a common area, researching legal issues and helping the ADA’s prepare for hearings and trials.

“Rackets” was an elite division within the D.A.’s office. Most divisions were trial-oriented, its attorneys assigned to particular judges. ADA’s in trial divisions had virtually no down time; they moved from one trial to the next, with little time to prepare, relying on secretaries and interns to fill in gaps. “Rackets” was different. Trials were few, and preparation abundant. The ADA’s worked with investigators to prepare their cases and only filed charges when cases were ready.

Investigations often involved field work, and one of the highlights of my summer was a visit with an ADA to a temporary surveillance center in the basement of a building across the street from a target, a seller of furs suspected of trading in stolen merchandise. The center was everything that I imagined: televisions screens depicting activity inside the target’s store, detectives watching the screens and listening over earphones to selected conversation, with audio and video recorded for further analysis. I would later spend time reading through transcripts of audio recordings, highlighting those portions that would help make the case.

Because trials in “Rackets” were scarce, I was given the chance to observe trials in other divisions. I selected a second-degree murder case involving guns, drugs and adultery. The trial lasted three days and the jury deliberated less than two hours before returning a guilty verdict. Later that day, as I related my experience to one of the senior members of “Rackets,” he smiled and nodded. “Convicting the guilty is simple,” he said. “Only the great ones convict the innocent.”

When I think back over my career, I can attribute my decision to become a litigator to my experience that summer. I pictured myself standing before the court, putting on evidence, cross-examining witnesses. I imagined the adrenaline, the rush that every litigator experiences when a trial begins, and I knew that is what I wanted.

I told this to Jerry, my fellow intern, over lunch one day. Jerry was an expert on the local cuisine, having learned of the best places from his father, who presided in a nearby courthouse. We ate that day at what Jerry referred to as “the Chinese McDonald’s,” a small basement restaurant on Mott Street decorated with police photographs and memorabilia. It was a favored destination of the NYPD and featured the best Sesame Noodles in the city. Jerry and I spoke of our experiences, our goals and ambitions, all-the-while dining on Chinatown’s best.

After lunch we took a shortcut through a small alley to Baxter Street and walked south towards One Hogan Plaza. As we approached our building the crowds suddenly appeared, men and women in suits, walking briskly in every direction, heading back to their offices while lost in thought. The revolving doors to our building offered refuge from the waves, thousands of people pondering life, love, and future, lost in a dance of perpetual motion in the shadows of the World Trade Center.