The Yankee Years Part 10

Just how bad was Weaver? There have been 188 pitchers who threw at least 200 innings in their careers with the Yankees. Weaver pitched the worst of all of them, posting a 5.35 ERA. Weaver was another reminder of the challenge of doing business in New York. Because of the expectations and scrutiny in New York, the Yankees face a longer checklist of evaluative items on a player than do other teams before pulling the trigger on a signing or trade. They must ask not just "Can he play?" but also "Can he play in New York?" The years following the 2001 World Series would be littered with expensive mistakes of exactly that kind like Weaver.

"I was more like a deer in the headlights when I got there because I really wasn't sure," Giambi said. "In Oakland, I was that leader, that guy. But all of a sudden you walk into a room with guys with just as many years in the big leagues as you do. In the beginning I was just more getting acclimated to trying to fit everything in. You realize after a while there are just so many people who need so many things, especially when you're the new kid on the block, the fresh story. Because before you know it you can find yourself saying, 'Oh, I've got a game to play now?' It happened.

"There are so many newspapers and they're all trying to vie for the same reader and they all have to have something different. They have to ask you different questions. That's where you learn how to fit in. Give people what they need or change your story a little bit or give them a little bit different quote and try to take care of them.

"I don't think it was bad, it was more like, 'I've got to get this under control.' The Yankees are the ultimate place to play if you're a player because it's all you can ask for. You have fans that are fanatical. You have your media. You're a traveling rock show. The Yankees are a traveling rock band."

Not everyone was made for the stage. The 2002 Yankees, and those teams that followed, found themselves playing under tremendous pressure. No longer was it just the pressure of New York, but now it also was the pressure of trying to re-create the success of the Old Guard Yankees-and without that indomitable will that those men uniquely shared.

"With Paulie's retirement that kind of changed the core," Mike Mussina said. "You're asking about a leader, and I don't think it was a a guy. It was a group. It was like six or seven guys who kind of worked together as a committee, not necessarily one guy. guy. It was a group. It was like six or seven guys who kind of worked together as a committee, not necessarily one guy.

"It was just about winning the game that day, whatever they had to do. They could be 0-for-4 in the eleventh inning but fight their way for a walk. Whatever that small thing it took, that's how that group of guys played the game. You start losing guys who have been involved in most of the championships, that's big. It's hard to keep the same feeling when it's not the same people."

Without the Old Guard core, or at least their playing values, the Yankees could never again live up to that mandate. And forced to find suitable replacements for those players, many of whom were homegrown, the Yankees did not run a productive enough farm system to sustain that culture. And when they needed to look outside the organization for those replacements, they found a changed landscape in baseball from when Watson, Michael, Torre and Steinbrenner reengineered the 1995 Yankees into champions.

Informational and economic revolutions were percolating around baseball. When the Yankees were winning championships, the teams they were competing against in the American League East were being run by men with mostly traditional scouting backgrounds who would never again run another team: Gord Ash in Toronto, Dan Duquette in Boston, Syd Thrift in Baltimore and Chuck LaMar in Tampa Bay. Most people in baseball, in fact, were just like them, running teams in dowdy, old-school ways that were made largely ineffective by the Yankees' growing edge in resources. In the new century in places such as Oakland, Cleveland and Boston, young minds were studying and understanding baseball in new, cost-effective ways. They knew they could not outspend the Yankees. The answer was to outsmart them. It wasn't until the 2003 publication of the bestseller Moneyball, Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, which laid bare how Oakland general manager Billy Beane built winning teams on the cheap by exploiting "market inefficiencies," that the Yankees and other teams in baseball understood the gains in research and development that were happening in the labs of these cutting-edge teams. by Michael Lewis, which laid bare how Oakland general manager Billy Beane built winning teams on the cheap by exploiting "market inefficiencies," that the Yankees and other teams in baseball understood the gains in research and development that were happening in the labs of these cutting-edge teams.

"There has to be a certain point that the game gets elevated," Mussina said. "I think Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in the NBA made everybody else have to be better. The league had to get better. Wayne Gretzky made everybody else have to be better in the NHL or he was going to embarra.s.s them forever. So the league started to get better. I think the Yankees of the '90s forced everybody else to find a way to be better because what they were doing wasn't good enough. So they found a way to be better, so it elevated the game another notch.

"Like Jordan going away or Gretzky going away, the Yankee dynasty, it went away. We tried to hang in there. We've been in the playoffs every year, but it's not the same."

The new-age general managers, freed from the shackles of conventional thinking, enjoyed an edge on the teams still doing business with old-school ways. They rooted for the old men to keep their jobs, and mourned when another team made the switch and joined the information revolution. They knew where to go to pick somebody's pocket to find undervalued, cost-efficent players. One general manager said he went to the same pigeon time and time again to pluck future big leaguers out of his farm system. The first reaction of the traditionalists to Moneyball Moneyball was to deride its paint-by- numbers approach to evaluation. It was an easy shot to take. Beane's A's, after all, never made it to the World Series and they were built on as timeless a philosophy as ever existed: a perfect storm of talented and cheap starting pitching. Between 2000 and 2003, the Athletics made the playoffs every year largely because Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito started 57 percent of the team's games in that four-year period while costing Oakland the total sum of $7.2 million, or about $10 million less than the Yankees paid for 12 was to deride its paint-by- numbers approach to evaluation. It was an easy shot to take. Beane's A's, after all, never made it to the World Series and they were built on as timeless a philosophy as ever existed: a perfect storm of talented and cheap starting pitching. Between 2000 and 2003, the Athletics made the playoffs every year largely because Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito started 57 percent of the team's games in that four-year period while costing Oakland the total sum of $7.2 million, or about $10 million less than the Yankees paid for 12[image]innings of Steve Karsay in the last three years of his deal. But even the most crusty traditionalists eventually had to concede that Moneyball Moneyball at the very least changed the dialogue in the game. If you were a dinosaur, it was something best kept to yourself. at the very least changed the dialogue in the game. If you were a dinosaur, it was something best kept to yourself.

"It's a sensationalized book that doesn't completely accurately depict what happened," said Mark Shapiro, general manager of the Indians. "But it does pose the questions that should be asked. What are our decision-making processes? How are we making decisions? How do they fit into a strategy and a plan? I don't think Moneyball Moneyball-leaning objectively all the way in making decisions-is the right way to go. The beauty of this game is that the reality is we're dealing with human beings. But if I were an owner, I would certainly have the right to ask, 'What are our processes? How are we making decisions? How do our decisions mesh with each other as we implement a plan, a strategy? What are we doing at the levels beneath the major league team that support that plan? To facilitate us making the best decisions possible? In an inefficient environment, how can we be as efficient as possible? How can we find value?'

"Those kinds of questions have got to be asked by owners. What I think is-and this is theory-is that owners started getting asked by their friends. It's a small fraternity. David Gla.s.s of Kansas City starts getting asked by his friends, 'Hey, did you read that? That's pretty incredible. Do you guys do that?' Now all of a sudden they go down and they look at a conventional old-school general manager, and they're probably not satisfied with the answers they're getting in response."

The intellectual revolution took off. Teams now wanted not just a Billy Beane of their own, but a Paul DePodesta, the Harvard economics graduate who at the age of 26 became Beane's righthand man and the brains behind the numbers and at 31 became the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The game that depended largely on washed-up former players and rea.s.signed company men to build a 25-man roster became a multibillion-dollar business that attracted well-educated minds to build organizations, organizations, even even systems. systems. When Beane, for instance, promoted David Forst, another Harvard grad with a sociology degree, to replace DePodesta, he posted an opening for Forst's former position as an a.s.sistant general manager. He received 1,500 resumes, including one from a chap who wrote, "I apologize, but I won't be available until June because I am completing my astrophysics degree from Oxford." Beane wound up hiring Farhan Zaidi, a PhD in economics from Cal Berkeley who earned an undergraduate degree in behavioral economics. When Beane, for instance, promoted David Forst, another Harvard grad with a sociology degree, to replace DePodesta, he posted an opening for Forst's former position as an a.s.sistant general manager. He received 1,500 resumes, including one from a chap who wrote, "I apologize, but I won't be available until June because I am completing my astrophysics degree from Oxford." Beane wound up hiring Farhan Zaidi, a PhD in economics from Cal Berkeley who earned an undergraduate degree in behavioral economics.

"Guys that maybe 15 years ago spent four years at Goldman Sachs and then moved on to private equity are applying for jobs with baseball teams," Beane said. "I remember when I sheepishly had to inform Farhan the amount of money we were paying him to start. The point being is that the resumes you see now are amazing. Partners in law firms are ready to give it up to work in baseball.

"I'm talking about entry-level positions, below Farhan, paying $30,000 starting salary. The people that got to Wall Street and want to work in sports are by nature very compet.i.tive. And because they are smart and compet.i.tive, the ultimate reward is they make a lot of money. Not that everyone makes a lot of money, but it's there to be claimed. That's the way it should be. I wouldn't even be able to apply for this job in another ten years. And it doesn't bother me."

The rise in intellect meant that all organizations began to better understand the value of the players. For instance, after the 2002 season, the Red Sox encountered little compet.i.tion for free agent third baseman Bill Mueller. He did not hit for power and he did not hit for an especially high batting average, the two traditional yardsticks for offensive "value," and thus the two components tied most directly to pay. Splitting the 2002 season with the Cubs and Giants, Mueller batted .262 with seven home runs. The Red Sox signed him for three years (with the third year left to their option) at a total cost of $7 million. What the Red Sox knew then that most others did not, however, was that Mueller was far better than the average player at getting on base. And the more runners you put on base the more runs you could score. His career on-base percentage was .370. Mueller won the American League batting t.i.tle in his first year with the team and helped the Red Sox to the world championship in his second year.

Four years later, Dave Roberts, a career .270 hitter with little power, went on the free agent market. By 2006, teams understood the value of on-base percentage and were paying for it. Roberts, like Mueller, did not have traditional value in terms of a high batting average or home runs. His value was getting on base. Roberts did not reach base as readily as did Mueller-his career on-base percentage was .344-but still he was better than the average player at getting on base. The Giants gave Roberts $18 million over three years, a whopping 129 percent increase over Mueller's value just four years earlier. Finding the next Bill Mueller became increasingly difficult with the rise in intellect. And if more teams were better at identifying the value of talent, then more teams had a better chance of putting together a winning ballclub.

"There are fewer inefficiencies to exploit," Shapiro said. "It becomes harder and harder, particularly as the teams with the great resources become well run and more efficient in the way they operate. The opportunities are fewer and farther between. And that has created some of the parity you're seeing. Obviously, I still feel like there are opportunities in certain areas, but they're harder to find."

Said Beane, "It used to be ten to twelve years ago I could call up Brian Cashman and there was always a yin and yang with teams. He could take my expensive players and I could value his younger players. It was a case of what was most valuable to each franchise. You could always find a dance partner. The biggest thing happening now is the ability to properly value what is the most valuable commodity in the game: the cost-controlled young player at a minimum salary who is productive at the major league level. Everything revolves around that.

"The Boston Red Sox are incredibly bright. They still have the resources to get the high-priced player, but they also value the young player with great player development. They can have the best of both worlds. The dangerous thing is when you have really smart guys that have a lot of money and are running those teams, quite frankly, when you look at Boston there's no reason to think they won't continue to win. The fact of the matter is you arguably have the brightest front office with lots of resources and an ownership group that supports it. They've turned the Red Sox into an international brand name with their on-field performance and marketing that brand. They created a Manchester United, an international brand."

Intellect and player development is where Boston lapped the Yankees. The Red Sox, for instance, became so insatiable about the power of information that they deployed expert number crunchers to the NCAA headquarters in Kansas to input every available statistic on all college players in history into a database. They then cross-referenced those numbers against the performance of those college players who made it to the big leagues, and from there they devised their own tables of how college performance might help predict major league performance-information that would become critical in their draft-day decisions. They also hired a renowned trainer specifically dedicated to keeping pitchers healthy, understanding that arms and shoulders required a very different expertise and maintenance than the bodies of position players. (The Yankees, meanwhile, stumbled so badly looking for answers to conditioning issues that in 2007 they hired a "director of performance enhancement" out of a country club in Florida. Marty Miller had not worked in baseball in 10 years. After five hamstring injuries on the Yankees in four weeks, he was fired one month into the season.) When the Yankees won, they did so with a very similar model to what is in vogue today: a core of cheap, homegrown players. On the 125-win 1998 world championship team, for instance, Jorge Posada, then 26, Derek Jeter, 26, Mariano Rivera, 28, and Andy Pett.i.tte, 26, were paid a combined $5.55 million. Bernie Williams, 29, another product of their farm system, was the team's highest-paid player at $8.3 million.

"The template wasn't much different than it is today," Beane said. "As that core gets older it sort of needs to be rejuvenated to some extent. After around 30, 31 years old, you start to get depreciating performance due to age. You still need to have those 25-year-olds entering their prime. Free agents complement the core."

The Yankees never replicated that sort of young core, in large part because they did not give their farm system the same priority they gave their 25-man roster, especially as their frustration grew with not winning it all.

"The Yankees have never been able to do both," said one veteran general manager. "They've tried to change and do some deconstruction, but it's so complicated over there, so inst.i.tutional, so multiheaded, that Cashman has a hard enough time just tearing things down to build them back up. They are smart and they have talent. They got pretty lucky internationally with w.a.n.g, Cano and Cabrera-Arizona could have had all three in the Randy Johnson deal. That really helped them because they had terrible drafts up until 2006.

"But it's so hard to deconstruct there that they went so far in the other direction. They rushed starters and made mediocre prospects untouchable. It was too dramatic a pendulum swing."

Another executive cited the declining health of George Steinbrenner as a factor in the Yankees falling behind the curve. Cashman's hold on baseball operations, which he seized in 2005, became more complicated with a committee to answer to, involving Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, Randy Levine, Felix Lopez and Lonn Trost.

"They started to catch up," observed the executive, "and they started, according to my conversations with Cashman, to understand what was happening to them with the Red Sox. They started to react to that and started to do things much more effectively and the dysfunction kind of went away for about two years. And now the dysfunction is right back. Cashman is wasting his time on things I don't have time to waste my energy on. Factions are starting up again."

Said the Indians' Shapiro, "Don't make the mistake, whatever is happening now, to think those teams with resources don't have a distinct advantage, particularly with how the Yankees were for a brief period of time and how the Red Sox are now."

Teams moved beyond the popular conception of Moneyball Moneyball long ago essentially because on-base percentage was no longer an inefficient market. So if all teams now recognize on-base percentage as well as the value of young players, what is the next inefficient market to exploit in order to make up the ground on the Yankees' growing edge in resources? Beane laughed and said, "Just saying that gives me a headache. Every part of the game is measured now versus the dollar investment. It's about turning over every rock. It's more and more difficult. I think that's a good thing. I have no chip on my shoulder about being antiquated." long ago essentially because on-base percentage was no longer an inefficient market. So if all teams now recognize on-base percentage as well as the value of young players, what is the next inefficient market to exploit in order to make up the ground on the Yankees' growing edge in resources? Beane laughed and said, "Just saying that gives me a headache. Every part of the game is measured now versus the dollar investment. It's about turning over every rock. It's more and more difficult. I think that's a good thing. I have no chip on my shoulder about being antiquated."

The race is always on. The A's have tried to develop proprietary defensive metrics to identify undervalued players by way of their glove work. The Red Sox then set about working up their own defensive metrics based on Cla.s.s-A and Double-A players-trying to s.n.a.t.c.h them before before they got to the big leagues. Such a think-tank culture helps drive the game forward and fosters the spirit of parity: if the real currency of the game is intellect rather than money, then why can't anybody truly win? they got to the big leagues. Such a think-tank culture helps drive the game forward and fosters the spirit of parity: if the real currency of the game is intellect rather than money, then why can't anybody truly win?

One area several teams are exploring as the next possible strategic advantage is biomechanics. Every team will agree that acquiring and developing pitching is the foundation to championship teams. But what good is great pitching if your pitchers aren't healthy enough to pitch? For all the planning and scheming it takes to build a roster, a team's season generally comes down to whether its rotation stays healthy or not. Even Torre's Yankees were proof of that. Here is the breakdown of Torre's rotations according to how many starters made at least 25 starts: [image]

Torre won his four world championships only in the years when at least four starters took their regular turns. On the other hand, in the six years when he had to patch staffs together-when no more than three starters gave him regular work-his teams were knocked out in the first round four times and never won the World Series.

Championships, then, might seem to turn on the vagaries of fortune, on the sheer luck of staying healthy. But what if health is not left to chance and can be controlled to a certain extent? What if data, and the a.n.a.lysis of that data, could improve a team's chances of keeping its pitchers healthy? Then you might have the next market inefficiency.

Glenn Fleisig, PhD, and Dr. James Andrews did their best to explain this concept to major league trainers and executives at a special presentation in 2002. Fleisig and Andrews helped establish the American Sports Medicine Inst.i.tute in Birmingham, Alabama, a nonprofit clinic devoted primarily to injury prevention.

"We said, 'Hey, we've got this biomechanics thing going,' " Fleisig said, " 'and we want to get into the prevention of injuries.' We went for the home run: a contract arrangement with Major League Baseball in which we would screen all pitchers. We can figure out who is at high risk of getting hurt. They all said, 'Great idea, but that's not how baseball works. Thirty different teams don't work as one company.' "

So ASMI opened its doors to individual teams. The A's were the only team to come through in 2002. The Indians, and then Red Sox, soon followed. The clinic now attracts 10 teams. ASMI puts reflective markings on a pitcher's body and uses eight special motion-capture cameras, using technology developed by Hollywood movie production companies, to film the pitcher's delivery and feeds the information into a computer. What comes out of the computer is a 35-point diagnostic checkup, measuring everything from the length of the pitcher's stride to "shoulder horizontal adduction," a biomechanical term for how far back the pitching shoulder flexes. ASMI captured so many pitching deliveries this way over the years that it established normative range guidelines for proper mechanics. They found that the greatest pitchers, such as Roger Clemens, don't do any phase of the delivery that is off the charts, but rather are exceptional because they fall in the normative range across the board.

"What we're studying," Fleisig said, "is how the principles of physics help people move and what are the patterns. What makes you the most efficient pitcher, where you obtain the most velocity with the least stress on the elbow and shoulder."

The biggest payoff to the data has yet to be unlocked: Once you have it, what do you do with it? "It's a huge challenge," Fleisig said. "My number-one priority is to find out what's wrong with pitchers. What to do with it is a huge question. Some things might need to be improved on by the pitching coach and some by the strength coach."

The Indians, for instance, sent pitcher Jeremy Guthrie to ASMI in 2004. His diagnostic report indicated that his "maximum upper trunk angular velocity"-in layman's terms, it's the answer to whether his upper trunk rotates faster than his pelvis in his delivery-fell just short of the normative range. Guthrie clocked in at 1,059 degrees per second, just outside the normative range of 1,078 to 1,370 degrees per second. What did the Indians do about it? Nothing. Guthrie otherwise checked out fine with no major red flags.

"It's so rare when you actually make a meaningful change with a guy," Shapiro said. "Occasionally you can work stride direction, when the ball comes out of the glove, little things like that might actually help."

Pitching is an act of violence. Once the pitcher loads the baseball in the c.o.c.ked position, the arm rotates forward at 7,000 degrees per second. "That is the fastest measured human motion of any activity," Fleisig said.

While in that loaded position, the shoulder and arm bear the equivalent of about 40 pounds of force pushing down. The biomechanical experts at ASMI were curious about how much more force an arm could take, so they brought cadavers into the lab and pulled and pushed upon the shoulder joint to find its breaking point. The cadavers' ligaments blew apart just after 40 pounds of force. "So a pitcher is just about at maximum," Fleisig said.

No wonder pitchers break down: they have pushed their shoulders and arms to the edge of the breaking point. Pitching, unlike most sports activities, has reached the limit of what is humanly possible. So while sprinters continue to run faster, swimmers swim faster, golfers drive the ball farther and football players get bigger and faster, the pitcher has reached his peak. You will not see a pitcher throwing a baseball 110 miles per hour. The arm and shoulder are maxed out. Pushed any further, the shoulder would blow up, like a blown engine.

"That's why the role of research in baseball is not to get the pitcher to throw faster," Fleisig said, "but to lower the risk of injury."

Said Beane, "At some point what's really going to happen is we are all going to employ actuaries, like insurance companies. In some ways we have now become pseudo-actuaries. You may hire actuaries in your office to figure out the probability of injuries occurring, given the amount of money you're putting in. Biomechanics is certainly a fascinating area to explore. One pitcher can be both the riskiest and the best investment we make. It makes sense to explore why."

Dovetailed with this information revolution was the seed money to encourage innovation. Selig and the owners did not follow through on their threat to contract two teams, but the gambit did succeed as leverage toward establishing an increased revenue-sharing system that funneled more money from the rich teams-most especially, from the Yankees-to the poor teams. The revenue-sharing system in 2001, for instance, transferred $169 million. By 2008 the amount transferred had more than doubled to $408 million.

Simultaneously, baseball developed lucrative sources of national income that didn't exist when the Yankees were winning the World Series. On January 19, 2000, for instance, Selig convinced the owners to share equally in all profits generated from the Internet. Baseball had no idea what kind of money was at stake-especially Selig, a technophobe who was computer illiterate. But Selig understood that if each team were left to make its own way on the Web, the rich teams such as the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and Cubs would only grow richer, extending the resource gap between them and the other clubs.

"I said at the time, and I didn't understand the full magnitude of it," Selig said, "that this will go down as being similarly important to when Pete Rozelle talked the National Football League owners into sharing television money. I believe history will show that to be correct."

Major League Baseball Advanced Media was created in 2000 to handle the sport's digital a.s.sets, with MLB.com launching in 2001. By 2007 it was generating almost $400 million in revenue, much of it from selling tickets, subscriptions to game packages and as one of the Net's most adept providers of streaming video. Suddenly baseball owners were getting equal cuts of national revenues that never before existed. In addition to MLBAM, they also enjoyed payouts from such revenue streams as satellite radio and satellite television and Major League Baseball International. Moreover, many clubs seized control of the resale-ticket market, using the Web to claim the secondary-ticket market revenues that previously went to scalpers on the black market.

The effect of these changes was that by 2008 every team in baseball knew before it sold a single ticket or negotiated its own local media packages that it started with a nut of $29 million, up from $16 million in 2001. It was the equivalent of the bank handing you money in a game of Monopoly before a die is cast.

The extra money did not close the gap on the Yankees' financial might. Indeed, the Yankees were getting the same one-thirtieth cut of the revenue streams as, say, the Kansas City Royals. But what the growing national revenues allowed poorer teams to do was to make financial commitments to their young players that might not have happened previously. And if these teams could lock up their young stars, it would mean postponing their free agency, and postponing free agency would mean fewer choices for the Yankees when it came to making up for the deficiencies in their farm system.

"More teams have signed guys who are prearbitration eligible, arbitration eligible and even to cover free agency," said Chris Antonetti, the Cleveland a.s.sistant general manager. "That happened with Roy Halladay, Chris Carpenter and, with us, C. C. Sabathia. There have been a lot of guys where that happened. What that does, especially because of the timing of it, is limit the available players in their prime years. So if you sign a starting pitcher through his two through eight years? Those are going to be the years of his highest leverage."

Here is an example. In March of 2006, the Indians signed center fielder Grady Sizemore to a six-year deal worth $23.45 million, with a club option tacked to the end of it. That meant the Indians control Sizemore's services through 2012. Without the contract extension, Sizemore could have left the Indians as a free agent after the 2010 season at age 28-smack in his prime-with the Yankees no doubt prepared to outbid everybody in baseball for his services. In all likelihood, the Indians would have faced the necessity of having to trade Sizemore before or during his walk year to gain a greater return on his loss than simply two compensatory draft picks. The contract extension, though, keeps Sizemore off the market, and away from the Yankees, for at least another two years and until after his 30th birthday.

"If we didn't have Grady signed we'd probably be looking at trading him at some point," Antonetti said. "What the central fund money has done is allowed us to retain our core guys. That's mostly what it's allowed us to do.

"For the teams in the middle and smaller markets, the central revenues are becoming a larger percentage of their revenues. Whereas for the larger market teams, that's not happening. Their revenues continue to grow with new ballparks and TV deals, radio deals, raising ticket prices, attendance . . . they're still increasing their local revenues. Our local revenue is far smaller, but the growth in central revenue becomes more and more important for us."

With clubs able to afford to delay free agency for their best young players, free agency became less of a guaranteed lifeline for the Yankees. When Toronto locked up Roy Halladay, for example, the Yankees were left to troll for Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright.

"Start with the fact that free agency is inefficient by nature," Shapiro said. "Because almost all of the players are past their prime as they hit free agency. You're paying top dollar for declining talent. Start with that. Then reduce the overall talent base in terms of quality, to the point that you've got compet.i.tive frenzy for the limited talent that is out there? You're exponentially increasing the inefficiency. And then, to add a more cyclical trend now, with more and more players tied up to deals, there is going to be less and less talent out there."

Though the Yankees kept generating more local revenues, the rise in intellect, the sharing of revenue and the tapping of more national revenue streams created a compet.i.tive balance in baseball that had not been seen since the 1980s. The Yankees now had to worry about not just old foils such as the Red Sox and Braves, but also the Angels, Marlins, Tigers and Indians-all of whom knocked them out of the playoffs-while teams such as the Astros, Rockies, Cardinals and White Sox were going to the World Series for the first time in a generation, if ever.

After the 2001 World Series, 12 franchises played in the next seven World Series, including nine that had not been there since 1987 and five who made it the year after posting a losing record. The trend toward parity has only accelerated. Since 2005, the eight World Series slots have been filled by eight different franchises. In 2007, no team repeated as division champion for the first time since 1988.

"The big market clubs will always be big," Selig said. "Even they understood this system was in their best interest. You're never going to get a completely even playing field. But if you're a fan in New York or Boston or Chicago or Los Angeles, and if you know three-quarters of the clubs coming in don't have a chance to win, what's going to happen? You know, people aren't dumb. I think it's worked out extraordinarily well."

After 2001, the Yankees could no longer count on other general managers to be pigeons or for cash-strapped teams to dump their best young players on the market or for teams that were down to stay down. They could no longer count on a core of New Yorkproven winners on their own roster or another wave of players from their minor league system to fortify it. Into the headwinds of all of those forces, though, the Yankees stubbornly counted on the same old outcome: to win the World Series. Anything else was a failure.

"It reached a point with us where it was six months of preparation for one month of important baseball," Mussina said. "And that wasn't written on the chalkboard anywhere, but it had become that way. I mean, the machine that had been created, the monster that was being created, that's what it was all about. It wasn't about getting to the playoffs anymore. It was about getting there and winning. It didn't matter how you got there, just get there and win."

Leaving themselves only two options in this new realm of baseball, win the World Series or fail, the Yankees came to know only failure.

By 2001 the so-called Greatest Rivalry in Sports, the shorthand account of the compet.i.tion between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, was no more a rivalry than what existed in the cartoons between the roadrunner and the coyote. The 2001 Red Sox gave what even for them was a virtuoso performance of the doomed foil. They finished in second place behind the Yankees for the fourth time in what would be eight consecutive such finishes. They won just 82 games, winding up 13 games behind the Yankees. The Red Sox had the best pitcher in baseball in Pedro Martinez, but their attempt under general manager Dan Duquette to support Pedro with a collection of castoffs and aging veterans-Frank Castillo, Hideo Nomo, Rolando Arrojo, David Cone and Bret Saberhagen all had seen better days-failed miserably. Even the great Pedro broke down, giving them only 18 starts in 2001. The Red Sox fired Jimy Williams as manager and replaced him with pitching coach Joe Kerrigan, who presided over the team mailing in a 17-26 finish.

Quite simply, there was no rivalry. In the six seasons since Torre took over as manager of the Yankees, New York was 67 games better than Boston and won the head-to-head compet.i.tion 45-35. The Yankees had won fourteeen postseason series, including four World Series, and the Red Sox had won one postseason series, while a World Series championship remained almost unfathomable for the accursed franchise.

It was not a fair fight upon any ground, including the business side. In 2001 the Yankees generated 52 percent more in revenues than the Red Sox. Boston drew fewer fans than fifteen franchises-fully half the teams in baseball-including such middle-market franchises as the Rangers, Brewers, Rockies and Orioles. The Yankees essentially built their dynasty with little resistance from the Red Sox, with the exception of the 1999 season when Pedro Martinez, at the height of his mastery, willed them into the American League Championship Series. Even then, however, the Yankees dismissed them in five games. The Red Sox won the only game Martinez started in that series, but lost the others behind fading starters Kent Mercker, Ramon Martinez and Bret Saberhagen.

The rivalry as we know it did not begin until December 20, 2001. On that day the Red Sox partners, operating the team under a trust arrangement from the estate of former owner Jean R. Yawkey, voted to sell the team to an investment group headed by John Henry and Tom Werner. Larry Lucchino, who would be named club president, joined them. The group paid $660 million for the Red Sox, Fenway Park and 80 percent of the New England Sports Network, the regional sports network that carries Red Sox games. No baseball team ever sold for even half that amount.

The sale was bad news for the Yankees. Henry, Werner and Lucchino were true baseball insiders, friends of commissioner Bud Selig, who knew from their previous stakes in big league teams how to play by Selig's unwritten rules. (Henry had owned a small piece of the Yankees, then the Marlins, while Werner had owned the Padres and Lucchino had served as president of the Orioles and Padres.) These men knew how to make deals and make money in the provincial world of baseball, having long ago covered the learning curve that even the sharpest of businessmen must traverse when they join the game. They represented the biggest threat to the Yankee dynasty. Within hours of their purchase, they fired Duquette. They promoted a.s.sistant general manager Mike Port to serve as general manager but only on an interim basis, vowing to take as much time as necessary to find a dynamic young architect that fit their vision for the team.

Kerrigan lasted only two weeks into spring training, the owners waiting until their purchase was closed in February. Lucchino called a team meeting one day in the team's clubhouse at its spring training site in Fort Myers, Florida, to introduce Grady Little to the players as their manager. Little, who had served as Williams' bench coach for three seasons, was a safe, popular pick. Immediately after Lucchino introduced Little, Martinez was so happy he danced naked around the clubhouse, cracking up his teammates by shaking his member.

The owners made a more important hiring that same spring training to far less fanfare, crude or otherwise. They named a 28-year-old Yale graduate to serve as an a.s.sistant general manager to Port. Theo Epstein, who grew up one mile away from Fenway in Brookline, had started out in baseball as a summer intern for Lucchino's Baltimore Orioles in 1992, 1993 and 1994. Epstein followed Lucchino to San Diego, where he worked two seasons in the Padres communications department before moving to baseball operations in 1997, all the while earning a degree from the University of San Diego Law School. He was whip smart, full of questions and at the front of a generation of young, computer-savvy executives and a.n.a.lysts who believed some of the answers for evaluating players and constructing teams could be found in a careful parsing of the game's copious statistics.

Change, however, did not come immediately to the Henry-Werner-Lucchino Red Sox. During the first half of the 2002 season, Port and his baseball operations people and scouts would hold frequent conference calls that sounded not very different from the way virtually all clubs had conducted business for generations. One of those conferences included a discussion about acquiring an outfielder.

"Hey," one scout piped up, "how about that Doug Glanville? He's pretty good."

"How about Marquis Grissom?" interjected another scout. "I've always liked him."

The conference call went on in the same manner: baseball men talking baseball, trusting their gut and little else. (The Red Sox eventually traded for Montreal outfielder Cliff Floyd, giving the Expos pitching prospects Sun-Woo Kim and Seung Song.) "That was pretty much the methodology," Epstein said. "People would sit around talking about the players they heard of and who might be a good fit. There were no numbers studied, just subjective a.n.a.lysis. Old school? It was really old school. And not good old school. So we basically started to integrate some new techniques behind the scenes."

In the back offices at Fenway, Epstein, Jed Hoyer and other young a.s.sistants in player development were running their own kind of lab, crunching numbers and asking questions in their new-school way. For instance, it was the statistical a.n.a.lysis done by Epstein and the back-office upstarts that helped lead to the Red Sox trading for lefthanded relief pitcher Alan Embree in June of 2002. The Red Sox gave up two pitching prospects of little import to San Diego to get Embree, a journeyman making $500,000 who had bounced from the Giants to the White Sox to the Padres to the Red Sox within 12 months. But Epstein liked Embree's strikeout rate-more than one per inning. Embree would be an important part of Boston's bullpen over four seasons.

"We weren't empowered to make the final call," Epstein said of the back-office a.n.a.lysts. "But gradually over the course of the year we started to integrate some of these techniques. It became rather obvious what John Henry was looking for in a new GM, and because of John's thinking, I felt empowered to create a new system."

Henry believed in numbers. They made him a rich man. In 1981, at the age of 31, Henry established an alternative a.s.set money management firm that proudly took human emotion and subjective a.n.a.lysis out of play. It made trading decisions based on a proprietary, objective system that a.n.a.lyzed trends in each market. By 2005 John W. Henry & Company, Inc. held a.s.sets of $3.8 billion. By 2006 Henry was estimated to have a net worth of $860 million. Henry saw no reason why data-based a.n.a.lysis should not work in baseball, too. After all, he had long been a baseball fan himself, and about 20 years earlier had discovered the work of statistical a.n.a.lyst Bill James and other so-called sabermetricians.

"We took our cues from the way his mind works," Epstein said. "He's really an empirical-based thinker. Very logical, very a.n.a.lytical, very objective. That led him down his career path, where he figured out trends in the market and discovered a formula. His belief is that you can look at the market objectively and the trends lie in the numbers, and even if you get battered in the short term, ultimately it's going to work out. It's empirical.

"Sabermetrics really appealed to him. He saw a great a.n.a.logy between the financial markets and baseball. He understood the worst decisions to be the subjective ones, the older-school decisions, and he wanted someone to approach baseball operations in the same systematic way he knew from the markets. He's even more devoted to a systematic approach than I am. I take a more balanced approach.

"Right around then the landscape was definitely changing around baseball when it came to decision making. The default modus operandi in the game, the old school approach, was about to undergo a sea change. It was a time of great change, and you saw a change in the type of people making the decisions."

The 2002 Red Sox won 93 games, but still missed the playoffs in what was a transitional year in the organizational culture. Henry still needed a point man to run the baseball operations in a manner that dovetailed with his objective a.n.a.lytical approach to the markets, and by November he knew exactly who that person was: Oakland general manager Billy Beane, but Beane turned him down for family reasons.

He considered J. P. Ricciardi, who had been Beane's righthand man in Oakland, but Ricciardi had been hired only a year earlier by the Toronto Blue Jays to be their general manager, and he wasn't about to walk away from that contract, not even to be the general manager for a team in his home state of Ma.s.sachusetts. Henry then turned to his third choice, who also happened to be the one Billy Beane recommended: Epstein. On November 25, 2002, one month before his 29th birthday, Epstein was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox. That same month, Henry hired James, the high priest of the sabermetric movement, and the next month he hired Josh Byrnes, a 32-year-old Haverford College graduate who had served under Mark Shapiro in the Cleveland Indians front office. The cultural shift in Boston was now complete. The Red Sox would run their organization with a heavy emphasis on statistical a.n.a.lysis to help find and exploit undervalued markets. They were the Athletics, only with a lot more money. With the new ownership and with Epstein's youthfulness, they also now had the bravado to be a true rival to the Yankees. They were now equipped to compete with the Yankees on their turf, even if that turf was in Nicaragua.

On Thanksgiving, only days after being named the Red Sox general manager, Epstein telephoned his girlfriend from Logan Airport in Boston. He was supposed to be enjoying Thanksgiving dinner at her parents' home.

"Sorry, but I can't make it," Epstein said. "I'm on my way to Nicaragua."

One of the legendary pitchers in Cuba, Jose Contreras, had defected the previous month while in Mexico pitching for the Cuban national team. He was in Nicaragua essentially to skirt major league draft requirements and become a free agent. The Yankees badly wanted the man Fidel Castro himself had dubbed El t.i.tan de Bronze (The Bronze t.i.tan) as an homage to the courage of 19th-century Cuban general Antonio Maceo. The Red Sox, however, conceded nothing to the Yankees. Indeed, Epstein's trip to Nicaragua was a symbolic beginning to Boston's mission to go eye-to- eye with the Yankees.

"Our scouts loved him," Epstein said. "They thought he could be a number-one starter in the big leagues, with some risk involved. You could not do the same statistical a.n.a.lysis as you could with a major league pitcher, and the issue of leaving his country and family was part of the risk. But right then two things became clear about us: we wanted to have no fear, and we wanted to be the type of organization that could take a risk and not back away because it might make us look bad. We didn't want perception to be part of the decision-making process. For too many years this organization was obsessed with tomorrow's newspapers and the Yankees. There was such a focus on what the Yankees were doing and looking silly in the newspapers that it almost paralyzed the club."

Before Epstein left for Nicaragua, he received a call from Louie Eljaua, his director of international scouting. Eljaua had arrived there first, taking one of the 12 rooms at the hotel in the remote Nicaraguan town where Contreras and his agent, Jaime Torres, were staying.

"Hey, man, it might be good if you booked a room not just for yourself, but book all the rooms in the hotel," Eljaua told Epstein. "That way other teams won't be able to stay here. The nearest place is miles and miles away."

Epstein loved the idea. The Red Sox bought up all the rooms. When he arrived there Epstein could not believe how well the plan worked. They had the place to themselves, he and Eljaua stayed up late with Contreras and Torres, drinking whiskey, smoking Cuban cigars and talking about a new life in Boston with the Red Sox. Ep-stein told Contreras that the Red Sox employed a bullpen catcher who was born in Cuba and would provide him with daily support and friendship.

"We probably won't be the ones with the highest offer," Epstein said, "but other teams won't give you the support and welcome that we will."

Contreras loved everything that he heard about the Red Sox. They enjoyed more conversation, whiskey and cigars before finally turning in.

"I went to bed sure he would sign with the Red Sox," Epstein said. "The next day I see two shadowy figures going in and out of his room. They're from the Yankees. I see him on his cell phone."

The Yankees had dispatched two operatives with a simple order: don't come back unless you have Contreras signed. If you don't sign him, your jobs won't be here when you get back. It wasn't long before Contreras asked to see Epstein. El t.i.tan de Bronze had tears in his eyes.

"It's nothing personal," he told Epstein. "I had a better offer. They wouldn't take no."

The Yankees gave Contreras $32 million over four years, blowing away Boston's offer of $23 million over three years. Legend has it that Epstein reacted by heaving a chair in his room and breaking furniture, a story he denies.

"I did not break anything," he said. "I may have thrown a few of my possessions across the room."

Lucchino, speaking to the New York Times New York Times then, reacted by throwing insults. then, reacted by throwing insults.

"The Evil Empire extends its tentacles even into Latin America," Lucchino said.