Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York city, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and ICE's 12 exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now here's your host, Josh King, Head of Communications at Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
The weather outside is warming. It's time to put away the skis and snowshoes, and those on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange could be forgiven for glancing away from the stock ticker and stealing a glimpse or two at the scoreboard as baseball, our national pastime, returns. And here's the truth, we'll forgive them those glimpses from now until October as long as a favorite team among the 30 and Major League Baseball are in the hunt for a playoff spot, and that means, just about all of us.
Josh King:
Tonight at Citi Field in Queens, it's opening day of the 2018 season, the 57th, for the New York Mets against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Metropolitans finished the 17 campaign with a frustrating 70 and 92 record, a decline from 87 wins in 2016 and their 90 pennant winning 2015 season. For the front office, that signals a rebuilding effort. Beginning with their skipper, Mickey Callaway takes over for Terry Collins, and Sandy Alderson, our guest today Inside the Ice House has also added Jason Vargas, Todd Frazier, Jose Reyes, and Adrian Gonzalez to the roster. Building a Major League team season after season bears striking similarities to trading stocks on the floor of the NYSE; a mix of analytics and human judgment to make the right moves at the right time. How does Sandy Alderson, a man renowned for introducing sabermetrics to baseball with the Oakland days, balance the numbers with the real world evaluation of on-field talent? We'll find out right after this.
Speaker 3:
Inside the ICE House is presented this week by ICE Global Index System, or GIS. ICE's index families combine leading reference data, evaluated pricing and analytics, along with a track record in index provisioning spending 50 years to deliver unique cross asset and best-in-class index solutions.
Josh King:
The roots of modern baseball can be traced right here to New York City where Alexander Cartwright codified the sport and founded the Knickerbockers Baseball Club. Cartwright worked early in his career right here on Wall Street, so it's no surprise that several brokers were members of the original Knickerbockers, including Henry T. Morgan, a member of the Morgan banking family.
Josh King:
Today you need to look much farther afield than a pool of stockbrokers to find talent for the ball field and use a lot more data to understand a particular player's five tools; speed, arm strength, fielding ability, hitting for average, and hitting for power. And in the sabermetric era, there are a hundred other variables that go into the decision to spend an owner's money and sign a ball player to a contract.
Josh King:
Many credits Sandy Alderson with inventing the mysterious recipe exposed somewhat by Michael Lewis's 2003 mega best-seller, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The game hasn't become any fairer in the past 15 years, but Alderson, Dartmouth grad, Marine Corps officer, and Harvard lawyer, brings as much mastery to its nuance as any general manager in the game today. Will his 2018 Mets finally take the Commissioner's Trophy this November? Let's find out. Welcome to the ICE House, Sandy.
Sandy Alderson:
Happy to be here.
Josh King:
The yearly ritual, you packed up all the gear at First Data Field in Port St. Lucie, shipped it up route 95 all the way to Queens. How did Florida feel this spring?
Sandy Alderson:
Florida was great this spring. We had terrific weather. Not too humid, not too hot. Very little rain. Didn't lose a game or a practice to poor weather. So from that standpoint, it was terrific, but more importantly, I think that with a new manager, some new players, a new approach to strength and conditioning, and a variety of other enhancements to the team, it was a great six weeks to see all of that come together under Mickey Callaway's leadership.
Josh King:
You have that special facility right next to First Data Field run by Mike Barwis, are the players using that regularly or a different regimen?
Sandy Alderson:
No. What happens is many of them are there in the off-season. One of the reasons that we instituted that program and our association with Mike was to be able to keep an eye on the players in the off-season, because in spite of what many people think, we don't dictate what they do in the off-season. We try to monitor. We try to be supportive. We send people out to watch and assess, but ultimately it's that day-to-day proposition of strengthening and conditioning that you try to get a handle on. So that facility in St. Lucie is one in which many of our players, Minor League and Major League, utilize in order to prepare for the regular season but for us it's a way of kind of gaining a little more control over what they do or don't do.
Josh King:
The closest thing you might be able to get to Parris Island during a Marine Corp bootcamp, huh?
Sandy Alderson:
Yeah. Well, pretty close. Mike's pretty demanding. The nice thing about Mike is he works with athletes across the board. Right now, for example, he is working with several NFL draft candidates, previously, to get ready for the combine, and now to see where they get drafted. He works with hockey players, so a variety. And he works with the disabled, so he's got a pretty wide portfolio.
Josh King:
You are just here ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange with your partners at First Data, NYSE, ticker symbol, FDC. Now the second year of your 10-year deal for naming rights at Port St. Lucie and they are expanding their presence at Citi Field. How vital are your corporate partnerships to creating that great fan experience, both across spring training down in Port St. Lucie and now coming back to Citi Field?
Sandy Alderson:
Well, having sponsorship support is incredibly important. It's one element of our overall gross revenues, which ultimately get plowed back into the players and support services and so forth, but also it's a way for us to sort of co-brand, if you will, and benefit from the reach of our sponsors. Good example was last year when First Data got the naming rights for the spring training facility, and it just happened to coincide with the arrival of Tim Tebow-
Josh King:
That's right.
Sandy Alderson:
... to spring training last year. So you were really talking about the sort of three brands coalescing; First Data, the Mets, and Tim Tebow, who is a brand in and of himself. The synergies of that are incredible. When we signed Tim Tebow it was really... Not that we thought he would enhance the Mets brand but he would certainly expand the Mets brand, and I think that's true with respect to First Data as well.
Josh King:
I mean, all those wire photos of Tim, both in the batter's box and in the on-deck circle, with the First Data branding on the padding behind him. Every day there was another shot of Tebow with the First Data logo in it.
Sandy Alderson:
He's the one player of his experience in the game who actually gives fairly regular interviews, so when you have the backdrop with First Data behind those interviews, I imagine the retweets and so forth are pretty spectacular. That's just an example, I think, of how the relationship can work.
Josh King:
Let's go back a couple years, Sandy Alderson. Here's that pitch from Familia to Dexter Fowler against the Cubs in 2015 propelling your team to that showdown against the Kansas City Royals.
Speaker 5:
And strike three called. They haven't been to the World Series since 2000 and the Mets are on their way back.
Josh King:
A sense of elation for you, I'm sure. What was the key to success in that team three years ago?
Sandy Alderson:
Well, I think that probably perseverance, a little bit of luck. When we got to the trade deadline in late July of 2015, we were several games behind the nationals in the standings, but we had gotten to the point over the previous few years where we thought that as an organization we needed to make a statement to our fans that we were going to go for it. And it wasn't as if the odds were in our favor at that time, but we had picked up a couple of relievers and we felt that if we were going to make a move at all we needed to add a hitter, and fortunately, in the end we got Yoenis Cespedes, and he went crazy toward the end of '15. So it was that. It was a combination of the hard work of a lot of other players.
Sandy Alderson:
And you probably don't recall but leading up to that trade deadline, we had a misfire on a previous trade. We had lost a horrendous game in extra innings with rain delays and so forth. It was an emotional roller coaster. And then we didn't make the trade for Cespedes until five or six minutes before the deadline. It was a great ride. Unfortunately it ended after five games in the World Series but it was a great story.
Josh King:
But as people like Roger Angell will always tell you, "Hope springs eternal," when you head back down to Port St. Lucie. If you flash forward ahead three years... This time of year is all about expectations, the move north from Florida, and many experts are giving the Mets at least the winner of the off-season trophy, including your hiring of Mickey Callaway. You went through so many people in your interview process, why was he the right skipper at this time?
Sandy Alderson:
Well, when we decided to change managers, and Terry Collins did a great job for us for seven years, but it's like any other business, at some point there needs to be some leadership change. So we were looking for someone who would fulfill several different qualities, and I broke those qualities up into two categories. One was professional ability. The ability to do the job. Be a manager, push the right buttons, et cetera. But on the other side of the ledger were personal qualities that would inspire the players, sustain the players over 162 games. And really we focused on those softer qualifications than those of the job per se.
Sandy Alderson:
We felt, in Mickey's case, that the credibility he would bring with him from Cleveland with his success with that pitching staff would be enough to give him the initial credibility necessary to run with it. From my standpoint, I was looking for leadership. I wasn't looking for a guy who'd done it before. Wasn't looking for somebody who had 35 years of experience. There are times for that but I felt in this particular instance that we needed something different.
Sandy Alderson:
I'm 70 years old, so being able to communicate is very important. And I have to remind myself every day that most of my communication is with guys who are 35 or 40. And so it's great to have a lot of experience in the game but it doesn't really entitle one to anything. You really have to kind of continue not to reinvent yourself but to continue to adapt. I'm a military brat, and I moved every three or four years. Adaptation was my thing. New friends, new this, new that. But I think that's true in one's career also. You constantly have to change given the changing environment and requirements.
Josh King:
Of the 30 Major League teams, I can think of maybe two markets here in New York City and Boston where the manager's ability to deal with the media is a paramount job qualification. How do you contrast the styles between Terry Collins and Mickey Callaway in terms of dealing with the media juggernaut that's New York City?
Sandy Alderson:
Well, I think the thing that they will have in common is authenticity. They won't have the same style but they'll have a style that fits their personalities. I think Terry was that way. He was straightforward, a little combative. Mickey is more of a communicator and thoughtful before speaking, but both of them very authentic for their personalities. They weren't trying to fool anybody. I think that's the thing that they have in common. I think that's the thing that will be different. Mickey will be probably more cautious in what he says but true to himself.
Josh King:
We've been talking about the personal characteristics of your manager, but also in recent interviews you've been talking a lot about the personal characteristics and character of some of the players that you've brought on to this year's team. Beside those five tools of what makes a physical player, talk about some of the thinking that is behind your signings and the 25 man roster in terms of the type of individuals and people that are making up the 2018 Mets.
Sandy Alderson:
Well, one of the first signings of the off-season was Anthony Swarzak, who was our relief pitcher last year for the White Sox and the Brewers. That had more to do with need than it did with any other sort of consideration, but Anthony has turned out to be very thoughtful, engaging, a great teammate.
Sandy Alderson:
And I can't emphasize enough the importance of being a good teammate. We're talking about 162 games. We're talking about six months of a regular season, maybe another month of postseason, together with two months of spring training. So you're talking about nine months out of the year that these guys are spending a lot more time together than they are with their families, so being a good teammate is incredibly important. And this is something that often analysts, the proponents of big data will discount, that it's all in the numbers, forget about the chemistry.
Josh King:
And maybe the head is a sixth tool.
Sandy Alderson:
Yeah. Something I read that Mickey said the other day, I think it's really important to understand that the analytics get applied to a generic set of circumstances, but if a player isn't comfortable, if a player is responding to that circumstance differently than the analytics would predict, why, because of emotion, because of unhappiness, because of injury, a variety of things, then the analytics don't apply. We can never forget that while the analytics are important, so is chemistry and so is sort of the personal commitment that players have. One of the reasons guys have good years and bad years is just some years they are more committed than others for a variety of reasons.
Sandy Alderson:
So anyway, second pickup was Jay Bruce. And Jay Bruce, very happy that he's back, because Jay came in originally in a trade deadline deal in 2016, didn't get off to a great start with the Mets, then was very good and instrumental in kind of closing it out in 2016 to get the wild-card. But while he was with us he never really felt like he was a Met, because we had him for that short period of time, then there's was all speculation that we wouldn't pick up his option. Yada, yada, yada. Now he's got a three-year contract. He's coming back. He knows New York. He knows Mickey from Cleveland. And he's been a great teammate, very solid. And partly he just goes out and plays every day. He's got a good relationship with the players but it's really leadership by example. He walks the walk, he doesn't talk. He is a good example.
Sandy Alderson:
Jason Vargas, Dave Island, new from Kansas City. Mickey and Dave both recommended him very highly as an individual, as somebody who will give it all for the team. Even recently when he was trying to decide whether to have surgery on his hand or not, it was about the team. "Gee, if I have it now, we've got guys stretched out and they can cover for me. If I wait and try to get through it, we won't have guys stretched out. That'd be more difficult to fill that fifth spot." Constantly talking about the team. I think those things are incredibly important. And Todd Frazier, one, a great guy, two, I just love to say, "Frazier".
Josh King:
Sandy, you were mentioning that you're a military brat. Your dad, John, was an air force pilot. He flew missions in three wars, I think including World War II, brought baseball into your life. He told a story I was reading about how you wouldn't be deterred from accomplishing a goal, including getting an autograph from Hank Aaron down in Columbia, South Carolina. I think you were at an exhibition game and you were still pursuing him and you actually threw the ball into his car to get the ball signed. This is a guy who doesn't stop at a goal if it was a Hank Aaron autograph or any of these signings. What are the tools you use from the 162nd game and the end of the playoffs until opening day to make sure you've got the best roster you can?
Sandy Alderson:
Well, what we try to do is have all of our decisions be what I call information driven. It doesn't mean that you rely exclusively on the information but I think you got to be well advised. So a lot of research, a lot of analytical work, but ultimately, boiling it down to a situation where we have the human input from scouts and so forth.
Sandy Alderson:
In baseball there are a couple of bromides. One is, we're going to build through the farm system. Well, okay. Everybody says that. How are you actually going to do it? Execution is so much more important than the concepts. The concepts are pretty well understood. When Moneyball came out, the whole idea of undervalued players with on-base percentage evaporated almost overnight. The discount that it existed, why? Because the information was then public and was also persuasive to people.
Sandy Alderson:
So the concepts have a very short half life but they can continue to have vitality. The question is, how do you take those concepts and translate them into action? How do you implement those things? And that's about personnel. It's about systems. It's about organization. It's a hard thing to do consistently over time.
Sandy Alderson:
But in any event, building through the farm system, we all say it, and the question is, how you do it. Well, in the same vein with analytics, we all say, well, we blend the analytics with the more subjective information from scouting. And of course the question there too is, okay, so how do you actually do that? Some teams have gotten to the point, like I would say the Houston Astros, where they don't do a lot of blending, most of it's analytical
Josh King:
They have some success to show for it.
Sandy Alderson:
There are very few teams, if any, these days who are exclusively subjective, rely on scouting, don't do any analytics, but the key thing, like anything else, how do you execute on that idea? How do you blend the two together? You might in one instance use analytics to whittle down a 100 players to 10 or 15, and then you start looking at character, you start looking at injury history, you start looking at a variety of other things. But that's the fundamental question. And that's what we try to do in the off-season, it's to figure out how to use the information to make a rational decision that also takes into account some of the more subjective elements.
Josh King:
Do you think that growing up as the son of such a technical specialist as a fighter pilot helps you in kind of this process of going through all of the mechanics of checking these lists before you make a decision on a player?
Sandy Alderson:
I don't think so, only because my dad was not what I would call an organized technician. He was more of a seat of the pants kind of guy, which can also be instructive. Sometimes kids go the other direction. I wouldn't say that I am as well organized as people believe I am. I do try to sort through ideas. There are other people in our organization, John Ricco and others, who are far better at follow up than I am, but you do have to make sure that you're comprehensive in the way that you approach things.
Sandy Alderson:
When I was a lawyer, I was a lawyer for five years, and I did some real estate law. If you do real estate, there is a checklist. If you do a lease commercial property, there might be a 100 provisions in that contract. Well, 90 of them are the same in every contract you draw, 10 of them will differ, but it's important that you make sure you got all 100 in there. So the importance of being comprehensive and not reinventing the wheel on every deal is important also.
Josh King:
We talked about Mike Barwis's program down in Port St. Lucie. Beyond the on-field performance, Sandy, we've read in the past years about the importance of diet, exercise, and most importantly, rest. Mickey Callaway has mentioned changing the rest schedules for some of the players, including potentially using a six-man rotation, and what he calls prehab. This sounds similar in many ways to what Gregg Popovich does with the San Antonio Spurs. Is statistical driven health management the next frontier of fielding a winning team?
Sandy Alderson:
I think health management is becoming increasingly important because I think that there's a greater and greater recognition of the impact of good nutrition, good health, good sleeping habits on performance. This gets back to something that's new for us this year. We are more in the vanguard in this area in baseball than most people would give us credit it for.
Sandy Alderson:
The key is figuring out how to assess the players' readiness. For example, this spring, players would come in the morning, we had a special device that would get their weight, but also would get their level of hydration and a couple of other things. And then at the time that they were on this device, they would answer four or five questions. How did you sleep last night? Are you sore anywhere? Et cetera, et cetera. The whole idea was to better assess the preparation of the players and their availability for work.
Sandy Alderson:
So this year, for every player, they will have a travel pillow. We've ended up with, over the course of spring training, we have like seven or eight different pillow styles, hoping that players will take their own pillows with them. The more we can do to enhance those aspects of their daily routine, the better off we're going to be. We are looking at the type of water that we... We provide bottled water, which is not a surprise, but different bottled water has different pH levels, as an example. So the question is, what kind of water are we going to provide them based on the mineral content of the filtered water? And it varies from brand to brand. So that's the level of detail.
Sandy Alderson:
Now, will any of that have a material impact on their performance? We don't know. But it's like other things, you can do a little bit here and a little bit there. We are not going to change our travel patterns. Some teams have considered the idea of traveling the next day, we can't always travel the next day.
Josh King:
A lot of red eyes in your sport.
Sandy Alderson:
You got to get to the next city. So given the limitations that we have, what can we do? Mickey started workouts later in the spring so that we wouldn't have to have players there at Zero Dark Thirty.
Josh King:
As we mentioned earlier, Sandy, baseball and the stock market share a long history. The same stock ticker that revolutionized stock trading was quickly adapted for disseminating baseball scores and statistics. You grew up in Seattle mostly or moving all around?
Sandy Alderson:
All around. Moved everywhere, yeah.
Josh King:
Do you have memories of how you used to sort of ingest stats or data from baseball early on, how you'd get those scores?
Sandy Alderson:
When I first got involved with baseball I was living in Japan. I was 8 years old. This was right after World War II. This was 1955, so 10 years after. So I didn't have access to much there. When I came back to the States we had our first TV. I remember watching the '56 World Series on television. But quite often I would listen to, this was in Central Illinois, so I could listen to the White Sox, the Cubs, the St. Louis Cardinals games. So I got quite a bit of it from the radio. And then trading cards. Bubble gum cards were big in those days and I had a pretty extensive low cost collection.
Josh King:
You still have some of those in the attic?
Sandy Alderson:
No. My mother, the one thing that I will forever fault her for was, while I was away in college, getting rid of my baseball card collection and my stamp collection. I know that nerdy, philatelist-
Josh King:
No, we all have those stories. Luckily my philatelist collection was preserved but my baseball card collection became kitty litter. From the early 1970s, all those great cards.
Sandy Alderson:
Yeah.
Josh King:
The average fan sees a few stats on screen for pitchers, fielders, and batters, strike percentage, fielding percentage, batting average, home runs. Here at the New York Stock Exchange a casual investor will look at, what, dividends and price equity ratios, but in baseball or investing, there's so much more to it than that. Bring us, Sandy, into the front office of the Mets, and give our listeners a few special statistics to keep an eye on in the first 60 days of this season. Things that could point to success or failure in October. What should the smart fan really be looking at for April, May, and June?
Sandy Alderson:
I think that, with respect to pitching, there are a few, not necessarily in order of importance, but one would be swing and miss rates. Swing and miss rates generally mean that a particular pitch either has a high velocity, a large sort of deflection, running or dropping. It may have to do with the spin rate. So spin rates.... With some of the new technology that we have we can measure almost everything. And so it's not just velocity anymore. It's does the pitch move, and not only can you say that with a naked eye but you can actually measure it.
Josh King:
Are these fan-accessible generally?
Sandy Alderson:
Some of them are, yeah. So spin rates, now you would think the spin rate on a curve ball is really important, well, spin rates on a fast ball are too. Because, for example, a higher spin rate tends to make a ball drop less than a low spin rate. If a ball doesn't drop as much, then you're probably better off throwing it high in the strike zone rather than low in the strike zone, or starting it in, say, the middle of the strike zone, and if it doesn't drop, then it's a fat pitch. On the other hand, if a ball is dropping, you probably want to stay down with the ball so the ball doesn't start up and then drop into the zone. A lot of those things come into play and that's the kind of information we didn't have just a few years ago.
Sandy Alderson:
We made a decision on a player... A few years ago we had to decide between Ike Davis and Lucas Duda at first base and we made the decision based on the exit velocity of their balls off of the bat. Lucas had a higher exit velocity, which usually translates into a higher batting average. Now in those days we didn't have what's now known as the launch angle. So today it's a matter of exit velocity and launch angle. And with so many teams shifting now, most teams have decided the best way to attack the shift is to hit over the shift. That's why there's been such a proliferation of home runs because guys are trying to hit the ball in the air.
Josh King:
And are these numbers changing subtly month to month either to indicate growing fatigue in the player or strengthening the player?
Sandy Alderson:
They can change from inning to inning, and that's where the application becomes more important, because if you see a change in the spin rate, change in velocity, change in release point for a pitcher, those things can indicate fatigue, and when you have fatigue you have a higher risk of injury. So it's not just a matter of monitoring that from game to game but it could also be very important in-game. And so that's where ultimately you want to get is being able to use this information on a real-time in-game basis.
Josh King:
After the break, more with Sandy Alderson on the path that took him into baseball and where the sport is headed, right after this.
Speaker 6:
Opening weekend at Citi Field features the Mets' Build-A-Bear Teddy giveaway for the first 15,000 fans in attendance on Saturday, March 31st, and a tote bag giveaway to all fans on Sunday, April 1st when the Mets take on the Cardinals. For tickets to opening weekend, go to mets.com/tickets.
Josh King:
Back now with Sandy Alderson, since 2010, the general manager of the New York Mets. You might be surprised to know that today, only one general manager is a former Major League baseball player, and only four others even played in the Minor Leagues. And Sandy will correct me if I'm wrong on that stat, but your career began as a Marine infantry officer in Vietnam before heading to Harvard Law School. That background doesn't portend to 37 years in this game. What drew you from the bar exam to the base path?
Sandy Alderson:
It was very fortuitous. I was a practicing lawyer in San Francisco doing work that I didn't particularly enjoy, but was the protege of another former Marine Dartmouth College graduate. And he and his father-in-law bought the Oakland A's, and his father-in-law ran Levi Strauss, the Haas family. And so I got involved doing legal work for the A's in the first year or so that they owned the team. I did salary arbitrations and a variety of other things. And one day he just asked me if I wanted to come over full-time and join the A's, and I said, "Why not?" I mean, I can always be a lawyer.
Josh King:
That's a great call.
Sandy Alderson:
It wasn't exactly a tough call, and I just went from there. At time the manager of the Oakland A's was Billy Martin, who's a legendary figure, certainly here in New York, but elsewhere in baseball also.
Josh King:
Number one.
Sandy Alderson:
So my baptism was with the team under Billy's leadership, but when Billy left, he took all of his buddies with him because the whole organization was made up of friends, and cronies, and drinking buddies of Billy's. So when he left, Roy Eisenhardt, the president of the team, and I, and Wally Haas, there was really nobody to turn to, and so I think they said, "Okay. You're it," pointing to me, just because they kind of trusted me, they had known me for a while. That's how I got started on the baseball side.
Sandy Alderson:
Now at that time there were no other people as general managers who were like me. They were all, not necessarily former players, but former Minor League general managers, really old school. And it was fascinating at the time but I was very, very different. Over time I thought there would be more people like me who would get into the game, more lawyers, but as it turned out it hasn't been lawyers who have come into these roles but more technicians, analysts, people who are used to using information.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about old school, there are these great scenes in Moneyball of Billy Beane squaring off against the scouts for the Oakland A's after succeeding you in that role. It's a scene that's probably played out in 29 other front offices at one point or another around the league. What is the current balance between data and human intuition in evaluating a baseball player's talent?
Sandy Alderson:
I think the balance has gone way over in favor of analytics. I think you have to start with the analytics. And I think that helps to explain what's happened this off-season with so many free agents not getting the contracts they expected. You can look no further than what has become known as the ageing curve.
Sandy Alderson:
If you look analytically at the performance of players from the age of 24 or 25 to the age of 35, you see, generally speaking, an overall decline. I think what's happened is that not only are analytics playing an important role but everybody uses analytics pretty much the same way because math is math. So when you have 30 teams that just say, look, I'm not going to give X amount of dollars to somebody who's 36 or 37 years old, and there aren't those outliers who have done it previously because they are now sort of caught up with the rest of group think, things change. So I would say right now there's far more reliance on the analytics than ever before.
Sandy Alderson:
At the same time I think there's an acknowledgement that the more subjective is views are in important. But for example, advance scouting. When we are going to play the Cardinals next week so we advance scout them. We look at all of their players and try to figure out exactly how they're going to attack us and vice versa.
Sandy Alderson:
Well, we used to do that. When I first started we'd do that with an unadvance scout, somebody who would actually go watch the Cardinals. Today we don't do that because we have access to so much more data, so rather than a small sample size, where somebody is actually watching the team, we're relying on video and data from 10, 20, 30 times more information than would be available to an individual. And it's being processed in a way that makes it more organized and usable. So it's night and day.
Josh King:
And that frees up space behind home plate for all those high paying fans.
Sandy Alderson:
That's right. That's right.
Josh King:
There were reports last week that the Yankees and the Red Sox may meet in London in a series in 2019 following the NFL's move across the Atlantic. During your career I think you've worked with the MLB on a lot of issues involving international expansion. How is the game doing internationally and how has all the aspects of the game impacted by events like the World Baseball Classic, the Olympics, and the growth of the game particularly in Europe?
Sandy Alderson:
I was directly involved with international baseball when I was at MLB from 1998 to 2005. One of the greatest experiences of my career was being involved with the Olympic team in 2000 that won a gold medal in Sydney, beating the Cubans in the last game. Incredible experience. It was like a World Series win over a season, collapsed down into a-
Josh King:
Two weeks.
Sandy Alderson:
... like a two-week period. It was incredible. Actually I don't think baseball is doing enough to expand internationally. I tried to persuade baseball to invest more overseas over that period of time and subsequently.
Sandy Alderson:
The Olympics I think are incredibly important. The way the Olympics work is that if you are in Olympic sport, you get subsidy from the government, you also get distributions from the Olympic movement, so there's money available. If you're not in Olympic sport, not only doesn't anybody really care about it in places like China, and Europe, or even the Eastern European countries, there's no money to promote the game. So while there are a lot of these baseball federations around the world, like a 100 of them, most of them are on paper only because there's no money. So if you're not in the Olympics, you're a secondary sport, especially if you're an emerging sport in some of these countries. So getting the game back in the Olympics, and it will be in the Olympics in 2020, is incredibly important. So there is definitely the possibility for disruption over the season.
Sandy Alderson:
You see that with the National Hockey League. They've done it for years and I think the National Hockey League has benefited tremendously from its involvement in the Olympics. This year they weren't in the Olympics, and it'll be interesting to see whether they decide to go back, because I think it's a tremendously important platform.
Sandy Alderson:
It's interesting, I tried to appeal to owners on a couple of different levels, but one level was franchise value. One of the things that contributes to franchise value is the access to capital. And if our sport is not even well-known in the Middle East, or Russia, or some of these other places where there's a concentration of wealth, then the sport doesn't have access to that capital. Not that I'm a big capitalist, but one of the ways I thought I could appeal to powers that be was say, hey, if we cut ourselves off from world capital because nobody really knows our game, it's going to affect franchise values over the long-term.
Josh King:
I mean, John Henry, no stranger to the UK, owner of Liverpool. Is there a special sort of vision that Henry or the Steinbrenners have in thinking that the cricketeers in London will have a particular affinity for the Red Sox and the Bronx Bombers somewhere at Wembley Stadium?
Sandy Alderson:
No, all they care about is being first. They want to go because it's London. It's not Caracas. It's not Puerto Rico. That's a headliner, playing in Wembley Stadium or what have you, being in London so they want to go. Nice thing about London too it's fairly close. It's not like going to Japan.
Josh King:
It's just like L.A. in the other direction.
Sandy Alderson:
Yeah. I think that the Mets were very strongly considered but I think, look, the cache of those two franchises at this point, not just individually but the rivalry will make for good theater in London as it does most places, so I'm happy they are going.
Josh King:
Next city after London that Sandy Alderson would pick.
Sandy Alderson:
Baseball is most popular in the Netherlands.
Josh King:
Really?
Sandy Alderson:
In Europe. Part of that is because of the Curacao and some of the West Indian territories, but baseball has always been popular in the Netherlands. When I was a kid, I was living in England, and the only non-US baseball that I was exposed to was in the Netherlands, but who wants to go play in Rotterdam?
Josh King:
No one.
Sandy Alderson:
So there was a lot of talk about playing in Rome. Baseball is fairly popular in Rome. I don't know if you've been to Florence, that birthplace of Italian Renaissance art, but they have a baseball team. So at night if you're looking at the Duomo, you got to avoid the baseball lights at the ballpark.
Josh King:
But no one can hit a ball against Michelangelo's David and knock off his arm because it's already been done.
Sandy Alderson:
It's already been done. It's not going to happen again.
Josh King:
You're trying to put a product on the field that fans can enjoy this year in the stands or on television, and a perennial topic in the off-season is the pace of play. It's particular focus for Rob Manfred, the commissioner, but the average game I think remains around three hours, and the pitch clock will be gone in 2018, but mound visits are going to be limited, commercial breaks are going to be shorter. Are we missing something? You've been watching games for four decades, are there other ways to improve this game that aren't being considered this year?
Sandy Alderson:
Well, I think the pitch clock is ultimately what will improve the pace of play most efficiently, but I think the commissioner has decided that, given the current relationship between Major League baseball and the Players Association, that imposing a play clock wasn't appropriate at this time. I'm the chair of the rules committee, so I look at these things. And when I was with MLB in from '98 to 2005, one of my responsibilities was to pace the play. And I think the key thing is, and this is what MLB is focused on now, is cutting out the dead time, and the way to do it is to do it incrementally.
Sandy Alderson:
So for example, between innings, most games there's a two minute and five second break. Well, the average break time is like two minutes and 45 seconds, I'm guessing there a little bit, but there's a lot of slippage. If we can tighten that up, and you take, let's say 20 seconds times 18-
Josh King:
18.
Sandy Alderson:
... you're talking about 360 seconds. That's six minutes. That's just one example of where time can be saved. Mound visits, pitching changes. They are little things that we can tighten up. Hitters staying in the box. Making sure that pitchers throw within 15 or 20 seconds is also important but I think we'll probably get there at some point. When I was doing this I always thought 245 was about the right length of a game, and the reason is you could say to people, "The game's a little over two and a half hours," as opposed to, "It's a little over three hours." It's like buying something for 99 cents, it sounds a lot cheaper than something that cost you a buck 10.
Josh King:
And I want to convince my wife to let my kids stay up and watch. Something in the nine hour is different than something in the 10 hour.
Sandy Alderson:
Absolutely, absolutely. Now the ironic thing is that, especially in the postseason, our best ratings are between 11:00 and 11:30 at night. There's always the debate over playing games during the day or playing them at night, starting them earlier than later, but our best ratings are typically in that 11:00, 11:30 timeframe when local news is on, and the games are ending and so forth. So there are a lot of different considerations.
Josh King:
Well, it's getting late here in the ICE House as well, and I want to end our conversation, Sandy, with a quick flashback to the early highlight of your career. San Franscisco, 1989. Dennis Eckersley on the mound for the A's against the Giants. Let's have a trip back down memory lane.
Speaker 7:
But the Giants have certainly not made life easy for them tonight. It's a ground ball on the right side steered by Phillips, flips to Eckersley. Yes. He's there in time, and the A's are the world champions.
Josh King:
A clean 4-0 sweep, but not before an earthquake disrupted the fall pageant. If there are a few keys to the 2018 Mets achieving that same kind of triumph this year, what are they going to be?
Sandy Alderson:
Good leadership from Mickey and the coaching staff. A commitment from every player to every other player as a teammate. Some good luck, every team needs a little bit of luck. I'm really excited about the season. And as I look back on that season-
Josh King:
'89.
Sandy Alderson:
... 1989, it wasn't all roses that whole season, but persevered because of great characters like Dave Stewart, Eckersley. The thing about that team, and I think we have a little bit of that as well with the current Mets team, it was a great team to watch. A bunch of characters. People hated to play us. They hated to lose to us. The most fun was going into another ballpark, kicking their butts, and walking out, because they just disliked all the personalities that we had. Rickey Henderson, he could get under your skin. Jose Canseco, Eckersley. We got a few characters like that on this team. Cespedes,
Josh King:
Gonzalez, he could come back and...
Sandy Alderson:
Well, Adrian's not really a character in a theatrical sense, he's a very solid player. We have some interesting storylines, and of course they don't mean anything if you don't win.
Josh King:
Can't wait to see it. Good luck against the Cardinals.
Sandy Alderson:
All right. Thanks very much. Enjoyed it.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Sandy Alderson, General Manager of the New York Mets. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a question or a comment you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected], or tweet at us @nyse. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Ian Wolff with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steve Portner. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Let's go Mets, play ball.
Speaker 8:
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