The Opening Bell

Rian Watt will now be contributing regularly to FanGraphs. This represents his opening salvo for the site.

I read last week that 100% of the S&P 500’s gains over the last quarter-century have come between 4:00 pm and 9:30 am, Eastern Standard Time. These are the hours during which the market is closed. For the last 25 years, in other words, you would likely have been better off buying at close and selling at open every day than bothering one bit about trading stocks outside those times.

This fact astonished me.

It also caused me to wonder who the heck would learn such a thing and draw from it the conclusion, as the New York Times did, that a sensible thing to do in response would be to sell at open and buy at close every day, and trade no further. This is partially because I have a natural skepticism of any market advice that involves participating in the market in the first place.

But it is also because it seems to me that, if you’re going to play the stock market, you might as well play during the day time, when everyone else is playing, too. The other way might make you money more surely and in larger quantities, but it’s also tremendously boring and does little to liven up the interval between when you’re born and when you die. So why bother at all?

I’ve been writing about baseball for three years now, at The Athletic, at Baseball Prospectus, at FiveThirtyEight, at VICE — and, as of today, at FanGraphs. That isn’t a very long time, really, but it’s long enough to make you think you’ve understood whether you’re part of the problem or not. Until this offseason, I didn’t think that I was part of the problem. I now think that I am.

In the three years I’ve been doing this, I’ve written plenty of articles that have praised teams for taking the long view — for trading two wins now for 10 later; for properly understanding their place on the win curve; for locking up young players on the cheap; for getting a good bargain on dollars per win. I’ve written plenty of articles that have praised teams for being very clever.

Too clever by half. It’s possible that some of the slowness of this offseason to date has come from a small handful of teams simply being unwilling to spend and using the powerful legacy of honest-to-God rebuilds in Houston and Chicago to cover for plain and simple grift. But more of it, I think, has come from a sort of mass intellectual narrowing that has captured, to one extent or another, even the 20 or so teams that are, actually, trying to win.

The dominant orthodoxy rests on three tenets I’ve slowly come to view as noxious:

• That a win in the future is worth some large share of a win in the present;
• That acquiring a good deal is better (or at least more defensible) than acquiring a good player; and
• That baseball is a game primarily for and by the general managers, and not for the fans or for the players.

Look, I get it. I’ve thought those thoughts. I’m the guy who reads process stories for fun. (I write them, too.) I’m the guy whose copy of Moneyball fell apart from use, who got an Econ degree and wrote for Nate Silver. I’m the guy who’s been reading this site for years, and I value cleverness and smarts and marginalism, too.

But folks, we only have so long to live. The closing bell isn’t that many hours away. You’ve already come to understand that, like me, you’ve somehow been condemned to spend some substantial portion of your life caring about this stupid game with the dirt and the bat and the ball with 108 tight stitches of bright red thread gleaming against immaculate white leather.

Wouldn’t you rather watch Aaron Judge hit the everloving shit out of that glittering ball than watch his balding boss, back in the luxury suite, push some paper around? Don’t you do enough paperwork already? Isn’t it time to ditch the marginal and chase the absolute? It sounds, frankly, a lot more fun than the game we have now.

Even the best teams — the teams that are both good and trying to win — suffered from an overabundance of cleverness that led them to believe that somehow $125 million or thereabouts was a good price for Yu Darvish, but $175 million guaranteed was extreme to the extent that it pushed them to the brink of spring baseball without putting his name on a dotted line.

That’s insanity. Pretty much every MLB team could have signed Darvish for $175 million, been better in an instant, and still kept peanut prices exactly where they were. But none of them did it, perhaps in part because one graphed line met another somewhere around age 35 and they together suggested that a combination of Alex Cobb and half a backup catcher might return more value per dollar spent.

But wouldn’t you rather have watched Darvish pitch for your team in 2018 than whoever it is you have as fifth starter now? Sure, he’ll be worse in a few years than he is today. After that he’ll be dead. But maybe in the middle of all of that overpay he’d have won some ballgames for you and yours and give you just a few moments of transcendence along the way. Why do you watch this game?

I don’t know what the game wants that answer to be. As it is, this offseason has left fans considering for entertainment — instead of baseball played on a field under sunshine and on green grass — some half-acknowledged vaudeville of 10-dimensional chess played out in imaginary futures, where each year brings with it a new cast of contenders. The prospect of a 30-team competition for a title in the children’s game has all but vanished — and with it, I think, a great deal of the fun.

You may be reading this and thinking, “Well, yes. But so what?” (You might also think I’m an idiot, but I hope not.) The “so what” is this: I’ve spent too much of the last three years valorizing losing in order to win and praising teams for making marginal improvements when wholesale advances were appropriate. Some of it has been good writing, but too much of it has been far too incautious.

As I start this new chapter at FanGraphs, I’d like to change that — to reexamine the way I write about teams and what they do, and the frames I use to judge them. I’m honored and delighted to join this wonderful community of writers and readers (I was one of you for a very long time), and I am confident that spending time with you will make me a better thinker and analyst. Perhaps it’ll even provide some moments of interest for you, too…

For now, here we are, just a few short weeks away from beginning again. Life is too often lived balanced on the edge of a knife, in moments far too precarious to allow us the time to gather our footing and swing for the fences. But baseball doesn’t have to be played that way. Enough. The opening bell is about to ring. Wouldn’t you rather all 30 teams be out there going for broke?