Saved by Softball

By Edwin Amenta

A few years ago one winter, I was elected chairman of my sociology department at New York University in a close vote. I had served briefly as acting chair. But instead of appointing me, the dean sent an e-mail message notifying me that he had chosen someone just hired by the department.

I felt a little like Carrie of Sex in the City after her boyfriend breaks up with her by way of a Post-it. Looking back, I can see that the dean was seeking to smooth over departmental divisions. At the time, though, I was waking up at 3 a.m. wondering why I had been rejected.

But not to worry -- I still had softball! Just before the departmental election, I was also placed in charge of my doormat men's team, which played Monday afternoons in Central Park. After the dean's decision came down, it was as if I were betting double or nothing on my season, seeking to redeem my reputation through the team. My advantages would include having much more power than a chairman. I would be general manager, manager, and player all at once.

My first step was to seek an outside sponsor, which would also made me feel like an owner. The previous manager, Zeus, who quit in frustration at losing, had a roster full of guys quick to complain when they didn't get to play when and where they wanted. After all, they had paid $80. Also, good players won't join a team if they have to pay a lot for the opportunity.

So I contacted Mickey, a soccer fan from Tunisia, whose career had advanced over the years from making sandwiches to running an NYU lunch spot called Pamela's Cantina. Although it served mainly Mediterranean food, the space had previously been leased to the Cactus Cafe and to retain the clientele Mickey kept its Mexican menu selections and jaunty southwestern look. I felt a kinship with him, too -- over the years he provided me as many meals as my mother has. To get him to fork over the entrance fee, I probably overreached by boasting that the team might win hardware for him to display over his bar.

To do that our losing team had to win, and it wasn't going to be easy. We were hemorrhaging talent; our pitcher quit, and Zeus, our best hitter, and another good player joined one of our rivals.

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis describes how the Oakland A's outfoxed richer opponents by amassing players who performed well, but didn't look like great athletes. As the A's general manager Billy Beane put it, "We're not selling blue jeans here." He acquired slow pudgy guys who hit homers and walked.

In softball, however, the undervalued player is someone who will take a walk, but who also reaches on errors and is fast and skilled enough to make more plays than most -- someone like me. Scouting pickup games and other leagues, I added a few such overlooked players.

Meanwhile, I planned to introduce a series of principles of softball I had developed from sabermetrics and social science, combined in an approach I liked to think of as Eddy Ball. Pioneered by the former Stokely-Van Camp night watchman and current Boston Red Sox executive Bill James, sabermetrics is an analytical approach to baseball that uses voluminous data about the sport to assess the value of players and strategies. Mainly, it has subjected the so-called Book -- the unwritten body of conventional wisdom in baseball -- to empirical testing.

And the Book, it turns out, is often wrong. Sabermetricians, also known as statheads, have found, for instance, that, despite years of commentary telling fans otherwise, making an out to advance a runner is rarely a good play and that players with high batting averages and many runs batted in do not always help their teams win.

Like my teammates, I wanted to win. But they had other goals, too, ones that often interfered with winning. Much of the satisfaction of competitive adult softball derives from players' imagining themselves to be like major leaguers, and my teammates identified with them by aping their attitudes.

Mainly musicians, bartenders, stagehands, writers, and others among the marginally or nocturnally employed, my teammates believed that big leaguers followed the Book -- so they were often truer believers in it than baseball insiders were. I found

myself acting like a spy on my own team and advancing my unorthodox ideas chiefly by encouragement.

I never referred to Eddy Ball, or sabermetrics. The last thing I needed was for one of my teammates to ask, "Who do you think you are, 'Professor Baseball?'"

Nonetheless there were often disagreements, especially where Eddy Ball veered from softball players' macho credo. One of my key injunctions was don't be afraid to walk; bases on balls lead to runs, but my teammates viewed them as unmanly.

Another was don't be afraid to hit the ball on the ground. With rocky infields, uneven fielding talent, and three plays needed to record an out, grounders often result in errors, which produce runs, despite reducing batting averages.

Yet another anti-macho, Eddy-Ball injunction -- don't try to hit home runs -- was based on logistics. Central Park has no fences, and New York's softball is soft, so those efforts will usually be flyouts. My teammates also liked to hit sacrifice flies, which trade an out to score a runner from third base.

But to me, like most statheads, the only thing worse than making an out is making an out on purpose, especially in softball, where there are fewer outs to give. Yet my teammates saw the sacrifice as not only noble, but smart, having had it drilled into them since Little League.

All of that made Eddy Ball a hard sell. My teammates saw themselves as rational, not traditional, to use Weber's terms, and understood the Book as less a holy scripture than a textbook based on decades of baseball experience. They viewed sabermetric ideas, meanwhile, as the softball equivalent of fusion in a jar.

It quickly became clear to me that the only way to establish my authority and legitimate my approach was through Weber's third basis of authority -- charisma. I needed to be seen as having extraordinary, inexplicable powers. My teammates would play along with me as long as my magic was powerful -- in other words, if we started to win.

And win we did, taking eight of the first 10 games, dominating the teams that had pounded us over the years. But even as things were going well I faced problems I had never encountered in academe. My more tightly scheduled players would appear only for games against the better teams. Notably, Billy, the rock-band front-man and junk-ball pitcher I recruited mainly because he seldom walked anyone, would occasionally flake, forcing me to pitch. I sweated out the victories against the lesser teams as they hammered my T-ball-like offerings.

I also had a difficult time avoiding overlap between my academic and softball social circles. On a few occasions my teammates and I made postgame pilgrimages to Pamela's for beer. I would traipse through Washington Square Park in the middle of a Monday afternoon, right past the dean's office, standing out in my softball uniform surrounded by similarly clad teammates.

That summer I was mainly working at home and avoiding my faculty colleagues. When they saw me in uniform, they seemed uncomfortable, as if they had bumped into Al Gore after the 2000 election but before he had become a movie star.

In our beery camaraderie at Pamela's, my teammates would be emboldened to challenge Eddy Ball. After one such debating session, I emerged onto the NYU campus, my bleary eyes blinking in the brightness, only to encounter one of my colleagues, who knew I was taking field notes on the season. He raised an eyebrow and asked, "How's the research going?"

Near the end of the season, I realized that not only was managing not that much fun, it was not greatly different from being a department chair.

Both jobs provide an undercurrent of excitement, with little crises to attend to all the time. Sometimes there are important general managerial decisions to make -- like deciding which players or faculty members to recruit.

But the rest of the work is extensive and thankless. It takes great effort to get teammates and colleagues to do things they should volunteer for, like practicing or serving on committees. Teammates want always to play their favorite positions the way colleagues like to teach their favorite classes.

To improve the team or curriculum requires making a few people angry, while the majority who benefit will barely notice. Winning or success in hiring new faculty members -- all that is to be expected and brings little praise. Losing or failing in hiring brings blame.

Meanwhile, the manager's or chair's own work suffers. As acting chair, I was often tapping out upbeat e-mail messages to the faculty or disingenuous reports to the dean when I could've been writing books or articles. In softball, I was often unable to practice before the game, as I consulted with umpires or fiddled with the lineup. I worried about my teammates' reactions to my minor moves, kowtowed to their schedules, and feared that I would be unable to retain their services. I would be looking for a replacement manager for next season.

In August we won our divisional title. I would soon take possession of a massive trophy to hoist above the bar at Pamela's Cantina, which was being refurbished. I was looking forward to a series of lunches with colleagues that fall with that garish award serving as a conversation centerpiece.

When I caught up with Mickey around Labor Day, the cantina had been transformed. The siennas and the faux-Southwestern ambience had been displaced by a brighter Mediterranean look, with bleached imitation-stucco walls and painted cobalt lanterns. The bar area was shrouded in white boudoir curtains, with a chocolate leather daybed nearby. The new name was Pamela's Global.

Mickey didn't want the trophy; it would clash with the new decor. It ended up in my overstuffed apartment, but for having bailed me out, I first thought about presenting it to the dean.