could enter the stats onto his game log cards; it was a five–four win in the ninth inning, his kind of ball when he was a player; David Martinez, his leadoff hitter, bunting down the third base line with the fielder playing back, a stolen base, a wild throw into center field by the catcher, trying to nab him at second, sending him to third and then scoring on a ground ball to first. Transcribing his players’ cards was tedious, senseless work—at least according to the big club. Last fall, not long after they hired a new director of player development—a thirty-something-year-old who seemed proud that he had never played a day of professional ball and who signed his emails “Marc Johansen, MS, MBA”—the team had sent him to a ten-week course at the junior college to learn a suite of statistical computer programs. “You’ve got a lot of what I call ‘Old World’ knowledge,” Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, said when he told Edward Everett he was asking him to learn the programs. “Just think of how valuable you’ll be if you can marry that ‘Old World’ to the twenty-first century.” Although Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, had phrased it as a request, Edward Everett knew he had no choice: shortly after Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, took his job, he’d sent an email to the organization. “I know that when changes occur at the top, everyone gets nervous. I want to assure you that we won’t make any personnel moves for at least sixty days.” The subtext was clear: starting on the sixty-first day, no one had a guaranteed job.
So, grudgingly, every Tuesday night from early October to just before Christmas, Edward Everett sat in a computer lab with kids less than a third his age and hunted-and-pecked his way through the exercises the instructor gave, making spreadsheets of fictitious daily sales of fictitious products of a fictitious company. He was slow, and so, after the instructor explained an assignment and the other students were attacking it with verve—keyboards clattering away—he would sit beside Edward Everett and go over and over the exercises, reaching over his shoulder and hitting computer keys and clicking the mouse, often so quickly that Edward Everett couldn’t follow what he was doing.
“Here,” the instructor would say. Click: a mathematical function occurred on the screen, a sum appearing at the end of a column. “See?” he would ask. Edward Everett didn’t see but nodded like a dumb mule anyway, thinking he just had to get through the class, because Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, said he had to, wanting the instructor just to leave him on his own, because he knew the special attention reinforced the notion that the other students had, that he belonged to a sub-class of human beings: people too old to live.
In time, Edward Everett did learn to use the programs well enough that he could finish the reports he needed to upload every day so that Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, could do what he called “massaging the data.” Nonetheless, he could not stop first doing it the way he had done it for twenty years—it was easier for him to slide a ruler from row to row on a card to see how much more patient Martinez was at the plate, or how his catcher Sean Vila was hitting against left-handers or how deep into a game his starter Pete Sandford went before he started giving up hits and walks to batters who had no business getting on base against him.
On some mornings, he was late uploading his spreadsheets. Then, he would get a scolding phone call from the assistant in the PD department, Mike Renz, his voice high-pitched and nasal: “We can’t do much with numbers we don’t have.” Edward Everett had met him at last year’s annual meeting for the organization’s managers and coaches. Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, was in Lucerne for his honeymoon and bad weather delayed his return flight so Renz stood in for him. He was a skinny kid, his hair spiked with gel that glistened under the lights, and he droned on for an hour with a lecture he titled, “The Future Was Yesterday,” in which he outlined an alphabet soup of statistical tools: VORP, DIPS, WHIP, and what he called a “proprietary metric,” which allowed the team to predict how a minor league player might perform in the major leagues. “Of course,” he said when he clicked on the projector for his PowerPoint, “I don’t expect