Bottom of the S-curve

Many authors, broadcasters, former players, and other baseball men say American League teams were slower to integrate than National League teams. But just looking at the timeline, it's not clear how much slower they were. Until 1953, both teams seemed neck and neck. But three NL teams integrated that year, against only 1 AL team, and the Senior Circuit held that lead until Pumpsie Green came along. But it doesn't look like a huge difference.

Clearly it's not enough to look only at the time each time picked up its first black player. It's just as important -- if not more important -- to look at when a team picked up its second black players, and it's third, and so on.

David Marasco has a timeline detailing the integration of Major League Baseball, or at least the time when each team added their first black player to their major league roster. Jackie Robinson started the 1947 season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but Boston Red Sox didn't call up Pumpsie Green until 1959. What happened in between? After the Dodgers, Indians, and Browns integrated in '47, it would take two years before the next team integrated. After that, teams were still slow to acquire black players. It wasn't until 1953 that it seemed most of baseball warmed up to the idea. Between 1953 and 1955, six of the sixteen teams added their first black player. At that point, over three-fourths of the league's teams had a non-white, but the Phillies, Tigers, and Red Sox held out. It would be another four years before these stragglers joined the party. This is the "S-Curve of Adoption" at work. When a new idea or technology comes along, there are "early adopters" who pick it up almost immediately, a delay before the bulk of the market jumps on board, and then second long stretch where the remaining stragglers catch up.

The latest new technology in baseball is the analytic study of players, and more importantly, the willingness to act on that analysis. And the market of baseball teams is still slave to the S-curve. After three where Billy Beane was going it alone in Oakland, analysis now drives much of the decision making process for Toronto and Boston as well. You can split hairs about several other teams -- like the Indians, Royals (?), Padres, and Astros -- but many teams are still slow to adopt Beane's methods. There are several accounts of teams actively shunning books like Moneyball, though they always quote the quotable "unnamed sources". How long will it take before everyone is on board? Well, it's hard to tell. You have to imagine that the cultural pressure against integrating baseball teams in the 1950s is much higher than the pressure against employing someone with a B.S. in the 1990s, but on the other hand, the current generation of front office employees is probably less than enthusiastic about the idea of radically changing the way they do their business. Beane started as G.M. of the As in 1998. We're only just now seeing performance analysis (that's a fancy way of saying "looking at the numbers as well as the players") creep into the front offices of a half-dozen teams at most, so there are likely three or four more years before the bulk of major league baseball places their faith in this idea.

All of this is a long winded way of saying I have some extra time to sock away cash in preparation for a massive pay cut to move into the baseball industry. The odds that eight to twelve teams will suddenly employ a numbers-savvy assistant GM in the next two years is pretty low. Breathe.