Haverball

With Josh Byrnes ’92 and Thad Levine ’94 shaking up baseball’s front offices, will America’s pastime ever be the same?

Sitting in the cool shade of the visiting team’s dugout, Thad Levine gazes across the expanse of Denver’s Coors Field, its empty stands gleaming in the lazy Colorado afternoon, and lets the words tumble out. “This is my first time coming home.”
The clean-cut, well-dressed 34-year-old lets the words hang in the air, punctuated only by the percussion of batting practice, the echoes of wood meeting hide reverberating through the stadium as balls arc into the bleachers, a sound soon to be diluted by the cheers and applause, the booming announcements and vendor hollers of the coming Friday evening clash between the Colorado Rockies and the Texas Rangers.
“It feels like home,” he repeats thoughtfully, surprising himself, considering that where he really belongs, ever since last October, is 800 miles away in an office in the Ranger’s Ameriquest Field in Arlington, Texas, labeled “Assistant General Manager,” not in this diamond framed by Denver skyscrapers and the Rocky Mountains, a field that’s just a three-game stopover for his Texas squad.
But, in truth, this ballpark should feel like home. Coors Field was his territory, his world, for the previous six baseball seasons, where he’d scoured scouting reports, deconstructed game videos pitch by pitch, and haggled with agents over lavish contracts. And it was here he worked hand in hand with Josh Byrnes, his mentor and long-time friend, spending countless hours with him fine-tuning provocative theories that might score the Rockies that one extra, crucial run. Then, when they had a precious free minute, the two colleagues would sit back and reminisce about the times, not that long ago, when they shared a baseball diamond at Haverford College. They compared college memories, like those of their annual team trips to Florida that always seemed to involve more baseball games than there were hours in those hot, Gulf Coast days. They shared favorite stories, like the time the team celebrated an especially dramatic victory against Swarthmore by returning to the field that night, replaying the winning at-bat pitch by pitch.
The long hours the two spent together are in the past. With Levine in Texas and Byrnes in Arizona as general manager of the Diamondbacks, all they share are the late-night, long-distance calls. Over the phone, in between the batting-order ruminations and multi-million dollar payroll discussions, maybe the two have just enough time to marvel, just for a minute, at how these two college buddies, Byrnes ’92 and Levine ’94, have skyrocketed, in just a handful of years, from the dusty anonymity of Division III college ball to some of the most powerful and demanding jobs in the game.
* * *
Ron Shapiro still remembers the home run. It was 1993 and Shapiro was at bat during a homerun-hitting contest at a Haverford alumni game. The Class of ’63 slugger still had it in him; after all, as an agent-attorney for Cal Ripken, Jr, Kirby Puckett, and Eddie Murray, among others, he’d never drifted far from the game. Shapiro slammed a line drive to the fence, a great hit—but another alum hit one further, a rocket over the fence. It was at the hands of Josh Byrnes, a young, strapping health-care consultant with an “H” on his chest who approached Shapiro and told him that he wanted to get into baseball operations more than anything. Though he’d never met him, Shapiro agreed to help—and not just because of his impressive swing.
“There was a quiet, unassuming yet intense air about him,” says Shapiro. “It told me he was a special guy.”
Byrnes had always been this way: inspiringly intense, unpretentiously confident—especially when it came to his favorite sport. “I loved baseball ever since I was a small kid,” says Byrnes, speaking over the phone. “I loved playing it. I loved following it. It’s been a bit of a life-long obsession.” Growing up in Washington, D.C., he poured over arcane box scores while his peers compared baseball cards. When he wasn’t hammering out runs at the plate or throwing bee bees from second base at St. Albans, the elite prep school he attended, he’d be reporting to his coaches on the holes he’d spotted in his teammates’ swings—talking like a professional scout, not a high school freshman.
No wonder his high school nickname was “Sire”: This kid deserved respect, on and off the field. “He was a very regal guy,” remembers Mark Naples, Haverford Class of 1984, who taught and coached baseball at St. Albans at the time: “He had an eye for detail that I had not experienced. I was looking at this kid and thinking, you’re just 15?”
Byrnes inspired such awe wherever he went. The first time Sire first stepped onto Haverford’s field, it seemed to Greg Kannerstein, then the baseball coach, that it was as if nobody told the newbie he wasn’t playing Division I ball. “He knew the game so well,” says Kannerstein, who’s now school dean. “He had far more knowledge of the mechanics and overall strategy than any player I coached, and he was only a freshman. And he was able to convey that in a way that didn’t seem pretentious.” Byrnes became team captain in every sense of the word. He spent a summer building a Haverford bullpen by hand. Before games he’d be in the infield, rake in hand, attacking lumps that could lead to a crucial ball bouncing away. And he still found the time to break the school’s home run record and lead his team to the top of what was then called the Middle Atlantic Conference.
A series of shoulder injuries leaving his mighty arm hanging limp and dreams of professional on-field glory dashed, Byrnes set his post-graduation sights on a job in baseball operations. There was only one problem: how to break into the old boys’ bastion ensconced in remote front offices, a world inundated with applications from people who seemed, on the surface, just like him. Luckily, he found the ultimate insider: Ron Shapiro. The superstar agent was so impressed with this indomitable home run-hitter that he met at the alumni game he called up his son Mark, an upper-level manager with the Cleveland Indians. “He said if you hire [Byrnes] at some point, he is going to make your organization better,” remembers Mark Shapiro, now the Indians’ GM. Not long after, Byrnes found himself in Cleveland with a $6-an-hour Indians internship and a foot in the door. It may have been negative twenty degrees out that morning in Ohio, but to him it felt like a perfect day.
The young intern could not have known just how lucky he’d been; that starting with the Indians’ front office in 1994, he was in the middle of baseball’s mad scientist laboratory, a crucible of outfield insurrectionists and at-bat alchemists. The team’s GM, John Hart, had surveyed his club’s state of affairs—a mid-market payroll in a sport where only richest teams scored championship-winning superstars—and decided it was time for a change. The retired minor league catcher filled his front office with young, unorthodox assistants, people who weren’t afraid to replace the long-held lexicon of the game, data such as pitchers’ win totals and RBIs, with more accurate measures of success, stats like one-base percentages and runs created, quantifiers that had long been unsuccessfully championed by number-crunching baseball outsiders. Hart developed a long-term player strategy, lassoing young guns like Kenny Lofton and Manny Ramirez into long-term contracts before their emergent talents priced them out of the team’s payroll. In short, Hart treated his operation not like an unsystematic, tradition-laden “club,” as most GMs had always done, but like an innovative and economical business—with huge dividends down the line: Five consecutive American League Central titles. A sold-out stadium for 455 straight games. And a cadre of Hart apprentices—Mark Shapiro, Paul DePodesta, Dan O’Dowd, Chris Antonetti—that would go on to lead front-office revolutions all over the country.
That illustrious list included Byrnes. In a baseball team built like a business, he was the ultimate executive. He integrated novel video analysis with antiquated game-charting software to expose the elusive holes in the swings of daunting opponents like Mo Vaughn and José Canseco. He experimented in inventive numerical methods to suss out weak links in the Indians’ batting order. Soon promoted to scouting director, he spent 250 days a year, radar gun in hand, in one-street towns and indistinctive hotels and company rental cars, scrutinizing promising pitchers’ release points, imagining the prospects of a 17-year-old wunderkind a decade down the road. He succeeded at it all. “He was a guy who, once given an opportunity, started to impact us pretty quickly,” says Mark Shapiro. “The pace of Josh’s thinking, his awareness of what was going on around him, it was clear from a knowledge standpoint and an intellectual standpoint that he could make us a better organization.”
Byrnes’ secret weapon, one born in the Haverford classroom, was his skepticism—no convention was too sacred to be challenged, and no method too unusual to be used to challenge it. “A lot of baseball tradition is gray. A lot of it is thoughts that haven’t been challenged in too long,” says Byrnes. “Haverford began my ability to analyze, research and articulate thoughts on anything. Ten years ago, I’m at a game and I’m hearing scouts not wanting short right-handed pitchers, and my sense is to research that and find out the accuracy of that sort of pathology.”
In 1999, Byrnes packed up his innovations and valuable cynicism and bid Cleveland adieu. A different team, a new front office, was ready for his talents. But first he needed a cohort, someone who’d match his passion and intellect. He knew exactly where to find him.
* * *
Thad Levine waited by the phone, ready for the call that would send him to baseball’s version of Siberia.
It was a call he’d been had been wanting for a long, long time—the call that would get him into baseball. Years before, just out of Haverford, he had sent resumes to every front office in the game; the few responses he’d received, a handful of formal rejection letters, he’d treated like prized autographs. He had justified stints at Reebok and Coca-Cola by figuring they were tangentially related to baseball. While getting his Master’s in business at UCLA, he’d finagled an internship with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a tantalizing taste of the industry that was all too short. His former Haverford baseball teammate Josh Byrnes had nurtured Levine’s enthusiasm every step of the way, providing the outsider with an intimate look at the Cleveland Indian’s front office, keeping him abreast of possible openings. And now the breakthrough had finally come, the news that Byrnes would moving to a new team—where, if all went as planned, there’d also be an opening for Levine. There was just one catch: It would be with the Brewers, in freezing-cold Wisconsin. And Levine wasn’t a fan of the cold.
But Levine had packed his bags eagerly, waiting for the final, official call from his old classmate telling him to get on a plane and meet him in Milwaukee. After all, Levine trusted his old friend instinctively—if Byrnes told him to go to Wisconsin, he’d go to Wisconsin. They’d been this way ever since they’d first met at Haverford and Byrnes, learning that Levine was from his native Washington, D.C., barraged the underclassman with obscure Orioles trivia questions—each of which Levine answered perfectly. While Byrnes was hammering away at the school’s home run record, Levine was throwing heat seekers from the mound, securing a string of pitching victories that ranks among the school’s all-time best. And once Byrnes had graduated, his captainship passed down to Levine—with the former captain’s stirring intensity replaced by the latter’s infectious, charming charisma. “Thad had a million and one best friends,” says his former teammate Ashby Jones ’92. “You just knew he was going places.”
Levine was indeed going places—just not, as it turned out, to Milwaukee. With his sweaters and winter hats packed, Levine finally received the long-awaited phone call from Byrnes, the one that ushered him into the game. But it wasn’t the call he was expecting.
“Josh said, ‘Meet me here in two days,’” remembers Levine. “I said, ‘Alright, but I’ve never been to Milwaukee in my life.’ And he said, ‘We’re going to Denver.’ My response was, ‘Thank goodness.’”
Thanks to a last-minute arrangement, the two joined the Rockies’ front office, Byrnes as assistant GM, Levine as baseball operations assistant. They were faced with an expansion team whose honeymoon period had waned, one that sorely needed an infusion of energy and inspiration. To meet the challenge, Levine adopted the meticulous and innovative approaches Byrnes had honed in Cleveland—scrutinizing video footage of every team at-bat to figure out why a clutch hitter was striking out looking, crunching huge amounts of computer data to statistically prove the disastrous effects Coors Field’s mile-high altitude and mammoth outfield had on a pitcher’s potential, consulting endless scouting reports and veteran scouts’ opinions to understand the reason behind this slugger’s stance and that hurler’s delivery.
“Thad really has the best qualities of people in this game,” says Byrnes. “He has tremendous passion for baseball. He’s incredibly bright with a lot of strong skills. But probably most importantly, he’s got a lot of character and sanity in a
business where people don’t always do the right thing.”
After a three-year mentorship, Levine was on his own in Colorado. Byrnes was off to the Red Sox Nation where, in 2004,
as assistant GM in a front office, he helped pilot the Red Sox to their first World Series since 1918. Meanwhile, Levine was excelling in Denver, managing payroll, negotiating player contracts and spotting financial trends as the Rockies’ director of baseball operations. In 2003, Baseball America magazine ranked Josh Byrnes as one of the game’s top-10 general manager prospects. Thad Levine, hot on his tail, made the shortlist.
* * *
Thad Levine watches his charges, the broad-shouldered men in gray and blue, power practice ball after practice ball into the vacant Coors Field bleachers and thinks about the future. He’s thinking beyond the game tonight, which will feature his current team, the Rangers, prevailing 8-6 courtesy of a pair of back-to-back home runs. And he’s thinking beyond their three-game series, which his former team, the Rockies, will take with victories the following nights. Levine is thinking decades down the line, to a time when these day-by-day triumphs and defeats may have long faded from memory but the effects of the current front-office tinkering, the subtle insurrections led by people such as Byrnes and himself, will surely still be felt.
“I foresee, fast forward 25 years, we’ll have a family tree, where Josh Byrnes will be on the top, and the rest of us will be splintered off. I’d like to think there’d be a few branches off my name, and a few branches off [Indians GM] Mark Shapiro and [Indians assistant GM] Chris Antonetti, and [former Dodgers GM] Paul DePodesta, and [assistant Marlins GM] Michael Hill, and [Red Sox GM] Theo Epstein. Those are all people that Josh has had an opportunity to touch,” he says. “He showed us it’s not about having quick success in the game. It’s about having lasting success in the game. He’s not going to be the shooting star. He is going to have a very lasting impact, and he already has.”
The impact of these young innovators is everywhere. It’s been felt in Boston, where fresh-faced brain trusts armed with numerical esoterica helped dispel the Curse of the Bambino. It can be seen in action in Oakland, where GM Billy Beane is running the A’s with the efficiency and vision of a stock-trading company, leading his bargain-basement squad to one of the best track records in the business. It’s reverberating through baseball operations all over the country, where data-gorging computers are being installed and front office walls are being decorate with diplomas from Cornell, Yale, Harvard—and Haverford. And it has taken a hold in popular culture, where sports-page chroniclers and business pundits have given a name to this new, bold, style of play: Moneyball.
These tremors have shaken game to its core, and not everyone’s happy about it. The lines have been drawn, sides taken. It’s the revenge of the nerds, the game’s old-timers bemoan, in which all you need to run a team is an Ivy League degree and a calculator. When DePodesta, a young statistics-wielding Harvard grad, was let go after two tumultuous years at the helm of the Dodgers, there were muffled snickers from the sidelines. Look, the skeptics whispered: the kids are not alright—they may know a thing or two about spreadsheets, decimal places and random variables, but when it comes to the soul of the game, the human element, the mixture of guts and gumption required to take a team all the way, they will always be rookies, plain and simple.
The thing is, these two Haverford alums don’t quite fit the stereotype. Not Byrnes, with his well-traveled radar gun and dog-eared scouting reports and his innate ability to sniff out critical baseball intangibles like the personality quirk of the red-hot high school prospect that doesn’t show up in his stats but would lead to disaster under the gaze of 40,000 fans. And not Levine, with his undeniable magnetism and insatiable curiosity, his oft-used ability to parse the fundamentals of the game with 21-year-old statisticians and grizzled old scouts alike.
Watching batting practice in Coors field, Levine considers the current clash between statistics and scouting, the new school versus the old, and places his allegiance firmly in the middle. “I think that the people who are continuing to excel in the game are the people who have shown an appreciation of both schools of thought. And I think those of us who are committed to statistical analysis to the exclusion of the other side are getting weeded out, but likewise the scouts who don’t really think there’s a place for statistical analysis in decision making are also getting weeded out,” he says. “I think what you are seeing is a continued refinement of the types of personnel who work this game. Everyone now is on the continuum of scouting and statistics.”
Byrnes agrees. “I got to know the governor of Colorado pretty well when I was in Colorado, and he came by [The Red Sox’s] Fenway Park a few years later. I gave him a tour of the ballpark, and he said, ‘Which side of it are you on? Are you on the numbers side or the scouting side?’ So I said, ‘Governor, this isn’t Republican or Democrat. We don’t have to declare our affiliation here. Whether a scout gives me an opinion or whether [statistics guru] Bill James gives me in opinion, I have to ask the tough questions about it.’”
Byrnes and Levine’s staunch refusal to be pigeonholed, their flourishing versatility—part of that must come from Haverford, concludes Ron Shapiro, the sports agent and fellow alum who set the baseball rolling, so to speak, for both of them. “The values they exhibit, their emphasis on character and values is certainly part of a Haverford tradition,” says Shapiro. “Statistical analysis is a big part of modern baseball. And intellectual strength supports that. But people still go with their gut on character. There are a lot of people who don’t make the grade in terms of human elements. And I think Haverford is one of the places that combines the intellectual side with the human side.”
The two former college teammates don’t see much of each other these days. There are usually just the phone conversations, Byrnes calling from Phoenix, full of stories of his freshman season as general manager of the Diamondbacks, where he’s surrounded himself with a motley crew of subordinates—Stanford graduates, corporate executives, former major league players—who reflect his own wide-ranging proficiencies. Levine, on the other end of the line, counters with tales of his first year as assistant GM of the Rangers, where he’s fusing cutting-edge statistical analysis and traditional player analysis to breathe new life into the squad. The two note the progress of the other Haverford upstarts who are following in their footsteps and making inroads into the game all over the country, in minor league clubhouses, major league executive suites and high-powered sports agency offices [see sidebar]. And they surely grumble a bit about their 40-phone call, 18-hour days; the unending media spotlight; the pressure of never knowing if a sour season or botched draft will end their careers; and the meager time left to spend with their wives and, in Byrnes’ case, his young daughter.
But all of it, both admit—the pressure and uncertainty, the long hours and skeptical headlines—is worth it. The hard work is worth the inexplicable feeling of cultivating a promising amateur from high school obscurity through draft days and minor league teams and watching him bloom into a superstar known the world over. The anxiety is worth the indescribable sensation of watching the first pennant flag or World Series banner rise in their stadium in 40, 60, 80 years, and knowing they had a hand in it. And the nerve-wracking insecurity of the job is worth the giddy, optimistic hope that maybe one day, if they play the game just right, the two of them, Byrnes and Josh, will once again share a baseball diamond.
“My dream one day is putting together a dream team,” says Levine as the Rangers take their last practice swings and the crowds begin to trickle into Coors Field. “Josh and I will be working together in the front office, working towards retirement. Getting to share that experience with our families, and working with a lot of people that we’ve helped get into the game. We’ll put together an all-star team in the front office and win a few championships.” And when it’s all over, when that final, World Series-winning home run has sailed over the stands and into the night, maybe they’ll all go down to the field and, under the lights, replay that last miraculous at-bat pitch by pitch.

Joel Warner ’01 is a Denver, Colo.-based freelance writer for newspapers and magazines.

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