As Election Day nears on November 6, people all over Washington are out campaigning and fighting for their jobs. Washington Nationals manager Davey Johnson isn’t one of them. He took a team that had never so much as finished with winning record since their arrival in 2005 and, with an unconventional approach, led them to the best record in Major League Baseball and their first playoff appearance in team history (and first in Washington in nearly 80 years).
Johnson and the Nationals front office have built their team mainly with the use of sabermetrics (the analysis of baseball using statistics pioneered by Bill James and popularized by Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s in the film Moneyball and the book of the same name). Holding firm to their beliefs in their research hasn’t always been popular among the fans, however. Earlier this year, the team shut down their ace, Stephen Strasburg, after a set number of innings after consulting studies and statistics that led them to believe it would help protect his future health.
Even without their top pitcher, the Nationals took the top seed on the National League and have already taken a 1-0 advantage in the best-of-five Division Series against the Cardinals. With the success Johnson and the Nationals have found making decisions based on statistics AND intangibles–facts AND analysis–Ben Bernanke opines, “Many of us in Washington could learn a thing or two from the Nationals’ approach.” He might just be right.
MICHAEL ADAM RAY 