Balls: the joy of watching ideas win - Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - Book Review

Reason, Dec, 2003 by Matt Welch

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 275 pages, $24.95

IF EVER YOU were going to judge a book by the reaction to it, an excellent candidate would be Moneyball, reporter Michael Lewis' terrific and brisk account of how a long-simmering and mostly amateur analytical revolution was finally acknowledged, embraced, and ruthlessly implemented by a Major League Baseball executive: Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane. It's a tale of what happens when an energetic manager realizes that "the pursuit of truth [is], suddenly, the key to success," and that the possessors of this truth are outsiders shunned by the rigid hierarchy and insular mind-set that has dominated an industry for a century. You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy the story and thrill to its non-sporting implications.

Beane is the most visible and successful proponent of a new school of baseball thought and scientific analysis that for the last quarter century has been demonstrating, in voluminous detail and with caustic wit, that much of what you've always known about the national pastime is just plain bunk. Dependable "clutch hitters"? They basically don't exist, study after "sabermetric" study has shown. (SabermetHcs, a word coined by the discipline's revered popularizer, Bill James, is derived from the Society for American Baseball Research.) Pitching and defense win championships, right? They don't without good offense, James and others have shown. Are minor league and college statistics meaningless predictors of major league value, especially when compared to eyewitness observation? Actually, something much closer to the opposite is true.

Not surprisingly, some professional dispensers of these leathery, increasingly insupportable cliches have issued denunciations of Moneyball so laughably distant from the sabermetricians' treasured scientific method that they inadvertently added fuel to the statheads' rapidly spreading fire.

Hall of Fame second baseman turned dull broadcaster Joe Morgan repeatedly criticized Billy Beane for having the nerve to write such a book, even though, um, Beane didn't. WSVN.com columnist Ralph Wiley suggested that Bill James had a possibly racial anti-Rickey Henderson motive for disparaging reckless base stealing 20 years ago. Actually, James has spilled more ink defending Henderson's greatness than any writer I'm aware of. Toronto Star baseball writers Richard Griffin and Geoff Baker, who have been railing against Moneyball all summer (Toronto Blue Jays General Manager J.P. Ricciardi is a former protege of Beane), both suggested that sabermetrics has helped transform their team into the "White Jays"--a bunch of boring, slow-footed Caucasians good mainly for drawing walks and hitting home runs. "Ricciardi along with Oakland's Billy Beane and other new-wavers believe in building offence through patience at the plate and taking no chances on the bases," Griffin wrote. "That's a pre-WWII style of play. Under those criteria, Jackie Robinson could not have played in the majors." This is pure nonsense; Robinson is a stat geek favorite for his high-percentage base stealing, vastly underrated defense, and high walk rates, in addition to his barrier-breaking courage.

In a later column, Griffin branded the Society for American Baseball Research a "cult" Tracy Ringolsby, longtime diamond columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and Baseball America, trashed Moneybag as a "one-sided, poorly researched piece of literature," written by a man with "limited knowledge of baseball" who failed to appreciate the evidence of Beane's shortcomings. "Heck," Ringolsby triumphantly announced, "the A's haven't even been to the World Series in the Billy Beane era."

Of course, neither have 21 other teams (out of a possible 30) since Beane was hired in 1997. But there are other factors in evaluating an organization's performance. For instance, since the beginning of 2000, only one other major league club has won more regular season games than Oakland (the Seattle Mariners, who have just one more win), and the A's have achieved this despite being restricted by one of the smallest budgets in baseball. Oakland's payroll for the 2003 season, when the team made its fourth consecutive trip to the playoffs, was $49 million; that's $10 million less than the Detroit Tigers, who this year set the American League record for losses in a season. Industry wide, the average annual payroll is around $75 million; the New York Yankees, who barely squeaked by the A's in the 2000 and 2001 playoffs, spend $180 million, more than three times as much.

Lewis, a gifted writer best known for his 1989 Wall Street memoir Liar's Poker, wanted to figure out just how David was managing to compete with Goliath, year after year. What he discovered was the first-ever baseball organization to rip up more than 100 years' worth of tradition by adopting, from the owner's box down to the lowest minor league scout, a total organizational approach based on the principles and information hashed out in the thriving and mostly ignored subculture of baseball analysis. Working in a comparatively small city and saddled with a lousy stadium, the A's were financially desperate enough to consider radical measures for finding quality players grossly undervalued by the market. Sandy Alderson, a rare baseball outsider turned general manager who ran the mostly successful franchise through most of the 1980s and '90s, had been an early enthusiast of sabermetrics, and he sprinkled his organization with people open to its ideas. But it wasn't until the team ownership changed in 1995 that his budget mandate became grim enough to accelerate the process. That's when he gave one of his new hires, an intellectually restless young ex-player named Billy Beane, a stack of Baseball Abstracts, the seminal annual books authored from 1977 through 1988 by Bill James.