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

Reason, Dec, 2003 by Matt Welch

As the A's cruised to another first place finish this year, an odd thing happened: they did it with pitching and fleet-footed defense, not their on-base percentage (which ranked near the bottom of the American League). Quietly, and without the naysayers noticing it, the team has gotten rid of fat slow white guys like Matt Stairs, Jason Giambi, and Jeremy Giambi, while importing low-on-base-percentage defensive wizards such as Chris Singleton. Meanwhile, the Boston Red Sox, who hired Bill James and sabermetric wunderkind Voros McCracken in the off season, had a record-setting, playoff-bound offensive season using forgotten players only stat geeks could love. While the Tracy Ringolsbys of the world stew in their juices, Beane and his fellow travelers are having the last laugh.

"A few years ago," he told the Oakland Tribune recently, "people wondered if we pitched well enough and if we played good enough defense. It's a story untold. All you have to do is score enough runs."

Matt Welch (mwelch@reason.com) is a reason associate editor.

The son of a Little League coach, Associate Editor MATT WELCH was inspired to become a journalist by the snarky elegance of Bill James' Baseball Abstract, which he first read while waiting in line for World Series tickets. James is the most visible proponent of a new statistics-driven management theory called sabermetrics. So it's fitting that Welch takes on sabermetrics' critics in his review of Michael Lewis' Moneyball ("Balls," page 71), a chronicle of the method's embrace by the Oakland A's. Welch writes a fortnightly column for Canada's National Post and maintains a popular weblog at mattwelch.com.