On Moneyball

To answer the question I keep being asked, no, I'm not excited about a movie coming out named Moneyball, despite the two giant moneyballs sitting in my living room (crappy State Fair prizes). Because I know what it's about.

Back when I first read Moneyball, I was in the middle of some kind of binge of books on sports and serial killers, two subjects which actually have a frightening amount of overlap. Both turned out to be largely about men so fixated on one idea they would go to any extreme to appease their demons, and I don't know if I'd prefer being locked in a room with a serial killer or with Mike Agassi and Peter Graf. However in this sea of vivid characters, Moneyball left me cold, for several reasons.


The first problem is it very quickly became dated. Some of the ideas about baseball statistics are interesting, and they were no doubt revolutionary and controversial back in the 2002 season when Michael Lewis was researching this book, but to a large degree the new stats have already entered the conversation especially when it comes to hitters, so it's hard to join in Lewis' smugness as he proclaims Billy Beane a genius for discovering on-base percentage. Lewis tracks the meteoric rise of minor league players who we now know never made it or flamed out, and almost ten years later Beanes legacy is a lot more questionable after he backed out of a big-market job with the Red Sox and led the A's back into obscurity.

Knowing a bit more about how things turned out, Lewis' almost masturbatory tone when describing Beane and his pet prospects becomes insufferable at times. Lewis is so caught up in the magical moments of "catcher with a bad body" Jeremy Brown's historic journey to the majors it's like he hasn't read his own book: early chapters describing Billy Beane's career as a player describe how a "can't miss" prospect never made it as a pro and offers this as proof of the incompetence of the baseball scouting establishment. At the same time, Lewis illustrates Beane's genius by telling the story of how he found the catcher with a bad body and snagged the undervalued player the establishment didn't want (but mysteriously doesn't explain why Beane used a high draft pick on a player nobody wanted). Several chapters raving about Brown and Nick Swisher and the future of the A's seemed a little anti-climactic when Brown is retired and Swisher was riding the bench in another city. Ironically, Beane's six years in the majors look pretty good compared to Brown's ten career at-bats with the A's.

Moneyball is not without merit, and there's certainly some interest in some of the stories of the inner workings of the A's office and how Beane worked trades with other GM's, but the love affair Lewis has seemingly entered with his muse undermines his credibility. Anyone who dares to disagree with Beane is maligned and dismissed, as Lewis tells us statistical analysis shows that A's manager Art Howe's single contribution to the team's success was to inspire the players by standing on the top step of the dug-out with his chin stuck out. Otherwise the manager is just sort of there, getting in Beane's way. Lewis acknowledges that the GM is not allowed into a major league clubhouse, so it's hard not to wonder if his brief dismissal of Howe stems from the manager's disagreements with Beane over the relevance of game situations vs. broad statistics.

And statistics is ironically where Moneyball seems to get lost. Once again it seems like Lewis hasn't read the first half of his own book where Billy Beane's philosophy is initially presented as seeking value, finding the aspects of the game and the players that are undervalued and therefore easier to acquire with a small market team's resources. The key stat Beane found was on-base percentage, and with it the ability to build a team that didn't have power or speed but could string hits together and keep an inning going. Lewis tells us the A's were going to ignore defense and baserunning, not waste money chasing power hitters and pitchers and just keep runners moving and count on maximizing the number of runs they scored over 162 games. Over time every else caught up to what Beane was doing, so presumably he would change his strategy to find another undervalued aspect of the game. But like all statheads, Lewis gets married to one idea and extends it way, way past the boundaries of the model, and comes to the conclusion that maximizing on-base percentage is the only way to win a baseball game.

That strategy did score a lot of runs and win a lot of games for the A's in 2002 and put them in the play-offs where they lost the division series. Art Howe warned Beane that in the play-offs games get closer and the stakes get higher, and when you're trying to win a single game it's necessary to get outs and manufacture runs when you need them, where Beane dismissed this tinkering as gambling on the wrong odds. I'm not enough of a baseball expert to judge, but Lewis dismissively points out that none of the A's 2002 play-off games were the kind of low-scoring nail-biters that Howe was predicting. According to Lewis, the A's just had some unlucky bounces of the ball, and had they played a 162-game playoff series Beane's team would have surely emerged victorious. His analysis completely ignores one fascinating element of that play-off series: their opponent.

It's interesting that Lewis spent so much time in Billy Beane's office that he didn't look around at anything else going on in baseball and make any kind of comparison to other teams. The White Sox in those years were trying to assemble a team of all power hitters who played no defense who would win every game 9-0 with nine home runs. They were mercurial, living and dying on their ability to pound in extra base hits, but they kept losing to a small-market team with little revenue that, like the A's, punched above their weight: the Minnesota Twins. The strategy that the Twins were employing was the exact opposite of the A's, valuing pitching and defense to keep games close and manufacturing enough runs to be one run ahead at the end of the 9th. There is a very strong correlation between runs scored and allowed and winning percentage, yet somehow the 2002 Twins kept defying that statistical logic that says nobody a team that's in a lot of close games has to finish at .500. And they beat the A's, with a utility infielder chasing down the last out.

It boggles the mind that Lewis watched a five game series between the A's and a team pursuing the exact opposite strategy and didn't find it worth considering, however it's not the only glaring omission. Despite their disdain for pitching, the 2002 A's were blessed to have three young pitchers having great years. Having young players break out at the same time is an incredible windfall for a small-market team, and those three won a lot more games for the A's than a catcher with a bad body in their farm system.

Something can be wrong and insightful all at the same time, and parts of Moneyball explain very well the logic of the ongoing statistical revolt in baseball over the last ten years against the dominant 19th century paradigm of the game. And Beane's story is an interesting one, but what makes me unable to ever recommend this book to anyone is when I consider the poor surgeon who no doubt had to be called in to remove Michael Lewis' tongue from Billy Beane's anus. One part of this meandering love poem to Beane is illustrative of how Lewis lost any journalistic perspective and became an sycophant: when he defends Beane's 11th hour antics with the Red Sox. Back in Boston Theo Epstein had famously left he office in a gorilla suit to avoid the press, and Beane had plane tickets in his pocket to Boston when he decided to back out of the job without explanation. With the Red Sox he would have been subject to constant media scrutiny and had no excuses about payroll, and he would either prove his model of baseball by building a world series winner, or he would fail. Most people think he choked and went back to hide in the corner, however Michael Lewis tells us he didn't want the job in the first place, and he just took it to prove to everyone he could be GM of the Red Sox if he wanted to. It's such a childish attitude, like a kid who won't play a game but assures everyone, "I could beat you all, if I wanted to." And yet his loyal sidekick, Lewis, seems to think we should all stand in awe of Beane for pissing away the second or third most powerful job in baseball.

So no, I like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Brad Pitt, but I'm not excited about the movie Moneyball, which I assume will be more revisionist history.