Don't Kill the Messenger

When Michael Lewis decided to write Moneyball, his intention was to figure out how a team with seemingly no resources in which to compete with large-market teams could put together playoff runs year after year. He was specifically interested in how the Oakland A's, one of the "poorer" teams in baseball (I always smile a little when teams complain about having a payroll of "only" 40 million dollars) was able to be successful. What he found wasn't a magic formula but, in fact, the seeming opposite.

Baseball, a game built on traditions, didn't understand any of those traditions. Instead, with a series of superstitions and misguided beliefs, a multi-billion dollar industry was run with the efficiency of a ice cream stand on the sun.

With a little less melting.

The baseball theory itself is pretty interesting, but, amazingly enough, not really the point of the book. The point is to show that baseball is not really a game of gut-calls, but instead, a game of numbers. It can be a game of numbers because it produces such large sample sets -- 162 game seasons, multiple at-bats per game, multiple innings-pitched, multiple pitches thrown. What this means is that, over the course of a season, and over the course of a career, there is enough data to generate statistical probabilities that generally stand up. What the A's figured out was that certain statistics more accurately gauge a players offensive capabilities, and that those statistics weren't the ones that find themselves in the daily box scores, key among them, on-base percentage. The team had come to the conclusion that, when it comes down to it, the most important thing a hitter can do is not make an out. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter how you get on first base, just that you do (with the exception of fielders choices, of course).

What Lewis was amazed by (as were the A's, who people saw as this anamoly), was that this was a radical way of thinking. Logic-be-damned: no boy with a computer is going to tell someone who actually played the game that RBIs, steals, and batting average don't matter. The problem was, that the A's weren't saying that. They were saying that those numbers are not as accurate at explaining how good an offensive player is.

In the end, the book is less about the math (although it is important), and more about the philosophy. It wasn't that the A's were trying to prove that the rest of baseball was wrong. it wasn't trying to say that the people everyone else had designated as good were bad. It was simply trying to show how a baseball team, if run as an efficient business, can do so with less money by identifying the "parts" others were undervaluing, selling high the players other teams were overvaluing, and getting the best possible team for his money. The fact was, the A's couldn't afford superstars on their team, so instead they had to figure out a way to win that didn't include players traditionally labeled as being good (regardless if they had actually performed or not -- hence their liking college players over high school players: they had more evidence on which to make a decision).

That's why the book is called Moneyball. Because, although it's a game built on tradition, it's also a business built on cash.

The most amazing thing about this book is the reaction. This book was written a couple of years ago, and yet it seems as if people still think it's hogwash. They don't understand how a guy with a bad body, or someone who doesn't run fast, can be a major league baseball player. They don't understand how the sacrifice bunt is a wasted play (that the probability of a run scoring from first base with no outs is significantly statistically higher than a player on second base with one out) or how, for the most part, stealing is statistically too risky a play to warrant indiscriminate running -- no matter who the player is. Again, this is about tradition. We grew up playing this game, we grew up watching this game, and so many things that we took for granted -- usually because some ex-ballplayer who is now the announcer says it's so -- are being questioned. But the numbers don't bear out those plays. It is conservativism at it's worst, being afraid of technology because they refuse to see anything is broken at all.

Perhaps the worst of these nay-sayers is, amazingly enough, someone who has admitted he's actually never read the book: Joe Morgan. Now Morgan was a phenomenal player (or so I'm told; I never saw him play, but seeing how he's in the Hall of Fame and the numbers are there, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt), but he's a terrible broadcaster. This despite the fact that he's the number one baseball analyst for ESPN. What makes him so terrible is that he has no concept about why things happen in the games. He has a love for "little ball," and yet when he points to a successful "little ball team" (such as the 2005 White Sox), what he inevitably ignores is their tremendous "big ball" numbers and amazing pitching. If you pointed out to him that the same team, with the same philosophy, performed poorly the next season, he has no answer for that. Most importantly, though, is that although he hasn't read it, he still feels he has the right to comment about it. And his comments are wrong.

To observe how wrong he is, read one of the better sports blogs on the internet, Fire Joe Morgan.

The funny thing is, I had bought into the ideas espoused in Moneyball before actually reading it. When they were explained to me, they simply made sense. How could they not: they were backed up with numbers. The numbers were backed up with success. Yes, as Morgan gleefully points out, the A's have not won a World Series with their philosophy, but they have reached the playoffs a number of years with players people consistently belittle -- something must be working. Too, there can only be one champion each year, and it's not always the case that the best team in the regular season wins it all. But somehow winning division titles isn't enough for Joe, and yet he'll praise managers with losing records (because they play the game "the right way"). Reading the book was like having gravity explained to you by Newton -- it felt like I was getting the inside scoop from the man himself.

If you want to understand the numbers behind baseball, read this book. If you want to understand why some teams do better than others, regardless of payroll, read this book. If you want to learn more about Billy Beane, the A's general manager (who did not write the book), Scott Hatteberg, Josh Brown, Nick Swisher, or Chad Bradford, read this book. However, if you want to maintain your belief in baseball as being flawless, do not read this book.

You will not understand it or you will be defensive and resistant to it. Either way, it's not the book for you.