Title: Moneyball
Rating: 5 Stars
Before I starting talking about the book, let me just say how lucky Michael Lewis is when it comes to film adaptations. Lewis is a talented writer. When you read him, you are always entertained. At least to me, he does not seemingly tell cinematic stories. After all, Moneyball is a story about statistics and how most baseball teams misuse them. The Big Short is about several certifiably odd people that found an anomaly in the financial market and used it to get very rich. They were both interesting stories but really, is there a film there? It just shows how wrong I am because not only are there films there, but, having watched both (Moneyball quite recently), they were both great fun to watch and both received Best Picture Academy award nominations. Not only that, but another Lewis work, The Blind Side, was adapted and received yet a third Best Picture nomination (and won Sandra Bullock a Best Actress Academy award). Having neither read that work nor seen the picture, I can’t comment on them, but still, quite impressive Michael Lewis!
On to Moneyball. Written about the 2002 season, it describes baseball as having several serious problems. One is that baseball is run by largely baseball people. These men, using their own experiences, are confident that they understand the game. They have no need for statistics. They have no need for analytics. They can eyeball a player and determine how good he’s going to be. They can look at a player’s face and determine his character. Any player that doesn’t match their platonic ideal of a baseball player is rejected out of hand, regardless of their actual productivity on the field.
A second problem is that the statistics that they do use (and after all, baseball is ostensibly awash in numbers) are not useful indicators of productivity. A hitter’s batting percentage is misleading since it ignores walks. After all, a walk is quite literally as good as a single. A fielder’s fielding percentage is misleading because it only counts overt mistakes. For example, if a player is slow and has limited range, he won’t have as many errors as a player that could actually get at least close to a hit ball. Finally, a pitchers earned run average is misleading because, other than strike outs, home runs, and walks, a pitcher has effectively no control once a ball is hit into play.
The third problem is the cloistered nature of baseball. As a group, baseball people form a pretty small club. The front office people are afraid of looking foolish in front of their peers, so they continue to operate in a manner that is obviously counterproductive. As a group, they epitomize the definition of insanity as doing the same thing and expecting different results.
In 2002, each of these problems are going to be solved by one club, the Oakland Athletics.
The statistical work was done earlier by Bill James. Before that, most of the statistical work was done in the 19th century by a man named Henry Chadwick. He developed the box score as we know it. Considering that his background was actually cricket, his translation to baseball was somewhat lacking. For instance, the idea of the walk has no place in cricket so he essentially ignored it.
Starting in the 1970s while working as a security guard on the night shift, Bill James got angry enough about the state of baseball statistics that he decided to do something about it. He started publishing a baseball abstract that took a deeper, more analytical look at baseball statistics. The first abstracts were mimeographed sheets of paper that were sent out to at most a couple of hundred users. Other oddball people latched onto James’ ideas and advanced their own statistics. Daniel Okrent (a pretty famous author that among other things wrote Last Call, a history about Prohibition, of all things) invented rotisserie baseball (named after the restaurant where it started). It was a fantasy baseball league that allowed people to pretend to be baseball GMs. This was a primary reason for the explosion of popularity of sophisticated baseball statistics.
One of the more radical ideas is that batting percentage is much less important than on base percentage. The main thing a batter needs to avoid is making an out. The on base percentage measures that. Another idea was that pitcher’s statistics should be based just on strikes, walks, and home runs. All else was left to luck.
Still, baseball ignored all of this. Enter Billy Beane, the GM for the Oakland A’s.
When he was young, he was considered a lock to become a major league star and maybe even a future Hall of Famer. Everyone in baseball from scouts to coaches to management told him that he was a sure thing. He had all of the tools. He made it all look easy.
That might have been the problem. It was too easy. Once he reached a level where it wasn’t easy, he couldn’t deal with it. He let himself get wrapped up in his own head. Despite all of his natural skills, he never could figure out how to hit off of professional pitchers. After several years of futility and ferocious anger, he gave up, walked away, and asked for a front office job with the A’s.
There he found a home and ultimately became their General Manager. One thing that came out of his own experience is that he had no trouble calling out scouts on their bull shit. He saw himself as exhibit one in their ability to predict talent. He was therefore open to new ideas.
Given that the A’s consistently had the lowest team salary in Major League Baseball, this openness turned out to have significant benefits. Knowing that he couldn’t afford top talent even if he wanted it, he started to look for overlooked gems. He started making use of the more sophisticated statistics to identify these gems.
There was the catcher with the bad arm that was an incredibly patient hitter. Fine, let’s put him at first base. Struggling in the beginning, eventually the catcher’s raw physical talent turned him into an above average first baseman.
There was the pitcher that had a goofy delivery. He pitched in a submarine style that was so low that his knuckles occasionally grazed the ground. Such an unorthodox delivery made him too embarrassing for other teams to consistently use. Beane had no such embarrassment. Beane used him and he became an effective middle reliever.
In the film, Brad Pitt played Billy Beane (and got an Academy award nomination, I believe). He exactly captured Beane’s charm. One person compared Beane talking to other GM’s to the Big Bad Wolf talking to Little Red Riding Hood. One thing that Pitt did not adequately capture was Beane’s intensity and anger. Beane is fiercely competitive, not above throwing chairs when he is raging.
I’m not sure if I’m doing a good job describing how much I liked this book. I’m not even a baseball guy. I’ve been to maybe one game in the last ten years. In telling what could be a dry story about the evolution of baseball statistics, Lewis does an outstanding job bringing all of the characters to life, from Bill James to Billy Beane to A’s players like Scott Hatteburg and Chad Bradford.
Lewis manages to, as he consistently does in other books, combine numbers and statistics with personalities in a very engaging and entertaining way. Moneyball is one of Lewis’ best efforts.
dorkenstein 