March 4
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis (2003)

I've been meaning to read this book since it first came out, early last summer. It got a lot of buzz in Oakland, so of course when I went looking for it at the Oakland library all the copies were checked out. My first reaction was to wait for them to be returned and read the book some time after the initial popularity died down. Eventually, I realized that that wasn't going to happen any time soon. There were multiple holds on the book, and the only way I'd get it is to place my own hold and get in line. But by then it was too late, as I was due to leave Oakland soon.

When I finally got settled in Seattle, when I got my library cards Moneyball was at the top of my list of books to look for. To my surprise, there were multiple holds here, too, so I got in line. It came in last week, and I read the whole book in one day, a luxury I haven't enjoyed in a while.

Like Guns, Germs and Steel, Moneyball emerges from a simple question: If money is so important to winning baseball, why is it that the Oakland Athletics, with one of the lowest payrolls in the league, has managed to put together so many winning teams? Commissioner Bud Selig, leader of the faction that claims financial imbalance is the heart of what's wrong with baseball, answers that Oakland's success is just an anomaly due to luck -- a position which is becoming increasingly hard to defend against the evidence, and which incidentally provides a good rationalization for the dismal record of his own Milwaukee Brewers.

One curious thing I've noticed since moving to Seattle is the difference in attitude toward the money question. I should qualify, I haven't had much contact with actual Mariners fans, nor have I studied the matter in any detail, but my general impression from the radio and newspaper coverage is that Seattle sides with Bud Selig on this question. Oakland assuredly does not. Yes, there is a certain amount of complaining by fans that the Yankees can afford to hire big stars that we can't, but such complaints are marginalized next to the general can-do attitude in which having a lower budget is just one more point of pride when we do beat the Yankees and other rich teams.

Here in Seattle I've seen a lot more whining about financial inequity than I ever did in Oakland. Odd, since the Mariners aren't exactly a poor team. They aren't quite at the level of the top tier in terms of big bucks, but they're pretty close behind. My impression of the Mariners, again from the general media coverage, is that the management doesn't spend its money very well at all, overpaying players and chasing after stupid trades. Not as bad as Texas, sure, but worse than Boston or the Yankees. And yet here they all are, whining about how the Yankees can afford to buy A-Rod but they can't. A-Rod!? In Oakland no one even thinks about A-Rod, he's so far off the radar screen.

Michael Lewis suggests a different answer to the money question. His central thesis is that conventional wisdom about how to evaluate a player's talent is (1) deeply rooted in the industry, and (2) mostly wrong. Coming off his earlier book about stock market arbitrage, he is quick to deduce that this equals a great opportunity for anyone who will use better evaluation information and defy the conventional wisdom, buying up underpriced players and selling off overpriced ones. According to Lewis, this is the secret to the success of A's general manager Billy Beane. Thus, the book is largely a story of Beane and the A's organization.

This better information comes in the form of statistical analysis. As applied to baseball, it is given the name "sabermetrics", after SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), an organization devoted to studying such statistics. It's important to note that this data is rather different from the usual baseball statistics which have been around for many decades. Indeed, one of the central tenets of sabermetrics (or at least of Lewis's thesis) is that traditional stats are poor indicators of player value because they measure a lot of the wrong things, and thus they contribute to the errant conventional wisdom.

Lewis quotes Bill James, the father of sabermetrics:

The general reaction I heard in Oakland after Moneyball was released is that it is very accurate in the story it tells, but the author's focus on his one particular theme tends to give a lopsided view of the team as a whole. For example, given Lewis's heavy focus on A's method of evaluating hitters, you might never guess that the key to the A's success for the past few years hasn't been hitting at all but starting pitching. Barry Zito and Tim Hudson are briefly mentioned as pitchers who were underrated in college, but they don't really fit the pattern of "ugly" players with hidden greatness that only the A's recognized. Rather, they are results of the A's strategy of drafting pitchers cheap and in bulk, with the assumption that a few will develop well. Mulder is even further from the pattern, being very much in the traditional model of a good pitcher. Likewise with some of the hitters. It's true that the A's front office has a special fondness for patient hitters who will take a lot of pitches, but the chapters that Lewis devotes to this might make you forget that the A's best two hitters in recent years -- Tejada and Chavez -- aren't like that at all.

I'm not sure whether being an A's fan makes the book more rewarding or less. I certainly enjoyed getting the "behind-the-scenes" at the players and seasons that I've already followed closely and remember well. (Many of the players featured in the book are still in the minor leagues.) On the other hand, a certain amount of the story was duplicative, since I've already heard most of the stories about A's major-league trades, as well as Billy Beane's personal bio. (Well, most of it. I only just recently learned that I have for years been confusing Billy Beane with Billy Bean. The latter is the only former player in Major League Baseball who is openly homosexual. I had thought they were one and the same person, but they aren't.) More informative for me was the earlier history of the A's and the history of sabermetrics. I've seen names like Sandy Alderson and Bill James a lot, but I never really knew who they were.

One of Lewis's favorite themes is that a key A's tactic in obtaining talented players at low prices is to look for players that have some defect that will make other teams overlook them -- like buying superficially damaged merchandise at half price. He quotes Assistant GM Paul DePodesta: "We don't get the guys who are perfect. There has to be something wrong with them for them to get to us."

When Lewis sees a new player, he likes to ask, "What's wrong with him?" Here he is on A's relief pitcher Jim Mecir:

It's not a joke. Mecir really does have a club foot.

Another peculiar pitcher is Chad Bradford. This passage is funny if you've watched him pitch. If you haven't, I don't know.

That's Rick Peterson, A's pitching coach until the end of last season. He's now signed on with the Boston Red Sox, which seems to be a popular destination for former A's these days.

About Billy Beane's strategy regarding closers:

I think that Lewis exaggerates the ease with which a closer can be "created". Surely it's not just any "slightly above average pitcher". If it were so simple then there would be more than a few other teams creating closers. Still, it's striking how consistent is the A's pattern in churning closers.

It's even more striking when you recall the context. Lewis continues:

He's talking about the beginning of the 2002 season.

I started following the A's late in 1999, so Isringhausen was the first A's closer I saw. When Lewis says Beane had "already done it twice", he's talking about two closers before Isringhausen. When he says "over and over again", he's talking about Isringhausen as the first of these. Since then, we've seen the same thing happen to Billy Koch, and now Keith Foulke. It remains to be seen how well Foulke will do with the Red Sox, but whether he declines or not, the A's still sold him at a profit.

Moneyball was published in the summer of 2003, well before the Red Sox signed Foulke to a $21 million contract. When the book came out, much of the debate centered on whether Beane's strategy would collapse now that his secrets were exposed, or he would stay ahead of the game by taking the next step beyond. In this instance, it seems to me that he doesn't need to step at all. He can just keep on selling his closers. The trick still works, so why change it? I fully expect Arthur Rhodes to become a star closer and then sign an expensive contract with some other team after the 2004 season ends.

Has anyone else learned the lesson? Perhaps the other low-budget team which wins more games than its budget seems to warrant, the Minnesota Twins. If Foulke had a rival for the title of AL's best closer, it was Minnesota's Eddie Guardado, who in 2002 completed 41 saves in 45 opportunities. So what have the Twins done with this great asset of theirs? They let him go. Guardado signed on with the Mariners for $13 million.

Part of being an A's fan is listening to baseball announcers tell you that the A's can't win because they don't steal and they don't bunt -- and then after the A's win a hundred games without stealing or bunting, listening to the same announcers tell you that the A's can't win in the playoffs because they don't steal and they don't bunt.

Because of course the playoffs are different. Lewis quotes Ray Durham, a guy who likes to steal and bunt, who was a free agent with the A's for the second half of the '02 season. (That's another standard Beane tactic: Pick up a player in the last year of a contract from a non-contender team. That way you get a guy tailored to the team's immediate needs with no long-term commitment. It goes without saying that he won't be re-signed for the next year.) Durham said, "I don't see a lot of playoff games where the score is 8-5. It's always 1-0 and 2-1." A few pages later, Lewis recaps for us the scores of the 2002 ALDS in which the A's were knocked out by the Twins: 7-5, 9-1, 6-3, 11-2, 5-4. Well, one out of five's not bad. (The book incorrectly shows 8-3 as the score for game three, but the point remains.)

Here's Lewis:

I remember that game, and I remember shouting at Joe Morgan on the TV screen. That game more than any -- more than the first game of the 03 playoffs which Ramon Hernandez won with a bunt right after everyone said the A's don't bunt -- convinced me that the small ball advocates aren't thinking straight. I don't know whether stealing and bunting is advantageous or not. What I do know is that the ones who argue against it present a logical argument backed up with evidence. The ones who argue for it are like Morgan. They don't even try to explain why the game at hand is an exception, or why there are other considerations that need to be taken into account. They simply state their belief in flagrant disregard to what is happening on the field.

It is a curious thing that the A's under Billy Beane have been so successful in the regular season and so unsuccessful in the playoffs. Beane says it's luck, and his partisans will show you the math to back it up. As in many games which combine luck and skill, you can control it over the long term, but not in the short term. Beane can create a team that will win 60% of the time. That's enough to be a playoff contender year after year, but in a five-game series it still leaves a significant chance that you'll get knocked out of the playoffs four years in a row. Selig is arguing that the A's success in the past four regular seasons is a statistical anomaly; Beane is arguing that the past four playoffs have been the anomaly. Beane's sample size is 647 games, in which the A's are 392-255. Selig's sample size is 20 games, in which the A's are 8-12.

And yet there are other teams with good records in the playoffs. The Florida Marlins don't reach the playoffs as often, but they always do well when they get there. Perhaps it's just luck, as Beane says. Or perhaps they have mastered some different strategy which is tailored for the playoffs as Beane's is not.

One of the things we debate every year in Oakland is whether that's such a bad thing. Suppose you could have a team which is guaranteed to be a contender year after year but will never win the World Series. Is that better than having a team that wins it all one year, then sells off all its players and goes into "rebuilding" (ie, "sucks") for several years before making another run at it? Personally, I'd rather have my team do well year after year.

Asked about Joe Morgan and the rest of the critics, DePodesta says, "I hope they continue to believe that our way doesn't work. It buys us a few more years."

That may be, but the border between "us" and "them" is moving. The A's are not just trading away players; they're exporting management talent as well. During this off-season, DePodesta -- Beane's assistant GM for five seasons -- himself resigned in order to become general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers weren't the first to invite him become GM. Two years ago, the Toronto Blue Jays offered him the position but he declined, saying he'd rather say wait for the "the right job" rather than "the first job." Instead, Toronto took the number-three man in Oakland, Director of Player Development J.P. Ricciardi. Last year, the Boston Red Sox offered the GM position Ricciardi, DePodesta and Beane. Only after all three declined (Beane actually said yes at first but then changed his mind) did they settle instead on Theo Epstein.

In another context, Lewis writes, "It was hard to know which of Billy [Beane]'s qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players." The latter refers mostly to the fact that Beane is a large, physical man with a volatile temper. In his playing days, he was the sort of player who would smash things in the dugout after striking out.

It also highlights the different sort of experience that Beane brings. The superficial notion is that DePodesta, as Beane's right-hand man, is made in Beane's image. In fact, although the two had a common strategy, they are more complementary than duplicative. Moneyball shows how well they worked together as a team, at the same time displaying their differences. Beane is the energetic wheeler-dealer with great instincts, a classic insider-outsider who knows the business but is detached enough to also see its failings. DePodesta is the sober Harvard graduate who brings modern management tools to the business and is dispassionate enough to resist conventional wisdom.

The model of the new management team, then, is not Billy Beane or Paul DePodesta but Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta. Ricciardi is in the style of Beane, and after moving to Toronto his first move was to hire Harvard grad Keith Law as his number-crunching assistant. "You need your Paul," Beane advised.

Now that Beane and DePodesta have been split up, the interesting thing will be to see which of them is better able to replace their missing half. Or to put it another way, is it better to have a Beane/Ricciardi type in the top spot, as in Oakland or Toronto, or to have a DePodesta/Epstein type, as in Los Angeles or Boston? (In terms of scientific experiment it would be more useful to rearrange them so that there's one of each on a low-budget team and one of each on a high-budget team.)

I don't know who will be DePodesta's Billy, but Beane has already named his new Paul. David Forst is a long-time assistant with the team, most recently as scouting director, and yet another Harvard business school graduate. He has been the heir apparent for at least a year; when it was thought that Beane would be going to Boston, DePodesta was to take over as GM and Forst was slated to be his assistant GM. Beane is as blithe about DePodesta's departure as he is about the departure of Miguel Tejada or Jason Giambi. "It's like shark's teeth," he remarked. "They fall out, they got another layer going."

Reporters like Billy Beane for his colorful way of stating things. I like the shark's teeth metaphor, but the more famous line, not in this book, came in 2001, when Jason Giambi left the team. "We're like Menudo," Beane said. "You reach a certain age and you can't play here anymore." Menudo was the name of a boy band that was popular at the time. To this day you still see occasional references, both in the real game and in rotisserie leagues, to the "Menudo method", the strategy of obtaining young players cheap and then trading them away after they get better.

(A "rotisserie league", by the way, is one of those games where players pretend to be the general manager of a team and recruit their pretend players from among the names of the real players. By some sort of processing of the players' real-life stats, the league commissioner determines who wins the pretend games. Apparently, it's quite popular, and Benzene's friend BRUX Linsey makes a living running rotisserie leagues for baseball and football. What I didn't know until reading this book was that the term comes from La Rotisserie Française, a restaurant in Manhattan, where a group of fans met in 1980 to devise one of the first such leagues.)

A consequence of the Menudo method is that the A's don't hang on to home-grown stars like Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada. Next in line to outgrow the band is three-time Gold Glove third baseman Eric Chavez. He becomes a free agent after the 2004 season, even though he'll be only 26 years old. His age is part of why he's perceived as the A's next star player. He hasn't had a superstar season yet, but he's had several very good ones, and he hasn't yet reached his peak.

His agent (former A's pitcher Dave Stewart) is in negotiation with the team right now discussing a new contract, but I don't think it will happen. Those who imagine that he might stay cite a few things that are different with Chavez. In addition to being younger, he is a friendly, easy-going sort of guy (unlike Tejada, who was high-strung and moody), and he has a close personal relationship with Beane. Chavez and Beane went to the same high school in San Diego. (Although Hispanic-American, Chavez is not an immigrant, and last I heard he doesn't speak Spanish.)

In my estimation, these things suggest that the transition might go more smoothly than earlier ones, but I see no reason to think Chavez will stay with the team. Reporters like to interview Chavez because he's talkative and open, and he rarely censors himself when speaking to them, which makes him a great source of quotes. (On A-Rod's signing with the Yankees, Chavez's quipped, "There goes my Gold Glove.") With his own trade status, he's a little more coy ... but not much. His line is, "Of course I'd like to stay in Oakland, but if they can't afford me, that's OK, too." It's not hard to see through that. Unlike Giambi and Tejada, he doesn't have the idea that he's so special that the team is going to break from its usual practice and come up with an unprecedented offer. He understands the Menudo logic, and he respects it.

One new twist he has added is that he has declared that there will be no negotiation whatsoever during the season. So if he hasn't signed a new contract by opening day, he'll be a free agent at the end of the season regardless, in which case -- unless he has a terrible year -- he's sure to end up with another team.

The conventional wisdom is that Chavez right now is worth about $60 million for five years. It's conceivable that the A's might come up with that much money, but only if the team retains the flexibility to move him. That's what stymied the negotiations with Jason Giambi. Giambi was willing to play for less money in Oakland, but only if he got a no-trade clause. That's a deal-breaker; Billy Beane will not sign a no-trade clause for anybody. Chavez won't get one either, so unless he's willing to sign on for a short-term contract or below-market pay, there will be no agreement.

The bottom line is that, as much as A's fans like to pretend that Chavez and the team are essential to one another, it's really not in either party's best interest for them to stay together. I expect Hudson and Mulder will also move on when they become free agents, in 2005 and 2006 respectively. The first of the A's stars who I think might actually stay with the team is Barry Zito. That's because Zito is so unusual. Players always say they don't care about the money, but ultimately they do, if for no other reason than that it's a measure of their status or how much they are appreciated. There's also a lot of pressure from the player's union for any star player to take the best offer, because it helps hold the rates up for everyone.

Zito is enough of an oddball that these pressures would have little effect on him. He's the one guy on the team you could imagine might announce some off-season that he's decided not to play baseball any more at all -- not because he's burned out, but just because there's something else that interests him more. Also, he has more of a geographic connection than most. The majority of the A's players live not in Oakland proper but in one of the nearby suburbs. Last I heard, Zito is the only one who lives on the other side of the Bay, in San Francisco. He likes it there, and if he doesn't want a long commute, that limits his choices to two teams.

But I still don't think it will happen. Zito is more likely than any other A's star to turn down the big money and stay with the A's, but that doesn't mean it's more likely than not. If I had to guess, I'd say he ends up with the Dodgers.

This book felt well-edited to me, in spite of a few errors. I'm beginning to wonder if there's no such thing as a thoroughly proofread book any more, but here at least there weren't any gross misspellings or incomprehensible sentences. Of the three simple typos I noticed, two were incorrectly spaced punctuation (a comma transposed with a space, and an extraneous space after an open quote). The one misspelled name was one of the 2002 draft choices, Brent Colamarino, who appeared once as "Colarmarino". Another dubious spelling was where something capable of being spat was described as "spitable". Since it's not a real word anyway, I suppose that's defensible, but I would have changed it to "spittable". The one bungled sentence was a reference to the situation with "no runners on base with nobody on base and no count on the better", when clearly the second "on base" should have been "out".

Possible lip-reading error: Miguel Tejada was notorious for his verbal outbursts at the plate, many of which were captured by the TV cameras and on display for anyone who can read lips. In a reference to one of these, Lewis quotes Tejada as screaming "Fucking pitch!" Perhaps he's right, but I think he mistook a "b" as a "p."

Of factual errors, I already mentioned the incorrectly reported score in the third game of the 2002 ALDS. Another error is not the fault of the author but of Billy Beane, whom he quotes. Following a surprise, last-minute trade for Mexican-born relief pitcher Ricardo Rincon from the Cleveland Indians -- the Indians were in town to play the A's, and the trade was finalized less than an hour before the game began -- Beane makes small talk with his new acquisition. Discovering that Rincon is from Veracruz, Beane says, "Well, Veracruz is closer to here than to Cleveland. You're closer to home!" Beane is incorrect. Like most of Mexico's population centers, Veracruz is in the eastern half of the country. It's about 2,100 miles from Oakland and about 1,800 miles from Cleveland.

A couple more minor complaints:

(1) The cover design is ugly. The front cover photo is OK, but the typography practically hides the book title. The author's name, on the other hand, is not hidden at all. Not only that, but there's a huge photo of the author on the back cover, and it looks awful. The publisher must have really wanted this book, to indulge the author's vanity like that.

(2) The book has no index. Yeah, I know. It's a book for a popular audience, so it doesn't need one. I still don't like it. Call me a wonk, but I think every book should have an index. Among other things, it would have made it easier to look up details for this review. I ended up rereading most of the book chasing down all the quotes I wanted to include.

I think it's no exaggeration that I spent more time writing this review than I did reading the book. The next one will be much shorter, I promise.

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