I have no idea why it took me so long to get around to reading “Moneyball” but I can thank Brad Pitt for giving me the motivation to finally do it.
The movie version of the story, starring Pitt, came out a few weeks ago, so I wanted to seize the opportunity to get through the book first. I’m not interested so much in the conventional exercise of just seeing how closely the movie follows the book. Rather, I really want to see how the elements of this Michael Lewis story are adapted to film in comparison to his book “The Blind Side.”
The movie that earned Sandra Bullock a Best Actress Oscar focused 90 percent on the non-football side of Lewis’ book about professional football player Michael Oher. The book, which describes Oher being taken in by a family when he was in high school, focused more like 50 percent on the football part of his story. Given that “Moneyball” is even more heavy on statistics and inside sports stuff, it will be interesting to see how that gets translated into a more traditional Hollywood movie.
If you’re totally unfamiliar, “Moneyball” examines the Oakland Athletics in the early 2000s under General Manager Billy Beane. With much less money available to run the team than many other organizations, Beane has to find a way to be successful and focuses on finding undervalued players in the baseball marketplace. His approach is not about signing the latest high-price star to hit the market, but rather to find the guy who succeeds at things nobody else realizes are important to winning baseball games.
The strategy not only helped the organization become surprisingly successful on the field, but engendered a passion among Oakland’s fan base to really support the team.
“Win with nobodies and the fans showed up, and the nobodies became stars,” Lewis writes. “Lose with stars and the fans stayed home, and the stars became nobodies.”
When those stars reach the end of their contract and are in line for a big payday, Beane is more than happy to let them walk away. All-stars Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon want to test the free agent market? Fine. Let Boston and New York overpay them. Beane will find two guys who have a similar on-base percentage — the king of the hidden key stats — and go right on winning at a fraction of the cost.
“The question was: how did a baseball team find stars in the first place, and could it find new ones to replace the old ones it lost?” Lewis says. “How fungible were baseball players?”
Not only is that one of the key questions driving Beane’s mindset, but also includes a word, “fungible,” that I drop all the time, only to get strange looks from other people. I can’t take any credit for knowing what it means, though. That goes to a fantastic college professor who happened to say it among so many other memorable lines that my cohorts compiled a document of his sayings during our time in his classes. (Highlights include: “Have you ever gone to run for the phone and just went ‘that dog just won’t hunt?'” “Please rent out the cameras immediately if not sooner,” and, in reference to aliens, “I have a feeling the government really screwed the pooch on that one.”)
Part of the book talks about the statistics revolution in baseball, the drive by people like Bill James to better quantify what is happening on the field. These are people who set aside the traditional box score stats and began asking questions about how players are really succeeding and how much they are actually contributing to that success.
One of the big examples is in fielding. If you look at a box score, pretty much all you’ll see is errors, which James found to be a really crazy way of evaluating how good of a defender a player actually is. So much of making an error is being near enough to the ball that the official scorer thinks you should have made the play.
As James says, “The easiest way to not make an error was to be too slow to reach the ball in the first place.”
Pitchers, too, have some very over-important stats. The earned run average, for example, has so many factors that are beyond the pitcher’s control that to use it as a major barometer for determining future success is somewhat crazy too. Sure, if you’re ERA is 17.50 that’s probably mostly your fault. But it would be silly to rely solely on ERA to say that a pitcher who had a 3.75 season is so much better than one who had an ERA of 4.50 in the same year.
Another guy named Voros McCracken worked to find more objective ways to value the work of pitchers. Lewis writes that McCracken focused on looking at the number of walks and home runs a pitcher gives up, as well as the number of batters he strikes out, among a few other things. These were the things a pitcher had more control over himself, and thus were more useful in determining how he may perform in the future.
Of course, when you’re the one in an industry doing things very differently from those around you, it’s probably expected that they’ll be less than welcoming of your approach. Especially in baseball, where tradition and attitudes of “the way it’s always been done” govern so much that goes on. Beane challenged a lot of conventional wisdom, so much so that many of his long-time scouts left the organization rather than have him ignore theirs.
“Baseball has structured itself less as a business than as a social club,” Lewis says. “The greatest offense a Club member can commit is not ineptitude but disloyalty.” Lewis mentions here former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton, who essentially alienated himself from the baseball Club with his 1970 book “Ball Four.” Bouton tells a lot of baseball’s secrets, and Lewis says that honesty got him “as good as banished from the Club” instead of a possible extended career in coaching or scouting. (I highly recommend Bouton’s book for those haven’t read it.)
And finally, because it’s something I find interesting and keeps popping up, Lewis writes about one A’s relief pitcher who battles with the idea that others are bound to figure out he’s not talented. Chad Bradford is a good example of a Beane find — a pitcher with a crazy submarine motion that conventional wisdom didn’t value, never mind that what he was doing got batters out. Bradford didn’t accurately value his talent either, but from what Lewis presents, that’s more because of the “imposter syndrome” I’ve mentioned before.
“When it starts not going right, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, I hope I can keep foolin ’em.'” Bradford said. “Then I start to ask, “How much longer can I keep foolin em?'”
