I finally got around to reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, the story of how the Oakland A’s consistently field one of the best teams in Major League Baseball with one of the lowest budgets. Their secret is rational use of appropriate data:
Beane and DePodesta played major roles in “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Michael Lewis’ engaging and controversial best-selling book of last year that detailed how the two men used Oakland’s financial desperation to ram through organizational changes emphasizing the scientific approach and research tools developed by a thriving subculture of mostly amateur “performance analysts.”
These “stat-heads,” building from the fertile intellectual groundwork laid by the incomparable baseball writer/analyst Bill James, operated almost entirely off the radar screen of Major League Baseball until Beane and DePodesta came along.
The book’s extremely well written, with great pacing, atmosphere, and even some suspense, so I’d recommend it even to those who aren’t fortunate enough to be baseball fans.
The controversy around the book is whether it fairly assesses the role that pitching plays in the A’s success, and whether it adequately addresses their post-season problems. There’s no better group of starting pitchers in baseball than Mulder, Zito, and Hudson, and it’s not clear how general manager Billy Beane found them, even if is clear that the rest of baseball ignored them because their physiques don’t appeal to the latent homoerotic fantasy lives of traditional baseball scouts.
The playoff question is a tough one, because the A’s definitely have an extraordinary problem closing the deal even when they’ve got the opposing team on the mat like Boston was after the first two games in Oakland last year. The traditional analysis is that the A’s don’t know how to play “smallball”, the traditional combination of sacrifices, stolen bases, and trick plays that are such a central part of the received wisdom of baseball. But it’s the nature of received wisdom to be faulty, and it’s the nature of front office management not to be able to direct action on the field day-by-day, and I’m inclined to believe that the A’s post-season blowups are the fault of dugout managers Art Howe and Ken Macha who aren’t on-board with Beane’s program.
Just to check this theory, I watched a replay of Game 5 between the A’s and the Red Sox last year on ESPN Classic just after finishing the book, and there was nothing to the game that casts any doubt on Beane. Quite the contrary, the announcers went into a soupy spiel about how teams can’t win in the playoffs without playing small ball, quoting Joe Morgan’s moronic charge that Beane “just waits for the three-run homer” and how you can’t do that. This was in the top of the sixth with the score tied 1-1. About ten minutes after they tried to impress the fans with this erudition, Manny Ramirez hit a 3-run homer and put the Sox up 4-1. The idiot announcers didn’t notice, let alone explain how you close a 3-run lead by stealing bases.
In the bottom of the ninth, A’s manager Ken Macha sealed the deal for me, killing a rally with a meaningless sacrifice bunt. The score was 4-3, the A’s had men on first and second and nobody out. So Macha has his hitter lay down a sacrifice to get the runners over to second and third, on the theory that any ball hit out of the infield will score the runner from third and tie the game.
The thing is, though, that the out he gave up in this situation happened to be more harmful than the slight advantage he gained from moving the guy in scoring position to third, because the next guy walked and loaded the bases anyhow, putting a double play in order that would have ended the game and causing the A’s to lay off the low pitches. With that shrunken strike zone, the last two A’s struck out looking.
The A’s need a manager who understands the system Beane uses to build the team, and who’s smart enough to use the talents his players actually have instead of the ones he wishes they had. Art Howe wasn’t that guy, and Ken Macha isn’t either, but with all the baseball writers sucking up to him for playing traditional baseball with a non-traditional team I don’t see anything changing for the A’s.
UPDATE: See Matt Welch for a coherent explanation of Moneyball.