What I’ve Learned So Far

The other day I referred to Michael Lewis’s new book, The Blind Side, which I am now reading and enjoying enormously. I’ll give you my thoughts on it later, but for now I thought I’d share a review I wrote of Lewis’s groundbreaking sports book, Moneyball. This review originally appeared in June of 2003 on BlueEar.com, the online journal and community founded by my good friend Ethan Casey. (Since I was writing for BlueEar’s global audience — many of whom would be unfamiliar with baseball — I included some explanations of basic material that would be common knowledge for any baseball fan.)

By chance, the timing for this is excellent, since Moneyball is about the Oakland Athletics, and the A’s just beat the Minnesota Twins to advance to the American League Championship Series for the first time in more than a decade.

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Let me get this out of the way right up front: This isn’t a review, it’s an appreciation. Moneyball is good enough that I wish I had written it. I told that to my wife when I was still holding the copy in the bookstore, having only just read the first couple of pages of it. The wish was even stronger by the time I had finished it the next day.

Moneyball’s subtitle is “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”, and it chronicles the career of Billy Beane, who is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball club.

Stop! Even if you don’t like baseball, or don’t know anything about it, please keep reading. I’d love for you to understand why I love this book for reasons that stretch far beyond its baseball content.

Billy Beane was himself a gifted athlete in high school. Maybe “supergifted” would be more like it. He played football and baseball and was the best at everything he tried. He’s still impeccably handsome, and has always had an easy way with the ladies. Baseball came to him so easily that it surprised no one when he was signed to play professional ball right out of high school.

Beane quickly ran into psychological limitations that would prevent him from ever having much success on the field. In some sense, his physical gifts worked against him. Until he began serving his professional apprenticeship in the minor leagues of baseball, he had always been able simply to do what he wanted on the field, without having a particular approach or method of preparation. And until he faced the tougher pitching of the minor leagues, he had no need to control his furious temper. If he failed at the plate, he would go back to the dugout and break something. While he was still in high school, the chances were good that he’d step up to the plate the next time and do something spectacular. But the minor leagues were something else again.

The minor leagues are tiered, such that a player starts in rookie ball, playing against other young men of about his age and experience. They’re all professionals, but they’re also all green. From rookie ball the successful baseball climber advances to low-A, then high-A ball, then AA (pronounced “double A”) and, if he’s very good, AAA (”triple A”). The best players are invited to participate in off-season leagues as well, including the Instructional League (which aims to polish the skills of the most promising players), the Arizona Fall League (which brings together the best players from AA and AAA for several weeks of intensified competition), and sometimes the winter leagues (which play in the Carribean and Latin America and feature some major leaguers alongside minor leaguers as well as veterans from foreign leagues).

At each tier of this system, the new player can expect to face better opponents than he ever has before. He may have faced individual pitchers as tough as the guy he’s trying to hit today, but up here all of the pitchers are that good. By the time he gets to AAA, our young player finds that all the pitchers have good breaking balls — balls that, unlike a fastball, don’t travel in a straight line through the hitting area. Good breaking balls are much harder to hit than fastballs. That’s why the guys with good ones make it to AAA, and that’s why a lot of previously good hitters peter out at AAA.

Essentially without exception, all of the players who make it to the big leagues are very, very, very good in comparison to the rest of the baseball players in the world. Very briefly, Billy Beane was among these players, mostly on the strength of his great raw athleticism and the intangible qualities that made baseball scouts and managers think he should make it. Beane is still as handsome and suave as a movie star. He’s 6′4″, broad-shouldered and rangy, and he always looked great loping across the outfield in his baseball uniform. But he psyched himself out at the plate, and couldn’t learn to keep an even keel through the inevitable slumps that affect even the most gifted hitters. Beane later came to believe that he was drafted for all the wrong reasons: raw speed and agility, the right look of a star ballplayer, the ability to impress scouts with an eye-popping swing or catch.

Throughout Moneyball, Michael Lewis makes clear the contrast between Beane the baseball player, who never lived up to his potential, and Beane the general manager, who is likely the best at his job since the great Branch Rickey. Rickey, among other things: (a) helped to build the modern ‘farm system’ by which minor-league teams are affiliated with major-league clubs; (b) systematized scouting of players and opposing teams; and, most famously, (c) signed, developed, and promoted Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who broke the major leagues’ race barrier in 1947. Since Rickey is generally considered by far the best general manager ever, the comparison suggests that Beane is one of the two best general managers in the game’s history. While I’m an unabashed fan of Beane’s, I think that rating is fair.

Why? How did Beane go from being a failed baseball player to a super-successful builder of teams? And if Beane the player was signed for all the wrong reasons, what are the right reasons that Beane the general manager uses to help the low-budget Athletics excel? This is where Lewis’s experience as a business writer (he’s the author of Liar’s Poker, among other books) helps him to explain the bases — both emotional and intellectual — of Beane’s competitive greatness.

First, the emotional side: While Billy Beane is a nice man and a loving father, he is also ridiculously competitive. The almost insane passion for winning that overpressurized him at the plate in his playing days drives him to excel as the general manager of the A’s (as the Athletics are also known). And the same smooth-talking charm he used to woo the ladies in his youth now carries over into the nonstop dealmaking he does with other general managers around the league.

These emotional traits are all mustered in service of the key intellectual obsession of Beane and his whiz-kid staff: that decisions be based on data, and not on the million received opinions of the hidebound institution that is baseball. Beane’s lieutenants (including Paul De Podesta, who is also treated at length in Moneyball) are constantly looking for new wrinkles of baseball knowledge that will allow them to understand better what they’re looking for in a player — and in particular, what undervalued traits will allow them to afford that player on the second-lowest payroll in the league.

Beane’s obsession with data-driven analysis led him to develop a key insight in concert with his precedessor and mentor Sandy Alderson. The thought progression runs like this:

–Baseball games are won by runs — hitting such that you score more of them than your opponent, pitching such that your opponent scores fewer of them than you do.

–Out of all the ocean of baseball statistics, the single number that is tied most linearly to run-scoring is something called on-base average or on-base percentage (OBA or OBP).

–Acquire high-OBP players as cheaply as possible.

Very simply, OBP measures what percentage of the time a player — call him Ted — goes to the plate and doesn’t make an out. Ted could slap a single, or crush a home run, or be hit by a pitch, or draw a walk (which happens when Ted is patient enough not to swing at pitches that sail outside the strike zone).

On average, major-league players get on base about a third of the time, or maybe 35%. But Ted, who isn’t flashy, and who’s a little pudgy around the middle, and who isn’t the fastest outfielder in the world, is more patient than that. He’ll wait all day to get his pitch, then hit the ball hard when he gets it. He gets on base 41% of the time.

While other teams might say “This kid’s pretty slow” or “That uniform looks tight on him”, the Athletics will say “You’re our new left fielder.”

Think of it this way: If the single thing you know about batting is “making an out is bad”, would you rather have a team full of guys who avoid outs 34% of the time, or a team full of guys who avoid outs 41% of the time? Avoiding outs is good, whether or not the players doing it are glamorous. You’ll score a lot more runs with the 41% set.

(All of these observations work in reverse for pitching, which I’m going to treat summarily here: The best pitchers are the ones who make the most outs relative to the number of batters they face. Lewis himself is a little too summary in his treatment of the pitching side of the equation — he uses just one absorbing chapter to talk about a young pitcher the A’s acquired last year. This is too bad, since the Athletics’ stellar pitching has sustained them as much as or more than their batting has in their recent run of excellence.)

One more thing about our friend Ted: Because he’s not a matinee idol, and he’s not a track star, and he doesn’t hit home runs that have to be tracked with GPS, he probably wasn’t highly touted or thoroughly scouted by other teams. This means that Oakland can get him via the amateur draft before other teams realize his value, and that they can pay him less than other teams would pay players drafted at a similar level. So not only are they more effective, they’re also cheaper. Thus does a team with one-third of the New York Yankees’ payroll match them on the field.

Lewis conveys a lot of the information I’ve just given you with a terrifically detailed account of “draft day” inside the Athletics’ command center. On this day, all the big-league clubs take turns drafting (i.e. gaining the exclusive right to employ) amateur players. Beane is at his best and most charged-up pacing around the room and reacting swiftly to what he’s hearing over the speakerphone. He’s incredulous and gleeful as other teams — teams with old-fashioned drafting strategies — roll the dice on this year’s model of Billy Beane-the-player. Meantime, Billy Beane-the-general-manager is busy stealing the cookie jar by acquiring pretty much all of the players on his wish list.

The narrative is gripping in large part because Lewis allows his characters to drive it. We get to know a lot about Beane and De Podesta, and also about the Oakland players Scott Hatteberg (a catcher-turned-first-baseman) and Chad Bradford (a relief pitcher). Lewis also shows his skill in using snippets of dialogue and description to convey the personalities of minor characters such as the team’s scouts — many of whom are products of the old school, and thus dubious about Beane’s methods — and its draftees.

Lewis couldn’t know what the 2002 season would hold when he convinced Beane to let him hang around to write about it. But he knew just what to do when, early in the season, he was handed the drama of a housecleaning trade that sent away one of the club’s most popular players. And he received a made-to-order set-piece in the form of the Athletics’ record 20-game winning streak, which was capped by an insanely dramatic Hatteberg home run. Reading that passage, I got chills all over again as I remembered watching that game last year.

In short: good stuff.

Even in comparison to other sports, baseball is an intensely conservative and insular world. Given that, you might be able to guess that Lewis’s book has stirred controversy among many of the good-ol’-boy network who believe that if a given tactic was good enough for John McGraw (who managed the Giants a hundred years ago), it’s good enough for today. And I’m not expecting Beane’s ideas to take over the baseball world overnight. Revolutions take time. But slowly, Beane’s proteges and their savvier peers are rising to the helms of clubs around the leagues, and not-so-slowly you can watch those teams improve on the field and on the balance sheet. (Well, you can guess about the improvement on the balance sheet, at least.)

But while we wait for the rest of the baseball world to catch up, we can appreciate both Michael Lewis’s good, entertaining story, along with its deeper message about basing the decisions of an organization on the best data it has available to it.

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If you’d like to read more about Beane and his methods, check out this 2003 Fast Company article:

How to Play Beane Ball

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Books, Sports, Decision.