Moneyball - Michael Lewis [137]
It was only after I had spoken with other teams, and found they didn’t have much to add to this particular story, that I came to focus on the A’s management and players. By that time the baseball season was over, and I had my material. As always happens when the material is strong, the story became telescoped in the writing. I felt compelled to jettison everything that didn’t have to do with putting together a baseball team. The result wasn’t anything like a biography of a man; it was more like a biography of an idea—that left its main character, Billy Beane, for thirty-five pages at a time.
Until they saw it, the Oakland front office had only the faintest notion of what my book would be like. Oakland’s staff read the book when reviewers read it, about a month before the hardcover hit the stores. Each member of that staff had a slightly different reaction to it. Beane’s was something like horror. He was surprised that so much of the thing was about him and disturbed that I’d portrayed him as a maniac. I probably should have felt more guilt about this than I did. I assumed most readers understood that this wasn’t the whole man, and that I had my own agenda. I wanted to capture Beane doing what he did so well and interestingly: value, acquire, and manage baseball players. And when he did this, in his most intense moments, he was a bit of a maniac.
That’s the background to what happened next, which was something new in my experience as a writer. The Club of people who made their living just off the field of play—GMs and scouts, along with some of the noisier members of the Women’s Auxiliary, the writers and commentators—flipped out. Not at me, mind you: at Billy Beane. For the six months of the 2003 baseball season, the sun did not set without some professional blowhard—half of the radio guys seemed to think it was clever to call themselves “Mad Dog”—spouting off about Beane’s outsized ego. To catalog the scorn heaped on the poor man—whose only crime was not throwing me out of his office often enough—would take too long. But it’s worth citing a few examples:
It was Beane who had a best-selling book, Moneyball, written mostly about him, in which he bragged endlessly about outsmarting wealthy clubs by reinventing the way players are evaluated.—Art Thiel, Seattle Post Intelligencer
…the other person being mentioned as Evans’ possible successor, Oakland’s Billy Beane, has done a terrific job with modest funds with the A’s, but he’s also a shameless self-promoter who wrote a book about his imagined genius and is despised by scouts around baseball.—Doug Krikorian, Long Beach Press Telegram
Two things are apparent in the recently released book Moneyball, The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Oakland general manager Billy Beane’s ego has exploded….—Tracy Ringolsby, The Rocky Mountain News
I’ll return later to the second thing apparent to Mr. Ringolsby, because he speaks for a big faction of the Club. What seemed apparent to me, terrifyingly so, was that baseball insiders were going to compel my subjects to recant—to say that this book about their organization was laughably off-target and could safely be ignored. If the Oakland A’s had a dollar for every journalist who asked Billy Beane or Paul DePodesta if they’d been “misquoted,” they could have gone out and bought a proper