Moneyball - Michael Lewis [138]
But the Oakland A’s didn’t recant, and a phony debate soon heated up. It wasn’t as interesting as a real debate, in that there was no chance for an exchange of ideas. It was more like a religious war—or like the endless, fruitless dispute between creationists and evolutionary theorists. On one side, parrying half-baked questions and insults, was the community of baseball fans who thought hard about the use and abuse of baseball statistics. On the other side, hurling the half-baked questions and insults, were the Club members, who felt a deep, inchoate desire to preserve their status.
Q: If Billy Beane thinks he’s such a goddamn genius, how come he didn’t draft (fill in the high school phenom)? How come he’s paying Jermaine Dye $11 million a year?
A: The point is not that Billy Beane is infallible; the point is that he has seized upon a system of thought to make what is an inherently uncertain judgment, the future performance of a baseball player, a little less uncertain. He’s not a fortune-teller. He’s a card counter in a casino.
Q: If Billy Beane’s so smart, and he says that on-base percentage is so important, how come the A’s don’t score more runs?
A: They don’t score more runs because their on-base percentage is not that great—much worse than it used to be. The market for on-base percentage has changed, thanks in large part to the success of the Oakland A’s. Still, the A’s on-base percentage retains one important trait: it’s good for the money. And the point is not to have the highest on-base percentage, but to win games as cheaply as possible. And the way to win games cheaply is to buy the qualities in a baseball player that the market undervalues, and sell the ones that the market overvalues.
Q: What kind of egomaniac claims that he discovered all these statistics? On-base percentage! My old buddy (fill in the name of old buddy) has known about on-base percentage since 1873.
A: The Oakland’s A’s never claimed to have discovered sophisticated statistical analysis. They claim to be ramming it down the throat of an actual big league baseball team.
I had gone to some trouble to show that all the ideas Beane slapped together were hatched by someone else’s brain. Indeed, any reader of Moneyball who had read Bill James or followed the work of some of the best baseball writers (Peter Gammons, Rob Neyer, Alan Schwarz) or the two leading Web sites, baseballprospectus and baseballprimer, might fairly wonder what all the fuss was about: We knew this already. The fuss, so far as I was concerned, was that the rubber had finally met the road, and, for putting it there, Billy Beane deserved a lot of credit. (Or blame, depending on your point of view.) Intellectual courage was his contribution. He’d had the nerve to seize upon ideas rejected, or at least not taken too seriously, by his fellow Club members, and put them into practice. But I’d never thought of Beane as a genius. He was more like a gifted Wall Street trader with no talent for research.
Over and over again during the 2003 season I found myself facing one reaction from the wider reading public and another from inside the Club. But it wasn’t until Joe Morgan weighed in that I fully understood the discrepancy. Hall of Fame player, ESPN announcer, general man around baseball, Morgan was the closest thing to Club Social Chairman. And when Joe Morgan decided he needed to talk about Moneyball, the tone of the discourse went from weird to stark raving mad. In one of his mid-season ESPN chat sessions