Moneyball - Michael Lewis [139]
It’s typical if you write a book, you want to be the hero. That is apparently what Beane has done. According to what I read in the Times [the New York Times had excerpted Moneyball] Beane is smarter than anyone else. I don’t think it will make him popular with the other GMs or the other people in baseball.
A number of people pointed out to Joe Morgan, in print, that Billy Beane hadn’t written Moneyball. It had no effect. A week later, during another chat, someone else asked Morgan what he would do to improve the A’s, if he were Billy Beane. To which, after summoning all of his wit, Joe replied, “I wouldn’t be Billy Beane first of all! I wouldn’t write the book Moneyball!”
Here was the nub of the problem: Joe Morgan hadn’t read the book but he was certain Billy Beane had written it. Even people inside the Club who understood that some other human being had actually taken the trouble to scribble down the words in Moneyball took the book, at bottom, to be the work of Billy Beane. Billy Beane was saying that there was some objective way to measure the performance of a baseball team, and that he was the best at it. Even worse: Billy Beane had written a book to say that a lot of things that Club members do and say is ludicrous.
It was, in a way, an author’s dream: the people most upset about his book were the ones unable to divine that he had written it. Meanwhile, outside the Club, the level of both interest and reading comprehension was as good as it gets. The Oakland front office had calls from a cross section of American business and sporting life: teams from the NHL, NFL, and NBA; Wall Street firms; Fortune 500 companies; Hollywood studios; college and high school baseball programs. There was even a fellow who ran a chain of hot dog stands who found a lesson for his business in the experiment occurring inside the Oakland front office. (Don’t ask.) Every nook and cranny of American society, it seemed, held people similarly obsessed with finding and exploiting market inefficiencies—and the Oakland front office inspired them. The people most certain they had nothing to learn were other Major League Baseball teams.
But of course they didn’t! They weren’t a business, they were a Club. In a business, if someone comes along and exposes the trade secrets of your most efficient competitor, you’re elated. Even if you have your doubts, you grab the book, peek inside, check it out. Just to see. Not in baseball. In baseball, they were furious. In the Club, there was no need to read it—baseball executives routinely bragged that they hadn’t read it—because, well, it was offensive. In poor taste, was the absurd phrase actually used by Seattle GM and Grand Poo-Bah of the Raccoon Lodge, Pat Gillick.
What baseball did, instead, was cast about for reasons to dismiss what had happened in Oakland—and what was now happening in Toronto and Boston. If the nerve was so raw, it was because the idea of rational baseball management had already begun to spread. The Boston Red Sox, having failed in their attempt to hire Billy Beane, did the next best thing, and hired a very bright young man, Theo Epstein, who viewed Beane as his role model. The Toronto Blue Jays had already hired Beane’s right-hand man, J. P. Ricciardi. Both Epstein and Ricciardi met with cultural resistance—though the Red Sox press is so reliably venomous that it was impossible to distinguish the poison directed at the new regime from the poison they’d aimed at every other person who had the temerity to pass through Fenway Park. What was interesting in Boston was the story that never got written, and the question that never got asked: if we’ve been doing things more or less the same way for eighty years, and we are hysterically angry about the results, shouldn’t we try something different? Might not science offer an answer to the Curse of the Bambino?
Toronto was closer to a pure case study. Ricciardi, the new GM, had done what every enlightened GM will eventually do: fire a lot of scouts, hire someone comfortable with