Moneyball - Michael Lewis [141]
Well, if you want to steer the conversation away from racism there are safer examples to pick. It was the nearest thing baseball writing has seen to a Marx Brothers routine. Griffin was Harpo who, seeing his friend engulfed in flames, grabs the bucket of water, without noticing that it’s marked KEROSENE. What made the whole episode doubly weird is that Jackie Robinson was exactly the sort of player the A’s and the Jays salivate over. He had the stats they tended to stress—high on-base, plate discipline, great power for a second baseman, etc.—plus he was undervalued. Indeed, one way of looking at the revolution in baseball management is as a search for less dramatic versions of Jackie Robinson—players who, for one unfair reason or another, often because of their appearance, had been maligned and undervalued by the market.
Still, in one way these two Toronto baseball writers were right: no matter how artfully it tried to insinuate racism, their story wasn’t about race. Race was merely a tool, a weapon in a bigger, more important struggle: the fight against people who didn’t take the scout or the sportswriter on faith. What had got under their skin were all these…little nerds out there with their Web logs and baseball stats and computers who thought they had something to say about building a baseball team. Pelted with rotten fruit, Baker claimed that the response to his story was no more than a conspiracy of these nerds. “We suspect,” he wrote to me, “that many of the e-mails and letters complaining about the story were in part the result of an organized campaign started on baseball web logs and by other parties with an interest in refuting the story.” Those pesky outsiders!
The “White Jays,” the uninformed rantings of baseball writers too lazy to pick up a telephone, the snide asides on ESPN, the knowing jokes about Billy Beane’s “genius”—it was all of a piece. To defend the Club against the new idea, the members had to distort the idea.
By the end of the 2003 baseball season I had learned something from publishing Moneyball. I learned that if you look long enough for an argument against reason you will find it. For six months, inside the Club, there had been a palpable longing for the Oakland A’s to fail. At the start of the season, after the book came out, there was some hope this might happen quickly. Scrambling to ditch payroll, Billy Beane had traded his star closer, Billy Koch, to the White Sox for a pitcher a lot of people had written off, Keith Foulke. He’d lost his fourth starter, Cory Lidle, who’d also become too dear. The A’s, once again, were playing in a division with far richer teams. Worst of all, the Red Sox and the Blue Jays were making the market for baseball players more efficient. How on earth could the A’s continue to win?
Well, they did win. They won more regular season games than anyone but the Giants, the Yankees, and the Braves. They then won the first two games of the five-game playoff series against the Red Sox. There was real joy in this—not just in watching David beat Goliath but in watching people with an investment in Goliath’s lifestyle try to prepare for what appeared to be David’s imminent victory. Every year for the previous three, after the Oakland A’s had been bounced from the playoffs, the Club’s Women’s Auxiliary raised a chant: the A’s can’t win! Their dislike of the sacrifice bunt, the skepticism about the stolen base, their bizarre taste in players,