Moneyball - Michael Lewis [142]
Ramon Hernandez bunted!
The A’s had won the first game of the Red Sox series when their molasses-footed catcher, with two outs, dropped a bunt down the third base line. The act itself triggered a chemical reaction in the minds of Club members.
Moneyball teams don’t bunt! These…little nerds all say that smart managers don’t trade outs for bases. Ha! Look! Okay, they won. But they’ve proven our point!
Never mind the absurdity of attributing the outcome of a game to the single event. Never mind that a single exception does no harm to the larger argument: that over the long haul it’s a mistake to give away outs for bases. Never mind that the dislike of the sacrifice bunt is a trivial sliver of the new approach to baseball. It wasn’t a sacrifice bunt. There were two outs! Ramon Hernandez wasn’t trying to trade a base for an out. He was bunting for a base hit.
Well, thank God, the Oakland A’s lost in five. (Though, surely, the case would be cleaner if they lost in three, no?) And when the Florida Marlins won the World Series, it was of course inevitable, the result of their true grit. The special something they possessed that only Club members could understand. Baseball America columnist Tracy Ringolsby—by far the loudest, most obsessed of Billy Beane’s critics—was on the scene to pant all over Jack McKeon, the Marlins’ manager, and pay him the ultimate compliment, that “he certainly doesn’t buy into the theories of the book Moneyball, which proclaimed teams should draft only college players, particularly pitchers.” Of course, it didn’t matter what McKeon thought about drafting players, as he hadn’t built the Marlins but was airdropped into their midst in mid-season. This McKeon guy had that special something that Ringolsby understands—and that guys like Billy Beane never will. That piece of manhood that little nerds will never understand. The bracing thing that Ringolsby can feel in his bones and you, weak-chinned outsider, cannot. The special something that won championships.
That special something, or its absence, happens to be the other thing that, in Ringolsby’s view, was instantly apparent in Moneyball. The problem wasn’t just that Billy Beane’s ego was out of control. It was that the author of Moneyball “has a limited knowledge of baseball and total infatuation with Billy Beane.” A limited knowledge of baseball—it sounds damning enough, but what does it mean? What it surely does not mean is that Ringolsby has performed on a baseball field under pressure—or that I have not—for he has never come near the field of play. Nor does it mean that he has actually tried to understand what these people in Oakland are up to, for he’s never bothered to interview them. Think of it! A guy who makes his living writing about baseball working himself up into a fine lather, year after year, about this radical experiment in Oakland and never once bothering to pick up the phone and ask Billy Beane to explain what he’s up to. A limited knowledge of baseball: What it means, so far as I can tell, is that he’s just another unathletic guy who’s assigned himself the job of keeping people out of the game who, in his view, have no business inside. He’s not a writer. He’s a bouncer.
But he has his own moment, this fellow. When he sits down to write his column he knows in his heart that he speaks for a lot of people who work just off the field of play. He may only belong to the Women’s Auxiliary, but his view of the game reflects those of actual Club members. A lot of people who make the decisions