Moneyball - Michael Lewis [31]
When Billy read Walker’s pamphlet, he experienced—well, he couldn’t quite describe the excitement of it. “It was the first thing I had ever read that tried to take an objective view of baseball,” he said. “Something that was different than just a lot of people’s subjective opinions. I was still very subjective in my own thinking but it made sense to me.” It more than made sense to him: it explained him. The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field. Billy Beane had himself been one of those illusions.
Billy wasn’t one to waste a lot of time worrying about whether he was motivated by a desire to succeed or the pursuit of truth. To his way of thinking the question was academic, since the pursuit of truth was, suddenly, the key to success. He was bright. He had a natural coruscating skepticism about baseball’s traditional wisdom. He could see that Eric Walker’s pamphlet was just the beginning of a radical, and rational, approach to the game—one that would concentrate unprecedented powers in the hands of the general manager. Where had Eric Walker come from, he wondered, and was there any more behind what he’d written? “Billy shed every one of his player-type prejudices and adapted,” Alderson said. “Whereas most of the people like him would have said, ‘That’s not the way we did it when I played.’” In answer to Billy’s question, Alderson pointed to a row of well-thumbed paperbacks by a writer named Bill James, who had opened Alderson’s eyes to a new way of thinking about baseball. Alderson had collected pretty much everything Bill James had written, including four books self-published by James between 1977 and 1980 that still existed only as cheap mimeographs. Sandy Alderson had never met, or even spoken to, Bill James. He wasn’t a typical baseball insider but he still recognized a distinction between people like himself, who actually made baseball decisions, and people like James, who just wrote about them. But he had found James’s approach to the game completely persuasive, and had reshaped a professional baseball organization in James’s spirit. That’s why he had hired Eric Walker, in the hope of “getting some Bill James–like stuff that was proprietary to us.”
For his part, Billy Beane had never heard of Bill James. “But that was the big moment,” he said, “when I figured out that all the stuff Sandy was talking about was just derivative of Bill James.” His mind had finally found an escape hatch. It led to a green field as far away from professional baseball as you could get and still be inside the park.
Chapter Four
FIELD OF IGNORANCE
I didn’t care about the statistics in anything else. I didn’t, and don’t pay attention to statistics on the stock market, the weather, the crime rate, the gross national product, the circulation of magazines, the ebb and flow of literacy among football fans and how many people are going to starve to death before the year 2050 if I don’t start adopting them for $3.69 a month; just baseball. Now why is that? It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language.
—Bill James, 1985 Baseball Abstract
THERE IS A CERTAIN KIND of writer whose motives are ultimately mysterious. The writer born into a family of writers; the writer whose work is an attempt to make sense of some private trauma; the writer who from the age of four is able and willing to stay in his room and make up stories: each of these creatures is a stereotype. What he writes may be good, but why he writes isn’t something you particularly want to hear more about. The interesting case is a writer like Bill James. He grew up in a not unhappy family in Mayetta, Kansas (population: 209), and the closest he came to an uprooting experience was the move from there down the Interstate Highway to Lawrence. There, at the University of Kansas, James studied economics and literature. He didn’t know any literary types, had no apparent role models, and was not encouraged in any way to commit his thoughts