Moneyball - Michael Lewis [42]
It wasn’t as simple as the unease of jocks in the presence of nerds. Professional baseball was happy to have intellectuals hanging around the clubhouse and the commissioner’s office and the GM’s suite. Well, perhaps not happy, but not disturbed either, so long as the intellectuals had no practical consequences for how baseball was played, and by whom. Baseball offered a comfortable seat to the polysyllabic wonders who quoted dead authors and blathered on about the poetry of motion. These people dignified the game, like a bow tie. They were harmless. What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence.
STATS Inc. founder Dick Cramer told a story with the flavor of the deeper problem. In the early days, through fluky circumstances, Cramer had sold his data collection and analysis service to the Houston Astros. The Astros’ GM, Al Rosen, wanted to know how the team would be affected if the Astrodome’s fences were moved in. Would the team, as currently composed, do better or worse in a smaller, more hitter-friendly park? Cramer ran the numbers—showing the relative propensity of the Astros versus their opponents to hit long pop flies—and told Rosen, “Sorry, if you do that, you lose more games.” Instead of deciding not to move the fences in, Rosen decided that the information could never be made public. “All of a sudden it is classified information,” said Cramer, “It was ‘We can’t tell anyone! My God, we can’t let this information get out! Imagine the effect on our pitchers!’” They didn’t want the information to inform the decision. They’d already made the decision. (They believed home runs sold tickets.) They wanted the information, in some sense, to avoid having to deal with its implications.
In 1985, STATS Inc. gave up trying to sell their superior data to teams and began to sell it to fans. Their timing could not have been better: the baseball fan was changing in a way that made him a natural customer of STATS Inc. A new kind of fan, with a quasi-practical interest in baseball statistics, had been invented. In 1980 a group of friends, led by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Okrent, met at La Rotisserie Française, a restaurant in Manhattan, and created what became known, to the confusion of a nation, as Rotisserie Baseball. Okrent can plausibly be said to have “discovered” Bill James. Okrent was one of those seventy-five people who, in 1977, ran across the one-inch ad in The Sporting News James took out and sent off his check to Lawrence, Kansas. Back came an unpromising mimeograph. Then he read it. “I was absolutely dumbstruck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that (a) this guy existed and (b) he hadn’t been discovered.”
Okrent flew to Lawrence to make sure James indeed existed, then wrote a piece about him for Sports Illustrated. It was killed: James’s arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after the Sports Illustrated fact-checker spiked the piece. “She went through it line by line,” recalled Okrent, “saying, ‘Everyone knows this isn’t true. Everyone knows that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowd when he pitched, that Gene Tenace was a bad hitter, that…’” Conventional opinions about baseball players and baseball strategies had acquired the authority of fact, and the Sports Illustrated fact-checking department was not going to let evidence to the contrary see print. The following year, an editor who had been unable to shake Okrent’s piece from his mind asked Okrent to try again. He did, and the piece was published, and Bill James was introduced to a wider audience. The year after that, 1982, a New York publisher, Ballantine Books, brought out the Baseball Abstract, and made it a national best-seller.
Many of James’s new readers were Rotisserie Baseball fanatics. The game, which sought to simulate an actual