Moneyball - Michael Lewis [47]
The trouble was that baseball readers were not ready for what he had to say. The people who found him worth reading struck him, increasingly, as ridiculous. His skeptical detachment from the world around him helped him to become a writer but it left him ill-suited to be a best-selling one. “I hate to say it and I hope you’re not one of them,” he wrote in his final, 1988 Baseball Abstract, “but I am encountering more and more of my own readers that I don’t even like, nitwits who glom onto something superficial in the book and misunderstand its underlying message…. Whereas I used to write one ‘Dear Jackass’ letter a year, I now write maybe thirty.” The growing misunderstanding between himself and his readership was, he felt, not adding to the sum total of pleasure or interest in the universe. “I am no longer certain that the effects of my doing this kind of research are in the best interests of the average baseball fan,” he explained. “I would like to pretend that the invasion of statistical gremlins crawling at random all over the telecast of damn near every baseball game is irrelevant to me, that I really had nothing to do with it…. I know better. I didn’t create this mess, but I helped.”
Intelligence about baseball had become equated in the public mind with the ability to recite arcane baseball stats. What James’s wider audience had failed to understand was that the statistics were beside the point. The point was understanding; the point was to make life on earth just a bit more intelligible; and that point, somehow, had been lost. “I wonder,” James wrote, “if we haven’t become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.”
His final essay in his final Baseball Abstract James entitled “Breakin’ the Wand.” “To most people it no doubt seemed that I was writing about statistics,” he said, “but I wasn’t, not ever; in the years I’ve been doing this book I have written no more than a couple of articles about baseball statistics. The secret of the success of this book is that I was dead in the center of the discussion. I was writing about exactly the same issues that everybody else was talking about, only in a different way.”
With that, he quit. Claimed he was through being a sabermetrician. “It is a wonderful thing to know that you are right and the world is wrong,” he concluded. “Would God that I might have that feeling again before I die.” He never had a clue—not then, not later—that the world was not entirely wrong. No one ever called James to say that an actual big league baseball team had read him closely, understood everything he had said along with the spirit in which he had said it, and had set out to find even more new baseball knowledge with which to clobber the nitwits who never grasped what Bill James was all about.
Chapter 5
THE JEREMY BROWN BLUE PLATE SPECIAL
What I have tried to do with my work is to make baseball more fun.
—The Bill James Newsletter, 1985
WHEN YOU THINK of intellectuals influencing the course of human affairs you think of physics, or political theory, or economics. You think of John Maynard Keynes’s condescending line about men of action—how they believe themselves guided by their own ideas even when they are unwittingly in the thrall of some dead economist. You don’t think of baseball, because you don’t think of baseball as having an intellectual underpinning. But it does; it had just never been seriously observed and closely questioned, in a writing style sufficiently compelling to catch the attention of the people who actually played baseball. Once it had been, it was only a matter of time—a long time—before some man of action seized on newly revealed truths to gain a competitive advantage.
By the time he became the general manager of the Oakland A’s, in 1997, Billy Beane had read all twelve of Bill James’s Abstracts. James had something to say specifically to Billy: you were on the receiving end of a false idea