Moneyball - Michael Lewis [59]
There was something to be said for these arguments but there was also something to be said against them, and, according to two people who watched the proceedings, only one commissioner was willing to say it: Paul Volcker. Volcker was also the only commissioner with a financial background. To the growing annoyance of the others, he kept asking two provocative questions:
1. If poor teams were in such dire financial condition, why did rich guys keep paying higher prices to buy them?
2. If poor teams had no hope, how did the Oakland A’s, with the second lowest payroll in all of baseball, win so many games?
The owners didn’t have a good answer to the first question, but to answer the second they dragged in Billy Beane to explain himself. The odd thing was that the previous season, 1999, the A’s had finished 87–75 and missed the play-offs. Still, they had improved dramatically from 1998, Billy’s first year on the job, when they’d gone 74–88. And they were looking even stronger in 2000. Volcker smelled a rat. If results in pro baseball were so clearly determined by financial resources, how could there be even a single exception? How could a poor team improve so dramatically? Paul DePodesta wrote Billy Beane’s presentation and Billy flew off to New York to explain to Volcker why he was a fluke. He was happy to do it. He hadn’t the slightest interest in stopping the Blue Ribbon Panel from concluding that his life was unfair. He’d be delighted to see the cost of players constrained, or, even better, the Yankees made to give him some of their money. When he got up before the panel, Billy flashed a slide up on the overhead projector. It read:
When it suited his purposes Billy could throw the best pity party this side of the Last Supper. He told the Blue Ribbon Panel that the Oakland A’s inability to afford famous stars meant that no matter how well the team performed, the fans stayed away—which was the opposite of the truth. All the A’s marketing studies showed that the main thing fans cared about was winning. Win with nobodies and the fans showed up, and the nobodies became stars; lose with stars and the fans stayed home, and the stars became nobodies. Assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games, and watching them become stars, was one of the pleasures of running a poor baseball team.
Billy also told the Blue Ribbon Panel that his inability to pay the going rate for baseball players meant that his success was likely to be ephemeral. It might have been what they wanted to hear but it wasn’t what he believed. What he believed was what Paul Volcker seemed to suspect, that the market for baseball players was so inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash. He then went out and created more evidence in support of his belief. Having won 87 games in 1999, the Oakland A’s went on to win 91 games in 2000, and an astonishing 102 games in 2001, and made the play-offs both years.
They weren’t getting worse, they were getting better. The rapidly expanding difference between the size of everyone else’s money pile and Oakland’s had no apparent effect. Each year the Oakland A’s seemed more the financial underdog and each year they won more games. Maybe they were just lucky. Or maybe they knew something other people didn’t. Maybe they were, as they privately thought, becoming more efficient. When, in 2001, for the second year in a row, they lost to the Yankees in the fifth and deciding game of the play-offs, the Oakland front office was certain that theirs had been the better team and that it was the Yankees who had