Moneyball

By Michael Lewis, Reviewed by Paul Wysard

Twenty-five years ago, another tiff between Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner led to Martin's ouster as Yankee manager and his return to hometown Oakland to manage the Athletics. As had happened in New York, Detroit, and Texas in earlier seasons, improvement accompanied Martin, with the A's taking the AL West title in 1981. The club ran a lot and well, pitched inside, and got down and dirty on defense. The media christened the style of play "Billyball," after its heady and combative leader.

Three years later, Martin was back in the Yankees' dugout while a big, fast, "can't miss" young player was making his debut across town with the Mets. His name was Billy Beane, and some scouts out in California had rated him higher than budding Met star Darryl Strawberry. Beane had turned away from a Stanford scholarship to accept a professional draft, but six years and four teams later all he had to show for that decision were 300 at-bats, a .219 average, 3 homeruns, and several trips between AAA and The Show. The prospect was an intense competitor, perhaps too much so, never able to embrace the ebb and flow of the long seasons. He began to realize that he really didn't like to play, but nevertheless loved the game. What to do? In a most unusual move for a 27-year-old player, Beane walked into the A's office and asked to be given a shot as an advance scout. The general manager, Sandy Alderson, was not a former player, and was already flirting with the unorthodox, thinking, in today's vernacular, "out of the box." He hired Beane, figuring "this young guy doesn't want to be Jose Canseco, he wants to be me."

Beane worked his way into and up the Oakland administration, and became the general manager when Alderson left to take a supervisory post under the Major League Commissioner. In the meantime, both men had become convinced that there had to be newer and better ways to run a franchise and to evaluate and select players within it. Part of the reason for this attitude was both men became convinced that much of the thinking in baseball had become old, encrusted. Another factor was necessity; the new Oakland owners made it clear they did not intend to spend a lot of money. No fabulous free agents were to be bought, and so cheaper but successful players must be found or developed. There had to be "a bigger bang for a buck."

Enter Bill James and Sabrmetrics, followed by computers measuring players in new and different ways. Enter Billyball II, emphasizing off-the-field planning as much as its predecessor stressed on-the-field battles. The main ingredients of the new philosophy are:

1. Offense is more important than defense, which is difficult to quantify.

2. On-base percentage and slugging percentage should supercede century-old standards such as batting average and RBI.

3. Flame-throwing teen-age pitchers should be avoided in favor of college hurlers who
A. Have been winners in their longer, pressured seasons,
B. Show high strikeout-to-walk ratios, and
C. Induce many more ground balls than fly balls (since the former do not go out of ball parks and must travel along narrow lanes to bring extra bases).

Proficient and profane, charismatic and sometimes crude, Beane is shown leading scouts and front-office researchers in a series of evaluations related to the 2002 Draft. Following is a patched and paraphrased composite of those discussions:

Sc - "This kid is definitely 5-tool. You should see the build and the speed!"

BB- "Yeah, but can he hit?"

Sc - "He'll hit."

BB- "No. . .no, can he f-----g hit NOW?"

Sc - "Well, he'll need some work, some re-direction."

BB- "I like Brown much better. A lot."

Sc - "But Billy, that guy doesn't have anything physically."

Res- "He's got one of the highest college OBPs in the nation."

BB- "And 21 homers over the past two seasons."

Sc - "He's not quick. He's fleshy"

BB- "Yeah. Like Babe Ruth."

Sc - "His thighs are way too big. They rub together."

BB- "How many times do I have to say it? We're not selling blue jeans!"

The subject here, and the poster boy of Billyball II recruits, was University of Alabama catcher Jeremy Brown. He had been picked so late in 2001 that he decided to return to college ball. He didn't have the "tools" within the ancient tree of tradition almost all Big League scouts prefer. Billy Beane was determined to shake that tree. Brown had the kinds of numbers which meshed with the new approach, he was chosen early, and he hit so well in High-A play that he became the only 2002 draftee invited to the Big Camp in the Spring of 2003.

On the mound, a quiet, religious Southerner with a submarine delivery by the name of Chad Bradford showed the favored stats outlined earlier. He has been up with the A's and was generally successful in 2003 - 3.04 ERA, .236 average against, 1.25 WHIP, and a better than 2-1 K/BB ratio. Bradford and Brown are just two pieces in the overall collage of Moneyball-Billyball II: Find kids that fit the philosophy, use them until they reach high-priced free agency, say goodbye and start over. Giambi and Tejada succeeded and left, the likes of Chavez and Zito may follow, and maybe in around 2010, we'll be reading about negotiations with Brown and Bradford. And the A's have been a highly competitive factor. Now... if they could just win that LAST Divisional Playoff game...

Lewis is a versatile author, ranging from the semi-fictional Liar's Poker, about investment and finance, to baseball in this case. Although some folks may disagree with what is presented, especially the critique of scouts and scouting, the style is readable and well-paced. And the topic is most timely in this era when "small market-tight budget" clubs presumably always lose. It ain't necessarily so.

Editor's Note:
In the first few pages of Moneyball, author Michael Lewis spins a story. One of the propeller-heads in the Oakland A's front office noticed the stats of a pitcher on a small college team. He asked a scout to check things out. The scout saw the pitcher and responded that the front office person had wasted his time. The A's drafted the pitcher in any case, and he ended up dominating his league when he reached the minors. This summed up the book for me. Is this because Lewis is a great writer? Lewis is a good raconteur, but it has more to do with the fact that I recognized the name of the scout. The two of us went to high school together. He was a great player. He was seen in the same light as the brightest prospect our league had produced in recent years - Gregg Jeffries, who at the time was rocketing up the Mets system (Barry Bonds had left our league long enough before that he was no longer deemed a candidate for comparison). He knew more about baseball than anybody. In between classes you could shout out player names and he would mimic their batting stances and swings. "Darryl Strawberry!" Bam - the spitting image of Straw. "Will Clark!" Bam - perfect down to the screwy face. He worked his way up through the minors, finally stalling in AAA. He never made it to the bigs, but he knew his craft. Yet back in high school I would have picked about two dozen kids who could kick him around a rotisserie league. That's the central issue here, what's the best set of tools to use when it comes to evaluating players, their value and their potential? Is it the traditional baseball scout who knows exactly how to bend his knees for optimal power, or some numbers-cruncher who understands what a correlation coefficient is? Of course the best solution is a some combination of the two, but Billy Beane and his staff lean far towards the second option. This book gives an excellent inside look at Beane's approach.

An interesting shelfmate for Moneyball is Breton and Villegas's Away Games, which is another look at modern player development, and the struggles that Latin American players face in the minors. Miguel Tejada plays a big role in both, as "Mr. Swings-At-Everything", the anti-Beane prototype in Moneyball, and as the central character in Away Games.