Thursday, July 03, 2003
Moneyball
Well, yesterday was birthday #32 (Happy Birthday big guy). First time in years that I didn't spend my birthday at a ballgame. Fleur is going to be in Oklahoma this weekend, so maybe I'll see some ball then. I told my bro that I would go to a party with him tomorrow night, so I guess unless I can find some daytime ball (not likely on a Friday) it will have to be Saturday or Sunday.
My buddy Sean Smith bought me a copy of Moneyball (the new book about the management of the Oakland A's), so bonus points to Sean for getting a good gift. Without doing anything besides reading the jacket blurbs, I think I'll have the same experience as I did when I read Godel, Escher, Bach. GEB is a heck of a book, but when I read it I was wrapping up a degree in philosophy, heavy on the logic. So it wasn't saying anything new to me and I put it down half-way through. Moneyball has the potential to be a great book, but I nerded-out on baseball about a decade ago. If Moneyball tells me that the proper way to run a ballteam is to recognize OBP and to recognize simple economic concepts like sunk costs... Well, that might be news to a lot of GMs, but nothing I haven't seen before. Hopefully I'll be surprised by the book.
By the way, my friend Greg took me to an A's game a while back, and we sat a row behind Billy Beane. The man seemed to drink a lot of beer, but what the heck, it was a day game and it was hot. And he can whup most of the GMs out there with half his brain cells tied behind his back, so more power to him.
posted by David 4:54 PM
