Vigilante Sports

I know I’m a little late getting to the party. I first came across Moneyball by Michael Lewis in the summer of 2004. My soon-to-be brother in-law was having a bachelor weekend, his friends and family all gathered to play sports, eat, and relax. His best men, Tom and Steve (also his brother) were talking about a book they had both read that they thought Brit just had to read. It was Moneyball. Tom and Steve both thought it was a revolutionary book about how a baseball team should or could be run.

For those who haven’t read this book, I would encourage you to read it. If you’re a baseball fan, a business person, or someone who is interested in a good story this book is for you. Lewis masterfully tells the tale of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s. The author was given unprecedented access to the sports equivalent of the holiest of holies, the baseball clubhouse. He remarked that players and staff alike made him feel at home and assisted him whenever they could.

This book talks about the traditional baseball approach to scouting, drafting, trading and all other things about running a baseball team, and then contrasts it with how Beane and the Oakland A’s were now running that small market baseball team. Because the A’s were a small market team without a surplus of money, efficiencies needed to be found. That’s where Beane would make his mark.

Beane who was once the most promising prospect in the New York Mets farm system knew about talent, and he knew what traditional baseball men were looking for. From the time he was a high school student he had been involved with Major League Baseball. He knew the system. He was a five-tool (speed, hit for average, hit for power, arm strength, fielding ability) can’t miss prospect. The problem was, he missed. He never became the All Star player that all of the baseball guys thought he would. He had his own problems, and demons. The book delves deep into who Billy Beane is and why he decided to take on traditional baseball.

His thought was to remove the subjectivity of traditional baseball and replace it with statistics. To make the statistics tell the story of a ball player, rather than some scout who has strong biases for and against the way a player looks, talks, and plays. Bill James supplied Billy Beane along with a handful of other statistics people the ammunition to start a revolution. The statistical analysis of baseball that James did laid the groundwork for sabermetrics which James himself defined as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.”

The logic that Bill James and his contemporaries applied to baseball, and the statistics that they uncovered with their research changed the way I view baseball. I realized that I, like the old baseball cronies, let my perceptions cloud my judgment about a particular baseball player. This has specific application in fantasy baseball.

Daniel Okrent, known as the father of rotisserie baseball, has of course created a monster. Now some 28 years after the first rotisserie baseball league, fantasy baseball is doing huge business and has spawned fantasy sports of all kinds. Fantasy baseball, sabermetrics and the internet have created the perfect storm for baseball fans. Fans can instantly research and analyze data about a particular player, or team by typing in some simple search terms.

It’s not quite that easy for the general manager of a professional baseball team. Billy Beane has his methodology of paying for the attributes of a player that he deems important. Basically what he thinks is important is how can he win more baseball games. He and his staff, including his assistant GM Paul DePodesta (who served as the GM for the Dodgers from February 2005 to October of 2005), did research to find out what it was statistically that won baseball games. They needed to quantify that. They determined that on base percentage was a huge factor in how many runs a team was able to score. That principle, along with a bevy of other statistics geared towards getting on base rather than creating an out, would guide Beane and the A’s in all of their personnel decisions.

This book chronicles draft picks, and trades in a way that normal everyday baseball fans never get to see. We see Beane berating a scout who hasn’t done his homework, and masterfully navigates other general managers to get the players he wants without going over budget. In the book, we see not only a new methodology to running a baseball team, but we see a man, Beane, in his element. For all of the tools he had on the field, his skills in the general manager’s chair trump all others.

I enjoyed reading this book so much, I didn’t want to finish it. It was well written and fascinating. I will definitely pick up Lewis’ book about football (The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game).  I would love to hear if any of you have read Moneyball or The Blind Side. Tell me what you thought. Did it affect your view of baseball?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 12:44 am and is filed under Baseball, MLB, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.