But seriously. These past seven or eight weeks have been some of the strangest and most exciting games in baseball history... if you are a Cardinals fan. In the years to come, when people ask 'Where were you?' about various moments in franchise lore, I can say this: I was reading 'Moneyball' when the Cards beat the Astro's in Houston and then I paced the kitchen where I was housesitting while I listened to the local ESPN radio station play the rest of the Braves game. It's not very often you get to hear a cross-country rivals game broadcast on your local airwaves. On a side note: Does anyone remember, was it 2004, 2006 maybe, that the Braves had to beat another team in our division in order for the Cards to make the post-season? I just remember hearing the fans in Busch start doing the Tomahawk Chop. That's something else you don't see happen very often.
Going on six or seven years now I have had a copy of Michael Lewis' look inside of Billy Beane's head and organization, the Oakland A's. I love baseball, but I couldn't quite bring myself to read a book I assumed touted the glories of a system of viewing the game that I perceived to be a slight on the romantic, historic, beautiful aspects of this game I love. But with a movie version of the book released this fall, and a lot of extra time on my hands these past few months, I decided to try another attempt to read the red-spined book. (Another side note: I have recently shelved the majority of my books according to color. This makes it easier to find a volume as I tend to remember what color it is. However, if you have bought a more recent copy of the book, I believe it is green, so please don't go looking for your copy amongst the red books. But enough of my quirks.)
So here are a few of my thoughts on 'Moneyball':
First, it is an incredibly well-written and engaging book. Even if you think you don't like baseball, that it is boring and how on earth could a book make it better? Because Lewis doesn't assume that all of his readers are baseball insiders, he does well to avoid a lot of the technical jargon and surprisingly includes little of the statistical numbers game that the book is actually describing. By that I mean, don't come looking for a lot of numbers and decimal points. Rather, Lewis helpfully describes what those numbers represent. What it is that guys like Billy Beane see when they look at the numbers. Why this way of looking at the game has become so incredibly popular.
Second, I see that much of the tension in this story is between the older, more romanticized understanding of baseball and a newer, more scientific view. Now, this statistics thing? That's been around for a long while. It isn't the fact that statistics exist, it's how we read them, which ones we record, how we interpret them. Yes, interpret. Even numbers can be read in different ways. So when we are first introduced to the Oakland A's General Manager (the guy who is in charge of acquiring players) and his team of scouts, there is an obvious tension between Beane and the Scouts. It is a matter of what the Scouts see in their prospects and what Beane and the couple of fellow believers see in the numbers. How is this different? The Scouts want power, they want a boyishly good looking, talented but untried slugger. Beane's okay with paunchy, old, rehabbed players... who consistently get on base and therefore score runs. The numbers say go with the unexpected if unassuming. The gut says there's an ideal, a mold, a model. Find someone who fits within that. This is the tension between science and faith, between the romance and the math.
Third, there is the question of money. The question is: how much money will we pay for a run? The Yankees play some astronomical amount for a run (this is the amount of money on the player payroll divided by the number of runs). The A's pay far, far less. Not because they want to but because they have to. If you aren't a Yankees fan, it's safe to say you despise them. Me, too. But I also expect they become the baseball fan's scapegoat - they win because they can afford to buy whomever they want. Yet, we cannot deny the fact that in the 2002 season the A's did really well, with far less money.
But once you step away from the issue of the payroll it prompts a question: is baseball a game? Is it a business or a product or a science? Maybe even an art form? How do we consider the entity that is baseball? Despite the premise of 'Moneyball', you get the sense that the issue of money is something that is far removed from what happens on the field. It's almost obscene to talk about money. Not because people don't talk about money, but because the idea that money buys you wins seems absurd. It's the player, the power, the mystique. How ridiculous that one should assume that money has anything to do with the outcome of a team's season. Okay, that might be overstating things just a tad bit (or a lot). But the question remains: what role does money play in any given franchise's success? I suspect there are as many different answers to that question as there are major league franchises. But at the very least, Lewis' look at how one franchise handles this question was very enlightening.
As to the movie, I highly recommend that you go. Though the movie focuses in on Billy Beane far more than the book (he makes appearances, but each chapter is as much about other aspects of the team as it is about Beane), you see into the world of MLB trades, players, management and tradition. You see the mind game as much as a the numbers game. And you see that in the end, maybe the heart and soul of the game is still the romance, the heart and the beauty what happens on the field. Nine men take the field, one man up to bat. It's as simple as hitting that ball...
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