In case you've been living in a cave, Osama, Moneyball is about how stats geeks finally got a foothold in professional baseball after years of dwelling on the fringes and in the rotisseries. You see, for many years, stat geeks knew that virtually everything everyone thought they knew about baseball was wrong. All the conventional old-school myths, the inane platitudes and clichÇs announcers constantly spew -- it's almost entirely rubbish.
In Moneyball, the heroes are the people who stormed the castle of the ultimate old boys club with only facts and truth on their side and managed to survive. Longtime readers know of my penchant for playing the odds, for following reasoned probability and analysis despite a universe that always presents the enough random chaos to make you feel like you've gotten a wedgie from a bully for being so smart.
The godfather of all this is, of course, Bill James, who not only had the insights, the timing, and the outright defiance required to get the whole thing started. Anti-social and quite prickly, James went around for years on his jihad and gathered some brilliant followers, but was never able to break through the wall of ignorance. His story is really quite inspirational for anyone who believes in reason and ideas and finds they have to fight an ignorant, thoughtless, and even hostile status quo. According to James: "It is a wonderful thing to know that you are right and the world is wrong. Would God that I might have that feeling again before I die." For most of us that would not be true. It would be insufferably lonely and frustrating.
But James' concepts grew slowly in visibility over the years -- to a great extent only after he exited the battle -- until the perfect storm of Billy Beane's personality, Paul DePodesta's computer, and the Oakland A's financial realities allowed these ideas to be put into practice. Even despite the remarkable successes the new way of thinking has achieved, there is still overwhelming pressure from the old boys club to de-intellectualize the game.
I may have a colored view of this as it is a concept so valued by me, but it would be difficult to imagine someone coming away from Moneyball without an appreciation of the energy and passion author Michael Lewis brings to the table. The characters he describes are, well, characters. And he doesn't mince words about folks on the wrong end of the debate.
From the afterword:
The game itself is a ruthless competition. Unless you're very good, you don't survive in it. But in the space just off the field of play there really is no level of incompetence that won't be tolerated. There are many reasons for this, but the big one is that baseball has structured itself less as a business than as a social club. The Club includes not only the people who manage the team but also, in a kind of Women's Auxiliary, many of the writers and the commentators who follow it, and purport to explain it. The Club is selective, but the criteria for admission and retention are nebulous. There are many ways to embarrass the Club, but being bad at your job isn't one of them. The greatest offense a Club member can commit is not ineptitude but disloyalty.
To this day there is enormous resistance to statistical based analysis. For how long it can continue I don't know. There are basically two types of successful baseball organizations anymore. One of them pays attention to its stat geeks (A's, Blue Jays, some others). The other has more money than god and just buys whatever it needs (Yanks, Red Sox). But the small market clubs that just send out beat up old players to scout for talent are doomed whether they want to admit it or not.
I would tell you that if you ever have had a passing interest in baseball Moneyball is a must read, but if you have a passing interest in baseball, you have already read it.
