Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game: “The news just can't be intelligent about baseball because news by definition is small samples. Because it's daily, right? The most typical opinion in sports is the opinion about something that just happened. If you listen to them, they are always rationalizing the most recent events. If someone hits a home run, it becomes a reflection of that person's whole career. And they make these vast generalizations about the home run. If someone walks in the game winning run, it's a reflection of that player's character. So it's always taking some event that just happened and trying to make it signify more than it does. There's an inherent idiocy in baseball commentary. It's particularly idiotic in baseball commentary because you do have this pool of data that's available from which you can actually make some pretty intelligent statements which is just being ignored in that moment because you want to explain that moment.”
Other subjects Lewis discusses in the interview are Joe Morgan, now an announcer for ESPN, who evidently proudly claims to not have read Lewis' book; steroids in baseball; major leaguers' relationships with writers, even if the major leaguers have known the writer on a personal level for years; big trades and analyzing risk; making generalizations about events that just happened; what happens when something that was undervalued is no longer so; the inherent uncertainty of injuries; and finally, briefly about his new book, Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life.
I found this interview in a PubSub feed for 'moneyball', which you can view either in a browser or in an RSS aggregator. Since pretty much everybody who mentions Michael Lewis will also mentions in the same breath "author of Moneyball" (see above), it's been pretty easy to keep track of the author of one of my favourite non-fiction books of all time.
Mark D Lew has a lengthy review of Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. He criticizes Lewis for not focussing on popular pitchers like Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. That would have been the expected route, and Lewis decided to follow a different one. Instead, according to Lewis' acknowledgements, interviews with those two pitchers were instrumental to the background stories that informed the book. Lewis does an excellent job summarizing both the book and its larger context (in terms of baseball, but not of baseball).
He calls the lack of an index a minor error. I think not having an index is a major error, mainly because after reading it, I wanted to use the book as a reference. (I bought the book for my dad as a birthday present but made him promise to give to me to read after he did.) "See?" I would say. "Lewis thinks [x] about [y], so there!" But I can't do that without an index. Dave Pollard has also called not including an index in recent non-fiction an annoying trend.
Another overheard conversation on the bus. This was more of a monologue, a girl in her very early twenties talking about a guy she met at a party. She related to her girlfriends how she and and the guy had "crashed at Cassandra's place", and that the couch was shaped in such a way as to discourage cuddling—any couch that is designed in such a way to discourage cuddling is a crime against nature—ƒand that they had talked for hours and when they woke up, talked for 4 hours in the morning. The remarkable part, for me, is not that they had such a long conversation: I've had such long conversations, some that lasted well in to the morning. One lasted up until 5 AM. I felt kind of bad for one of my friends who was part of that conversation, because he really wanted to get alone with one of the girls also in the conversation group. It was all good though: at a party later, they got to second-base-or-so.
No, the remarkable part was that this was the first time that I heard a recap and evaluation from the girl's side of the story. She talked about how he was not especially good-looking, but that from their long conversation she found out much about him that she had in common, and even discovered that he was studying journalism and was into sports and that maybe he would become a sports columnist because that was "more accessible". (The best political columnists start out as sports columnists, a wit once wrote. Watching sports you have to suspend belief for 2 1/2 hours at a time and then write about it. Watching politics, you have to suspend belief full-time.) She said that because of that conversation, she figured out that she could find out whether a guy was more than just good-looking—that is, that there is a brain behind the body—if she asked him what book he was reading. She figured if he had an answer—any answer—other than "nothing", she could better determine whether he was a smart guy or not was not. Their conversation moved on to other guys they knew, including a "hot British guy" who could evidently could also speak French and Spanish. "Yeah," I wanted to ask them, but what book had he just read?"
A few months ago, I showed up to a party wearing a t-shirt and jeans and whatever else I was wearing that day. It was a spur-of-the-moment invitation, and I had planned to do nothing that night but sit in front of a cathode ray tube chatting with people I will never meet in the flesh. I decided it would be an opportunity to see a few friends I hadn't seen in a while. After politely declining alcoholic drinks, and impolitely accepting cookies in the shape of the female reproductive organs, I sat down and proceeded to mind my own business when a relatively cute Asian girl started, for reasons known only to her, talking to me. She saw my T-shirt and I explained it, and then she asked what I did for a living, to which I said that I was an independent contractor doing tech support for an Internet hosting company, a little bit of script programming, setting up websites and some other impressive-sounding tech-related phrase. She then asked, as if she were genuinely interested, what book I had last read. I lied and said Moneyball by Michael Lewis, because it was far more interesting than the book I had really last read, and proceeded to explain what the book was about. The question caught me a little off-guard—not so off-guard that I couldn't deftly think of an interesting lie, mind you—;for the very simple reason that no remotely attractive member of either sex has asked me at a party what book I last read, especially not in the drunken state he or she was in. Those who have skipped ahead here or those who have actually read up to this point may be wondering if I got her phone number. I can be confident and funny when I'm tired, but not confidence only goes so far when a girl's sober significant other is sitting next to her. If I had business cards at that point, or if I had been working for the employer that currently has yet to provide me with them, I would have handed it to her. Since both conditionals on which that last sentence is based is false, it naturally follows that the ritual conversation-concluding exchange of business cards did not occur.
Inner cinema now takes over as I consider the possibilities: what if I had a business card that night to give out? What if Mr. I Should Probably Be Taking My Girlfriend Home Now wasn't sitting next to her when I was not only not giving a fuck but sounding relatively coherent and intelligent in the presence a good-looking, about-my-age and single-for-all-I-know woman? Although surely there is more than one reason a woman would want to know what book the person sitting next to her has just read, overhearing that conversation on the bus fills in a spot on that list, which is, to see whether the individual in question might be thinking about things other than how to get in their pants.
Tyler Bleszinski on the point Moneyball was trying to make (yet which many people still miss): “Yes, OBP is important, but Billy valued it as a benchmark for acquiring players because it was something the market undervalued. That is no longer the case anymore. The Red Sox, Blue Jays, Dodgers, Padres and a whole host of other teams now use OBP as an important measure. The key is trying to figure out what the market undervalues and pouncing on it. If a team with a $120 million payroll is scooping up everything that Billy values, then the premise of Moneyball is now null and void. I'm sure Billy has moved on. And the changes in the team have reflected as such, for those that have been paying attention.”
Michael Lewis on how his book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game, was received: “The big thing was not baseball's response. It was the response outside of baseball, which was so loud that baseball couldn't ignore it. An awful lot of people who are friends with owners read the book. That was the channel back into baseball. The Wall Street investment banker friend of owner X calling him and saying, 'your team is completely mismanaged.' Baseball is a pretty insulated culture. But it's still porous. If it was perfectly insulated, they would have ignored it.”
He talks about what it was like hanging out with Billy Beane and why Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Eric Chavez were excluded from the bulk of the book. Only Zito was undervalued, but besides, everybody else was writing about them, so why should he?
Michael Lewis on his high school baseball coach Billy Fitzgerald: “We listened to the man because he had something to tell us, and us alone. Not how to play baseball, though he did that better than anyone. Not how to win, though winning was wonderful. Not even how to sacrifice. He was teaching us something far more important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure. To make the lesson stick, he made sure we encountered enough of both. I never could have explained at the time what he had done for me, but I felt it in my bones all the same.”
Jeff Angus comments on the article, and talks about Coach Fitz' technique of bluster and intelligent intimidation: “In moneyless ball, pre-college schooling environments, it may be the single most probabilistically effective technique for a baseball coach. The charges are pre-adolescents or adolescents, chronically unfocused, riddled with fears of inadequacy emulsified in a solution of arrogance and a belief in the self's ultimate immortality and superiority. In baseball as a income-generating profession, the approach has its limits, because most pros are making significantly more money than the coach, and in a society that worships money as it's most frequent measure of virtue, this makes adherence to the ultimate wisdom of the coach a tricky proposition.”
Aaron Schatz: “this league-wide rush to statistical analysis has created a problem for those optimistic that sabermetrics would have a leveling effect: Rich teams are discovering that they can play the sabermetric game, too. In the short-term, this is actually worsening the gap between some rich and poor teams, as rich teams with sabermetric approaches extend their advantage over poor teams without them. And, in the long-term, once everyone is using sabermetrics, every team will correctly value players, and there won't be any more inefficiencies to exploit. Suddenly major league baseball will be right back where it started: With the richest teams buying up the best players, and the poorer teams settling for the dregs.”
A vignette in Moneyball (p. 38 for those who have their copy handy) shows that this was already predicted.
"This is a cutting-edge approach we're taking this year," says Eric [Kubota], whose job, it is increasingly clear, is to stand between Billy [Beane] and the old scouts, and reconcile the one to the other. "Five years from now everyone might be doing it this way."
"I hope not," says Paul. He doesn't mean it in the way that the old scouts would like him to mean it.
Schatz goes on to say that Paul DePodesta, because he has “more resources to maximize” in Los Angeles although more resources also means more pressure to succeed. At one point in the book—and rather than say it was DePodesta, I would appreciate someone reminding me who said it, because there is no index to the book (!) and I couldn't flag down the passage—but one of the key managers of the A's is on record as saying that because salaries are low, expectations are low. If they failed in their experiments, then they can't be blamed because they didn't have much to begin with anyway. The A's correctly expected other people to expect them to lose more games than they won, which placed them in a situation where if the expectations weren't met, then that means they were doing something right. The Dodgers are playing in a big media market (not as big as New York or Chicago, but big), and expectations are high. (Some believe that the high expectations might be pretty close to realistic now that the Dodgers are making good moves even if one ignores the DePodesta hiring.)
There is more disagreement with the Schatz article: JC says that Scatz gets sabermetrics and its signficance wrong. Baseball Musings says there are multiple ways to win in baseball and that Moneyball is about finding undervalued players, and when the undervalued players become overvalued, others will step in and also be undervalued. In other words, there will always be inefficiencies: since the location of inefficiencies changes, the trick is to find out where they are.
So in other words: blah blah blah Moneyball blah blah Paul DePodesta blah blah blah Billy Beane etc.
Dan Lips: “American education could use a healthy dose of Bill James's rigorous analysis and Billy Beane's courage. For years, discussions about improving America's schools have focused on adding resources. Politicians promise to fix our schools the same way the New York Mets or Texas Rangers try to improve their franchises: spending more money, rather than focusing on efficiency. And the public schools, like the Mets and Rangers, have little to show for their extravagant spending.”
One thing I thought was missing in Moneyball by Michael Lewis was discussion on how the philosophies of Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta applied outside of baseball. The closest Lewis comes is when he is discussing Bill James' essay Inside Out Perspective, which talks the media's false pretense of taking you "inside" the game by saying (and these are Lewis' words) “What was true about baseball was true about other spheres of American public life and, to James, the only sensible approach was to drop the pretense and embrace one's status as an outsider.” (p. 94) Lips' article is one of no doubt soon to be many using the Moneyball metaphor of "winning" on a budget by looking at the metrics nobody else is looking at, the ones which happen to be the most important. Since the book barely mentioned how what the A's were doing applied to organizations other than baseball clubs (there is evidently going to be a sequel to the book, but no mention as to whether it talks about applications outside of baseball), Lewis created a niche for writers to compare the Moneyball philosophies to their other lines of work. Put this in the Not Cliché Yet pile.
Urban Educ8r has some comments on the Lips article.
Tom Benjamin had a revelation: “Frankly, I was shocked. Everywhere I looked I found bunk. Not only did I find bunk everywhere as a result of reading Bill James, I discovered something else that was every bit as disturbing to me. Most people like bunk! They love it! Most people hate debunkers. James was very obviously right about almost everything and hardly anybody in baseball or the baseball media liked him or believed him or listened to him! They often attacked him! Nothing changed.”
Last month I read Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and it fits very nicely into the minority opinion category (it only now occurs to me to create a category in my weblog content management tool of choice). It's a book almost solely about baseball: for about one paragraph Lewis talks about the implications outside baseball. A weblog comparing baseball to the business world does so far more explicitly, but Moneyball is a book about how the conventional wisdom usually isn't very wise and that how one can profit from being correct but in the minority, and it is in my current list of all-time desert island top five non-fiction books.
(Some time passes and Jeff of Management By Baseball writes in to say that "A weblog comparing baseball to the business world" is not an adequately accurate phrase to describe it, and says that it would be more accurate to say it is about the lessons managers—in the public, private and military sectors—can learn from baseball. Moneyball by Michael Lewis, Jeff says, has a similar subject theme, except it looks at the subject the other way around: baseball managers can learn lessons in terms of human capital from the business world as well.)
Bill James belongs in the Minority Opinion Hall of Fame.