Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions) (40 page)

It’s typical if you write a book, you want to be the hero. That is apparently what Beane has done. According to what I read in the
Times
[the
New York Times
had excerpted
Moneyball
] Beane is smarter than anyone else. I don’t think it will make him popular with the other GMs or the other people in baseball.

A number of people pointed out to Joe Morgan, in print, that Billy Beane hadn’t written
Moneyball
. It had no effect. A week later, during another chat, someone else asked Morgan what he would do to improve the A’s, if he were Billy Beane. To which, after summoning all of his wit, Joe replied, “I wouldn’t be Billy Beane first of all! I wouldn’t write the book
Moneyball
!”

Here was the nub of the problem: Joe Morgan hadn’t read the book but he was certain Billy Beane had written it. Even people inside the Club who understood that some other human being had actually taken the trouble to scribble down the words in
Moneyball
took the book, at bottom, to be the work of Billy Beane.
Billy Beane was saying that there was some objective way to measure the performance of a baseball team, and that he was the best at it.
Even worse:
Billy Beane had written a book to say that a lot of things that Club members do and say is ludicrous.

It was, in a way, an author’s dream: the people most upset about his book were the ones unable to divine that he had written it. Meanwhile, outside the Club, the level of both interest and reading comprehension was as good as it gets. The Oakland front office had calls from a cross section of American business and sporting life: teams from the NHL, NFL, and NBA; Wall Street firms; Fortune 500 companies; Hollywood studios; college and high school baseball programs. There was even a fellow who ran a chain of hot dog stands who found a lesson for his business in the experiment occurring inside the Oakland front office. (Don’t ask.) Every nook and cranny of American society, it seemed, held people similarly obsessed with finding and exploiting market inefficiencies—and the Oakland front office inspired them. The people most certain they had nothing to learn were other Major League Baseball teams.

But of course they didn’t! They weren’t a business, they were a Club. In a business, if someone comes along and exposes the trade secrets of your most efficient competitor, you’re elated. Even if you have your doubts, you grab the book, peek inside, check it out.
Just to see
. Not in baseball. In baseball, they were furious. In the Club, there was no need to read it—baseball executives routinely
bragged
that they hadn’t read it—because, well, it was offensive.
In poor taste
, was the absurd phrase actually used by Seattle GM and Grand Poo-Bah of the Raccoon Lodge, Pat Gillick.

What baseball did, instead, was cast about for reasons to dismiss what had happened in Oakland—and what was now happening in Toronto and Boston. If the nerve was so raw, it was because the idea of rational baseball management had already begun to spread. The Boston Red Sox, having failed in their attempt to hire Billy Beane, did the next best thing, and hired a very bright young man, Theo Epstein, who viewed Beane as his role model. The Toronto Blue Jays had already hired Beane’s right-hand man, J. P. Ricciardi. Both Epstein and Ricciardi met with cultural resistance—though the Red Sox press is so reliably venomous that it was impossible to distinguish the poison directed at the new regime from the poison they’d aimed at every other person who had the temerity to pass through Fenway Park. What was interesting in Boston was the story that never got written, and the question that never got asked: if we’ve been doing things more or less the same way for eighty years, and we are hysterically angry about the results, shouldn’t we try something different? Might not science offer an answer to the Curse of the Bambino?

Toronto was closer to a pure case study. Ricciardi, the new GM, had done what every enlightened GM will eventually do: fire a lot of scouts, hire someone comfortable with statistical analysis (Keith Law from baseballprospectus—
a Web site, for cryin’ out loud
), and begin to trade for value, ruthlessly. He dumped as many high-priced players as he could and replaced them with a lot of lower-priced ones—and began winning more games. His biggest problem was finding teams willing to take bloated stars off his hands. (His best day all year, he told me, was when George Steinbrenner watched a Yankee right fielder drop a fly ball, blew a fuse, and demanded the Yankees buy Raul Mondesi off the Jays.) He slashed the Jays’ payroll from $90 million to $55 million. In an efficient market, if you cut your payroll by 40 percent, you would expect to lose a lot more games. That’s not what happened, of course. What happened was that the Jays went, overnight, from being a depressing group of highly paid underachievers to an exciting team. They were younger, cheaper,
and
better.

For the most part, the city of Toronto appreciated the change. But even there, in that gentle and decent place, was that noisome sound—the miserable squeaks of protest from the Club’s Women’s Auxiliary. One morning during the 2003 season, Toronto woke up to a front-page story in the
Toronto Sta
r that raised alarming questions about the new Blue Jays. “The White Jays?” it was called. The headline, along with the mug shots of the players, read: “In a city of so many multicultural faces, Toronto’s baseball team is the whitest in the league. Why?” The baseball writer behind the article, Geoff Baker, had made his own little study. He’d found that there were ten nonwhite players on the average big league twenty-five-man roster and that, after Ricciardi’s wheeling and dealing, the new Jays had only six. The new GM seemed to be systematically trading for lower-priced
white guys.
How sad, how regrettable, in a city as famous for its diversity as Toronto, that the Blue Jays no longer represented it. “Ricciardi is at a loss to explain the numbers as anything beyond coincidence,” wrote Baker, who was not similarly at a loss. He found an explanation in the way J. P. Ricciardi ran a baseball team.

It was an intriguing line of attack, but with a tactical weakness. By its very nature, it demanded a response from outside the Club. (That, in the end, is the Club’s Achilles heel. It can never fully escape the larger culture that supports it.) Letters poured into the
Star
, the
Star’s
ombudsman was called in to apologize for the package, and other newspapers took the piece to heart. The
National Post
ran a withering editorial that pointed out that the Jays’ promotional campaign featured two players, Carlos Delgado and Vernon Wells, both black. That Toronto was 8 percent black and 2 percent Latino, its baseball team was 12 percent black and 12 percent Latino, and so, taken literally, the article made the case for
reducing
the number of racial minorities in Blue Jays’ uniforms. That it was grotesque to make racial generalizations based on a couple of moves. Wrote the
Post
: “The story, shot through as it was with vague hints of racism, comprised a smear job on a baseball team with no other agenda than to win games and please its fans.”

But where the anger climaxed was in the Blue Jays clubhouse: the players were ticked off. You see, they were laboring under the impression they’d been selected for their ability to play baseball, not their skin color. Carlos Delgado told the
Toronto Sun,
“It was the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. It doesn’t make any sense. You don’t see anybody writing anything about the Maple Leafs not having a black guy or the Raptors having 90 percent black players. It [race] has nothing to do with it. We don’t have any kind of problem in the clubhouse and we don’t need that shit.”

Enter, stage right, Richard Griffin, a second baseball writer on the
Toronto Star
. Griffin was another old baseball guy who had been on Ricciardi’s case from the start. Relentless in his ire for the new regime, and their new methods, he never missed a chance to point out where they were going wrong. Now he explained patiently to the
Star
’s readers that they should not “shoot the messenger.” His colleague’s article hadn’t been about racism, he said, but…well, what
was
it about? He cast about for a phrase and came up with: “The fluctuating racial mosaic of baseball.”
Ah! So that’s it,
the innocent Toronto newspaper reader must have thought, as he scratched his noggin. Then Griffin clarified his meaning: “Jays GM J. P. Ricciardi along with Oakland’s Billy Beane and other new wavers,” he wrote, “believe in building offence through patience at the plate and taking no chances on the bases. That’s pre WW-2 style of play. Under those criteria, Jackie Robinson could not have played in the majors.”

Well, if you want to steer the conversation away from racism there are safer examples to pick. It was the nearest thing baseball writing has seen to a Marx Brothers routine. Griffin was Harpo who, seeing his friend engulfed in flames, grabs the bucket of water, without noticing that it’s marked KEROSENE. What made the whole episode doubly weird is that Jackie Robinson was exactly the sort of player the A’s and the Jays salivate over. He had the stats they tended to stress—high on-base, plate discipline, great power for a second baseman, etc.—plus
he was undervalued
. Indeed, one way of looking at the revolution in baseball management is as a search for less dramatic versions of Jackie Robinson—players who, for one unfair reason or another, often because of their appearance, had been maligned and undervalued by the market.

Still, in one way these two Toronto baseball writers were right: no matter how artfully it tried to insinuate racism, their story wasn’t about race. Race was merely a tool, a weapon in a bigger, more important struggle: the fight against people who didn’t take the scout or the sportswriter on faith. What had got under their skin were all these…little nerds out there with their Web logs and baseball stats and computers who thought they had something to say about building a baseball team. Pelted with rotten fruit, Baker claimed that the response to his story was no more than a conspiracy of these nerds. “We suspect,” he wrote to me, “that many of the e-mails and letters complaining about the story were in part the result of an organized campaign started on baseball web logs and by other parties with an interest in refuting the story.” Those pesky outsiders!

The “White Jays,” the uninformed rantings of baseball writers too lazy to pick up a telephone, the snide asides on ESPN, the knowing jokes about Billy Beane’s “genius”—it was all of a piece. To defend the Club against the new idea, the members had to distort the idea.

By the end of the 2003 baseball season I had learned something from publishing
Moneyball
. I learned that if you look long enough for an argument against reason you will find it. For six months, inside the Club, there had been a palpable longing for the Oakland A’s to fail. At the start of the season, after the book came out, there was some hope this might happen quickly. Scrambling to ditch payroll, Billy Beane had traded his star closer, Billy Koch, to the White Sox for a pitcher a lot of people had written off, Keith Foulke. He’d lost his fourth starter, Cory Lidle, who’d also become too dear. The A’s, once again, were playing in a division with far richer teams. Worst of all, the Red Sox and the Blue Jays were making the market for baseball players more efficient. How on earth could the A’s continue to win?

Well, they did win. They won more regular season games than anyone but the Giants, the Yankees, and the Braves. They then won the first two games of the five-game playoff series against the Red Sox. There was real joy in this—not just in watching David beat Goliath but in watching people with an investment in Goliath’s lifestyle try to prepare for what appeared to be David’s imminent victory. Every year for the previous three, after the Oakland A’s had been bounced from the playoffs, the Club’s Women’s Auxiliary raised a chant: the A’s can’t win! Their dislike of the sacrifice bunt, the skepticism about the stolen base, their bizarre taste in players, their terrifying irreverence of old baseball wisdom—all these quirks that worked so well for them during the regular season somehow doomed the Oakland A’s in the playoffs. Well, after Game Two, nobody—and I mean nobody—said, “Ah, the Oakland A’s can’t beat the Boston Red Sox. They might have taken the first two but by the very nature of their enterprise they cannot ever win a playoff series.” What they did was cast about for an explanation to rationalize the horrible events about to transpire. A consensus of what that might be began to congeal:

Ramon Hernandez bunted!

The A’s had won the first game of the Red Sox series when their molasses-footed catcher, with two outs, dropped a bunt down the third base line. The act itself triggered a chemical reaction in the minds of Club members.

Moneyball teams don’t bunt! These…little nerds all say that smart managers don’t trade outs for bases. Ha! Look! Okay, they won. But they’ve proven our point!

Never mind the absurdity of attributing the outcome of a game to the single event. Never mind that a single exception does no harm to the larger argument: that over the long haul it’s a mistake to give away outs for bases. Never mind that the dislike of the sacrifice bunt is a trivial sliver of the new approach to baseball.
It wasn’t a sacrifice bunt.
There were two outs! Ramon Hernandez wasn’t trying to trade a base for an out. He was bunting for a base hit.

Well, thank God, the Oakland A’s lost in five. (Though, surely, the case would be cleaner if they lost in three, no?) And when the Florida Marlins won the World Series, it was of course inevitable, the result of their true grit. The special something they possessed that only Club members could understand.
Baseball America
columnist Tracy Ringolsby—by far the loudest, most obsessed of Billy Beane’s critics—was on the scene to pant all over Jack McKeon, the Marlins’ manager, and pay him the ultimate compliment, that “he certainly doesn’t buy into the theories of the book
Moneyball
, which proclaimed teams should draft only college players, particularly pitchers.” Of course, it didn’t matter what McKeon thought about drafting players, as he hadn’t built the Marlins but was airdropped into their midst in mid-season. This McKeon guy had that special something that Ringolsby understands—and that guys like Billy Beane never will. That piece of manhood that little nerds will never understand. The bracing thing that Ringolsby can feel in his bones and you, weak-chinned outsider, cannot. The special something that won championships.