Jonathan Yardley

'Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game' by Michael Lewis

MONEYBALL
The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
By Michael Lewis
Norton. 288 pp. $24.95

Surely the most inefficient, reactionary and parasitic multi-billion-dollar business in the United States, with the possible exception of book publishing, is Major League Baseball. Though it operates in effect as a public trust and enjoys an exemption from antitrust laws that is accorded to no other business of its size and scope, it clings to yesterday's customs and responds to change -- desegregation, expansion, player free agency -- with the utmost reluctance. It is steadily losing ground in the competition against other professional sports, mass-market entertainment, cable television and the Internet, yet it has neither the will nor the imagination to respond in anything except half-hearted and ineffective ways.

As is commonly known and near-universally deplored, one of baseball's most serious difficulties is the extraordinarily wide gap that has opened in recent years between the haves and the have-nots. On one side are the wealthiest clubs -- the New York Yankees, New York Mets, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, St. Louis Cardinals -- which enjoy robust attendance and substantial income from television contracts and other revenue sources. On the other side are the small-market clubs -- the Minnesota Twins, Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Oakland A's -- which play to small crowds and must scramble for whatever sources of income they can find.

In the age of player free agency, it stands to reason that the wealthiest clubs enjoy an almost incalculable advantage in the competition for the game's best players, as has been borne out in the final standings, which have been dominated by the Yankees, Braves, Seattle Mariners and Cleveland Indians, the last two of which are in small markets but play in handsome new (publicly underwritten) ballparks that attract near-capacity crowds for every game. Deep thinkers inside the game and out -- to the extent that anyone connected to baseball can be called a deep thinker -- tend to the view that if a more equitable form of revenue-sharing is not devised and implemented, competitive imbalance will become so pronounced that permanent damage will be inflicted.

The only trouble with this line of thinking is that it ignores the remarkable success in the past three seasons of the Oakland A's, who went to the playoffs and acquitted themselves admirably each time. This was done despite a $40-million player payroll that, in the 2002 season, was approximately one-third the payroll of the Yankees, and despite the loss at the end of the 2001 season of three of the A's' best players, including the invaluable Jason Giambi, who moved over to the Yankees for a seven-year contract at $120 million. In 2002 the Yankees won 103 games (a .640 percentage) and their division; the A's also won 103 games and their division championship. Both teams lost in the first round of the playoffs, but since the A's won two playoff games and the Yankees only one, it is fair to say that at season's end the $40 million A's were one game better than the $120 million Yankees.

The A's' success has been dismissed by Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball and one of the shallower thinkers on the planet, as "an aberration," but Michael Lewis, one of the best business writers around, knows better. Selig's response, he writes in this engaging, informative and deliciously contrarian book, "was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how'd they do it? What was their secret? How did the second poorest team in baseball, opposing ever greater mountains of cash, stand even the faintest chance of success, much less the ability to win more regular season games than all but one of the other twenty-nine teams?"

The answer in a word -- a word not commonly associated with baseball management -- is: brains. The A's outsmarted everybody else in the game except the Minnesota Twins, another small-market team that went to school on the A's' strategies and actually beat the A's in last year's playoffs. Unable to compete for the game's best players, the A's were forced to scramble for what they could get -- "bargains: young players and whatever older guys the market had undervalued" -- and somehow to patch together a competitive team out of the big boys' table scraps.

Of course anybody can put together a bad team by going low-budget, as the Orioles have made all too abundantly plain in recent years. The real question is: How do you put together not merely a good team, but a very good team? Well, you start by hiring as your general manager a totally wired, over-the-top guy named Billy Beane or a clone thereof. Beane is the protagonist in Lewis's account; indeed, it is fair to call him the hero of the tale. Beane built the A's by doing the unthinkable: He rejected the conventional wisdom about how baseball players are evaluated, what skills are most important and how ballgames are won, replacing the old seat-of-your-pants system with "reason, even science."

Beane was himself only a marginal major-league ballplayer during six years playing for four different teams in the 1980s, but he learned an important lesson. He was a can't-miss prospect who missed spectacularly, a guy with (as baseball people like to say) "all the tools" whose toolchest turned out to be pretty much empty of major-league implements. He learned that appearances can be deceiving. He had looked exactly like the prototypical ballplayer, yet he had flopped, and once he got the chance to put together a team of his own, he was determined "to find players unlike himself." He turned the conventional wisdom upside down: "Billy Beane had gone looking for, and found, his antitheses. Young men who failed the first test of looking good in a uniform. Young men who couldn't play anything but baseball. Young men who had gone to college."

In cahoots with a young computer whiz named Paul DePodesta, head of research and development for the A's, Beane established a system of player evaluation in which it was assumed "that the important traits in a baseball player were not all equally important," that "foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced," that "the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success," that -- the greatest heresy of all! -- "the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone." It is a system that emphasizes "the importance of generalizing from a large body of evidence as opposed to a small one," or, in a phrase, "probability theory."

Tell that to the lords of baseball. "Well into the late 1990s you didn't have to look at big league baseball very closely to see its fierce unwillingness to rethink anything. It was as if it had been inoculated against outside ideas." Then the A's hired Beane as general manager, and suddenly there was someone receptive to new ideas who was in position to do something about them.

It worked. Beane assembled a team short on glamour but long on the skills that win ballgames. Once he started to win, baseball began to pay attention. The Toronto Blue Jays and Minnesota Twins now operate along similar lines, and the Red Sox tried -- but failed -- to hire Beane after the 2002 season. All of a sudden baseball may become, proverbially, a whole new ballgame, though whether that can happen soon enough to save its bacon is uncertain at best. •

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardley@twp.com.