Moneyball is one of the greatest baseball books ever written. It has everything: a tragic hero straight out of ancient Greek drama, a classic story of tradition clashing with change, underdogs overachieving and overachievers coming undone, wild winning streaks and totally unexpected upsets and even the crazy guy who turns out to have been right all along. Not to mention baseball, baseball, baseball. There is just one thing wrong with Moneyball: it thinks it is a story about baseball in 2002.
If the story which is at the center of Moneyball—the amazing 2002 season of the Oakland A’s as they become the first team to put the sabermetrics theories of Bill James into actual practice—had been capable of taking place before the advent of statistical data analyzed on a computer capable of holding one’s lap—say around the closing of the 1960’s at the latest—it would be a story about baseball. Taking place in the 21st century, however, Major League Baseball is no longer just a popular game but spectacle entertainment. And that fact changes everything, including why “moneyball” will almost likely never really take over the process of building teams inside the General Manager’s office.
To engage an egregiously overused metaphor, what led to the narrative which is tracked inside the pages of this book is truly a perfect storm. It is a story of the right team hiring the General Manager who hired the right economist who graduated Harvard at the right time. Oh, and there is also the thunderous lighting strike that ignites the whole thing in the form of free agent Jason Giambi deciding to leave the A’s for the big money in Yankee Stadium.
If Billy Beane had been hired the Giants across the bay, Moneyball likely would never have been written. If Paul DePodesta had been hired by the A’s without Beane as GM, Moneyball would not have been written. If both Beane and DePodesta had both gone to work together for nearly any other team in the league, Moneyball probably would not have been written. Everything came together in a way that one would be tempted to say defied all statistical odds were it not for the fact that the entire book is about defying statistical odds. And yet, there is a part of what is admittedly a successful implementation of moneyball—if not entirely so—that seems curiously lacking in the tale.
Everybody in the book loves the game of baseball to the point that it becomes something purer that it really is. One gets the distinct feeling that it would be entirely possible to build a team within a pure fictionally constructed simulacrum of the league using the sabermetrics approach of James and very likely produce a more dominant team than most gamers do when playing out an entire season on an Xbox or Playstation. As anyone who has played a baseball game against the computer on those consoles knows, it is very easy to dominate team and individual statistics. In reality, not much difference likely existence between AI if building a team in a video game and building a team in that fictional construct of “moneyball.” What really unifies them is the one particularly important element which is missing from both.
Major League Baseball is not pure and decisions are made about who to sign and who to play which are based more on how many butts are in the seats than how many hits are in the box score. Imagine playing a baseball video game on the console of your choice in which your lineup was not entirely of your own choosing and which you were forced to insert a player into that lineup who is having a less impressive season than his backup? The star goes into a slump and suddenly his batting average is .225 while his backup has caught fire, knocking out fifteen homers in the last ten games. Which one are you going to start? No-brainer, right? Except that you can’t start the backup because the AI mandates that as the higher-paid gate attraction, the underperforming star must start. This situation is merely a replication of the reality of post-Catfish Hunter professional baseball. Whereas the game used to be such that a backup on fire gets the nod over the star in a slump, economics has changed the paradigm to where thirty-million-dollar player in a slump gets priority over the two-million-dollar hot hand.
This is the aspect of moneyball that is missing from Moneyball. Billy Beane and his team are playing the game of baseball as it existed before the game became spectacle; before it became perfectly acceptable to put a player on the field one-hundred-fifty games a year even if he’s not actually the best player in his position on the team. Baseball owners do not look kindly upon losing, but they look even less kindly upon fans staying home to watch the game on TV because they know the superstar is going to be sitting on the bench all night. The great irony of Moneyball is that it tells a story that is far more about the effects of the ball on the game than the effects of money on the game. That it is a story that hasn’t been relevant since the early 1970’s.
