What is Baseball?
Baseball is the perfect sport for predictive statistical analysis while also being the worst. It is the best because baseball literally has a stat for every single aspect of play. It is the worst because its greatest fans actually know and care deeply about those stats. The problem is that what makes the game worth loving lies in the very fact that those stats do not and cannot tell the whole story despite how the iron-willed faith fans put into almost magic quality of those statistics:
“Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking.”
The Sisyphus of Oakland
Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland A’s, was used to seeing great potential wiped out and as a result had developed a compulsive inability to actually watch the games of the team he’d built as it played out live on the field. Instead, he would drive, often in aimless circles around the stadium, keeping up with the game via handheld device which automatically updated scores around the league by satellite feed. His own unrealized potential and squandering of his shot at making the big leagues had come to make him seem:
“like some tragic figure in Greek mythology whose offenses against the gods had caused them to design for him this exquisite torture: you must desperately need to see what you cannot bear to see.”
The Greeks, Again
Baseball and the ancients make for a fantastic team when it comes to metaphor. If Billy Beane is the king who hubris at flouting the domain of the gods causes him eternal punishment, what of those who constantly who pay sacrifice to the gods with diligent fealty to their superiority? The talent scouts who have been working upon the same template of success for a century are given a role in this Greek drama coincident with their position:
“The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profit—by ignoring them.”
The Key to Winning
Moneyball godfather Bill Games and his statistical analysis had determined there is exactly one element of the game that must be focused upon above all others. So significant it this element that it pumps the life blood into every other aspect:
“The strike zone is the heart of the game.”
When Giambi Came Back to Town
The epicenter of the moneyball transformation of the Oakland A’s is the moment their one true star player, Jason Giambi, decides to take the money and run. He runs all the way across the country to New York and when he comes back in his Yankees uniform, the fans in Oakland have not forgotten:
“They’d come to watch the latest plot twist in one of the great David and Goliath stories in professional sports: Goliath, dissatisfied with his size advantage, has bought David’s sling.”
