Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Although I haven’t followed baseball much in the last 10-15 year, growing up in NYC with the Yankees dominance in the late ’70’s, I was obsessed. I must have seen at least half a dozen games a year for a while. They were often planned as part of birthday celebrations or just for fun. During one of these outings Roy White even gave me a bat as we watched him practice. The bat was slightly cracked, but I didn’t care, and I still have it today! Then the Yankees traded my favorite player, Willie Randolph, and that kind of broke the magic spell for me. I still would check out games now and then, but it was less and less. Just this last Spring a friend invited me to participate in a fantasy league for the first time. I would have loved to do this (I had decided to get into a fantasy football league a couple of years ago because I felt that although I knew the basics of the game I really didn’t know the players and didn’t really have a favorite team and so the fantasy league would help me with this, and it did), but since I knew how much time even fantasy football could take and I knew that fantasy baseball was much more demanding due to the much greater number of games, and the fact that I’m getting married in October, well, I didn’t think it would be a wise choice at least this year.

Moneyball is a book about Billie Bean, the general manager for the Oakland A’s and about how he has helped to take a scientific analysis of the game and use that to make choices regarding who to draft and who to play. The author, Michael Lewis (of Liar’s Poker fame), takes us back through baseball history and the personal histories of Bean and others on the A’s. He also highlights the originator of the concept, Bill James. For someone with even a marginal (or sentimental) interest in the game, like myself, this book will be fascinating. For anyone who likes numbers, statistics, or science, it’s also a great read. Lewis mixes these personal bios, layman analyses, and occasional play-by-play narrative into a delightful and riveting account of a central issue that could change how players are looked at and payed in the big legues.

The arguement in a nutshell is that up until this new method (termed sabermetrics), was developed - and really still now with all teams aside from the A’s, since no one has been bold enough to utilize the method in practice - players have been valued generally in a very subjective way by most of baseball, fans, and commentators. Scouts, for example, have a prejudice that works against anyone who is overweight, who looks funny, who doesn’t pitch fast or run fast. For hitters most people concentrate on their batting average. However, given the overall goal of baseball being to get one’s team into the playoffs, the main goal is really just to win games. Games are won by scoring runs (and not letting the opposing team score more than you). Given this, it is argued, the most important statistic for a hitter is the ability to get on base, but this isn’t always reflected in the batting average since walks can get you on base as well. Another quality which is not given the credit due is the simple ability to take lots of pitches from the pitcher (whether one eventually gets out or gets on base). In other words, knowing when to take balls or even strikes, how to foul balls off that one knows they can’t hit effectively, etc. What this does is wear down the pitcher to the point that they will eventually start making mistakes - not necessarily at the given at bat but even later in the game. Other statistics that are given way more credit than they are due (and seemingly don’t correlate with anything that helps the team consistantly) are home runs, stolen bases, and earned run average.

I actually listened to an abridged version of this book narrated by Michael Lewis himself and definitely recommend that version. You can listen to it via a subscription to Audible.com, or just by getting the audiotape or CD.