Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

“He encouraged strong feelings in the older men who were paid to imagine what kind of pro ballplayer a young man might become. The boy had a body you could dream on. Ramrod-straight and lean but not so lean you couldn’t imagine him filling out. And that face! Beneath an unruly mop of dark brown hair the boy had the sharp features the scouts loved. Some of the scouts still believed they could tell by the structure of a young man’s face not only his character but his future in pro ball. They had a phrase they used: ‘the Good Face.’ Billy had the Good Face.”

This describes Billy Beane as a high school player and the way the Major League Baseball scouts viewed him. The diction points to the subjectivity involved in the way scouts determined potential for future success. When compared to the statistical analysis described later in the book, it’s almost funny; some scouts believed that a handsome, rugged face made a good ball player. It’s not just subjective, it’s magical thinking.

“Taking a high school pitcher in the first round—and spending 1.2 million bucks to sign him—was exactly the sort of thing that happened when you let scouts have their way. It defied the odds; it defied reason. Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball. He used many unreasonable means—anger, passion, even physical intimidation—to do it. ‘My deep-down belief about how to build a baseball team is at odds with my day-to-day personality,’ he said. ‘It’s a constant struggle for me.’”

This quotation presents the dilemma Billy Beane faces as he tries to implement a new approach to putting together a team. It starts by describing the old way of doing things as practiced by the insiders (scouts). Beane thought that taking a chance on high school players was too risky, as they did not have a track record of statistics the way college players did—and statistics were the only accurate information to base a decision on. At the same time, Beane himself is a bit of a contradiction since his emotional temperament was at odds with the rational approach he was trying to instill.

“The two sides are, on the one hand, the old scouts and, on the other, Billy Beane. 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.”

Here is an example of the author’s clever writing style, comparing the old scouts to a Greek chorus in classical plays. The last sentence also has a certain flair to it, as the ending surprises the reader with a twist. Instead of just stating flatly and directly the conflict between the two sides, Lewis makes it more interesting while introducing Beane’s quest.

“Billy had his own idea about where to find future major league baseball players: inside Paul’s computer. He’d flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul’s laptop. The Internet now served up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country, and Paul knew them all. Paul’s laptop didn’t have a tiny red bell on top that whirled and whistled whenever a college player’s on-base percentage climbed above .450, but it might as well have. From Paul’s point of view, that was the great thing about college players: they had meaningful stats. They played a lot more games, against stiffer competition, than high school players. The sample size of their relevant statistics was larger, and therefore a more accurate reflection of some underlying reality. You could project college players with greater certainty than you could project high school players. The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of sight-based scouting prejudices: the scouting dislike of short right-handed pitchers, for instance, or the scouting distrust of skinny little guys who get on base. Or the scouting distaste for fat catchers.”

This quotation describes Beane’s quest to select players through a data-based method. It comes in the section about the draft meeting in 2002, when Beane is pitted against his scouts who do things the old way, and explains well the conflict: high school players versus college players, future potential versus a proven track record. Scouts relied on instinct more than anything else, and that invited bias. This is exemplified by their preference for players with athletic builds. Beane didn’t care what a player looked like if he was effective based on statistical analysis.

“Billy could run and Billy could throw and Billy could catch and Billy even had presence of mind in the field. Billy was quick-witted and charming and perceptive about other people, if not about himself. He had a bravado, increasingly false, that no one in a fifty-mile radius was ever going to see through. He looked more like a superstar than any actual superstar. He was a natural leader of young men. Billy’s weakness was simple: he couldn’t hit.”

Here we see the central conflict of the book distilled in Billy Beane himself. His appearance and demeanor were just right for the part of Major League Baseball player. After a long description, Lewis ends abruptly with the only problem—the fact that his hitting was poor. This is exactly what Beane as general manager was trying to reverse. That he experienced the conflict himself only made him a stronger convert to sabermetrics, ignoring what players looked like and homing in on their statistics.

“With that, he concluded his fruitless argument with his talent. He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success? Baseball was a skill, or maybe it was a trick: whatever it was he hadn’t played it very well. In his own mind he ceased to be a guy who should have made it and became a guy upon whom had been heaped a lot of irrational hopes and dreams. He had reason to feel some distaste for baseball’s mystical nature. He would soon be handed a weapon to destroy it.”

This describes the origins of Beane’s disillusionment with baseball’s insiders. He had no real idea what happened but realizes that he was almost set up to fail. Scouts and managers project what they want to see onto young players, hoping to mold them. It was no surprise, then, that Beane worked so hard to improve the system and assign actual value to baseball players.

“James’s readers were hard to classify because he was hard to classify. The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto; instead, it was used to divine the logic hidden inside a baseball game, and create whole new ways of second-guessing the manager.”

This passage is another example of Lewis’s style, making light while also making a point. Bill James tapped into something among fans that became very intellectual in nature. The old ways based on instinct and subjective hunches were about to meet objective, data-driven evidence. His joke about such brainpower having the potential to make scientific breakthroughs cleverly highlights the kind of people now invested in sabermetrics.

“By the early 1990s it was clear that ‘sabermetrics,’ the search for new baseball knowledge, was an activity that would take place mainly outside of baseball. You could count on one hand the number of ‘sabermetricians’ inside of baseball, and none of them appears to have had much effect. After a while they seemed more like fans who second-guessed the general manager than advisers who influenced decisions. They were forever waving printouts to show how foolish the GM had been not to have taken their advice. A man named Craig Wright spent many frustrating years as the sabermetrician with the Texas Rangers, and then many more consulting other big league teams. He eventually quit his profession altogether.”

Lewis notes the importance of the outsiders using statistical analysis. It touches on the theme of thinking outside the box, as only the outsiders could approach the game from a new perspective. Any insiders with an interest in sabermetrics got nowhere and ended up either marginalized or quitting the game altogether. It was as if most insiders had blinders on and even when presented with statistical evidence refused to believe it.

“Most every other team looks at the market pretty much the same way, or at any rate acts as if they do. Most teams, if they kept a wish list of twenty players, would feel blessed to have snagged three of them. The combination of having seven first-round draft picks, a deeply quirky view of baseball players, and a general manager newly willing to impose that view on his scouting department has created something like a separate market in Oakland. From their wish list of twenty they had nabbed, incredibly, thirteen players: four pitchers and nine hitters. They had drafted players dismissed by their own scouts as too short or too skinny or too fat or too slow. They had drafted pitchers who didn’t throw hard enough for the scouts and hitters who hadn’t enough power. They’d drafted kids in the first round who didn’t think they’d get drafted before the fifteenth round, and kids in lower rounds who didn’t think they’d get drafted at all. They had drafted ballplayers.”

This describes what an outlier the Oakland A’s were in the league. They alone sought unheralded, overlooked players while all the other teams fought over the same handful of players considered top prospects by conventional standards. Lewis relates how the A’s were able to draft many of the players on their wish list—each considered somehow “defective” by other teams but recognized by the A’s for the contributions they made toward the main mission of scoring runs and winning games. They may have been unconventional or ungainly, but they were effective.

“Billy Beane was a human arsenal built, inadvertently, by professional baseball to attack its customs and rituals. He thought himself to be fighting a war against subjective judgments, but he was doing something else, too. At one point Chris Pittaro said that the thing that struck him about Billy—what set him apart from most baseball insiders—was his desire to find players unlike himself. 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.”

This further describes Beane, the book’s main character. Lewis notes that it was Major League Baseball itself that sowed the seeds for Beane’s “attack” on it. The old ways had failed Beane, and rather than fade away like most players in such a situation, he tried to make sense of what happened and use it to make reforms. He was also unique in seeking out players who were the opposite of himself as a player. Virtually everyone else in his position looked for themselves in young players coming up, but Beane knew that was a route to failure.

“At any rate, by the beginning of the 2002 season, the Oakland A’s, by winning so much with so little, had become something of an embarrassment to Bud Selig and, by extension, Major League Baseball. ‘An aberration’ is what the baseball commissioner, and the people who worked for him, called the team, and when you asked them what they meant by that nebulous word, they said, though not for attribution, ‘They’ve been lucky.’ This was the year the luck of the A’s was meant to run out. The relative size of the team’s payroll had shrunk yet again. The difference between the Yankees’ and A’s opening day payrolls had ballooned from $62 million in 1999 to $90 million in 2002. The Blue Ribbon Panel’s nightmare scenario for poor teams had become a reality for the 2002 Oakland A’s. They had lost to free agency—and thus, to richer teams—three of their proven stars: Jason Isringhausen, Johnny Damon, and Giambi.”

Inequality in the league was legendary and growing worse. Only one club could take on the wealthy giants of the game and win: the Oakland A’s. They were such underdogs that no one could account for their success, which was eventually just written off as a fluke. Only Beane and a few others knew the real reason: the statistical analysis they applied through sabermetrics worked.

“Before the 2002 season, Paul DePodesta had reduced the coming six months to a math problem. He judged how many wins it would take to make the play-offs: 95. He then calculated how many more runs the Oakland A’s would need to score than they allowed to win 95 games: 135. (The idea that there was a stable relationship between season run totals and season wins was another Jamesian discovery.) Then, using the A’s players’ past performance as a guide, he made reasoned arguments about how many runs they would actually score and allow. If they didn’t suffer an abnormally large number of injuries, he said, the team would score between 800 and 820 runs and give up between 650 and 670 runs. From that he predicted the team would win between 93 and 97 games and probably wind up in the play-offs.”

This quotation gives the reader a sense of the statistical analysis the A’s applied. All of it was done with data equally available to other teams, but they made little use of it. Essentially, DePodesta is looking forward by analyzing past data. This has to do with predicting how well the team as a whole would do, but he does the same thing for individual players: predicting their future success via statistics. It was remarkably accurate, and the A’s could fit together the pieces of the puzzle to create a successful whole.

“Paul wasn’t the sort of person who typically rises to power inside a big league organization, and yet he had. He was an outsider who had found a way to enter a place designed to keep outsiders out. Billy Beane had turned himself into a human bridge between two warring countries—the fiefdom of Playing Pro Ball and the Republic of Thinking About How to Play Pro Ball—and Paul was dashing across it. Under his arm he carried both the toolkit and the spirit of Bill James. ‘The thing that Bill James did that we try to do,’ Paul said, ‘is that he asked the question why.’”

This explains the role of Paul DePodesta, Billy Beane’s assistant, and illustrates the relationship between the two. Whereas Beane was an insider by pedigree and outsider by choice, DePodesta was a true outsider, having played sports as a student at Harvard but nothing beyond that. A disciple of Bill James, he was armed only with a laptop and his propensity for statistical analysis. It was this that he brought to the figurative “battle” that Lewis envisions between the insiders and outsiders.

“The A’s front office realized right away, of course, that they couldn’t replace Jason Giambi with another first baseman just like him. There wasn’t another first baseman just like him and if there were they couldn’t have afforded him and in any case that’s not how they thought about the holes they had to fill. ‘The important thing is not to recreate the individual,’ Billy Beane would later say. ‘The important thing is to recreate the aggregate.’ He couldn’t and wouldn’t find another Jason Giambi; but he could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without, and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.”

Lewis explains the modus operandi of Billy Beane and the A’s team. Jason Giambi had been a member of the A’s until he gained free agency and signed a lucrative contract with the Yankees. Faced with filling the offensive hole that Giambi’s departure had left, their approach was not to seek a one-to-one equivalent but instead to divide up his output into parts and look for players who could replace those smaller pieces. They did this with statistical analysis, finding just those players they could get on the cheap who could play a small role in attaining the overall goal. In a sense, this was similar to their approach to getting runs: take the walks and the singles until a player reached home plate instead of looking for one big home run.

“Hatteberg hadn’t the slightest idea why the Oakland A’s were so interested in him. All he saw was that one major league baseball team treated him like a used carpet in a Moroccan garage sale, twenty-eight other teams had no interest in him whatsoever, and one team was so wildly enthusiastic about him they couldn’t wait till the morning to make him an offer. They pestered his agent on Christmas Day!”

The passage provides an imaginative way of illustrating the A’s outlier status. The team’s approach to picking players is the polar opposite of the other teams, so that a player like Scott Hatteberg would virtually have no place in the league without the A’s. To play off the quotation, they treated him like a hidden Picasso painting in a garage sale—an overlooked gem that had to be snapped up.

“Paul could usually see quickly how a pitcher should pitch to any given big league hitter, and how he could put him away. Hatty, he couldn’t figure. Hatty’s at bats often didn’t begin until he had two strikes on him. Hatty wasn’t afraid to hit with two strikes; he seemed almost to welcome the opportunity. That was because Hatty had no hole. Obviously that couldn’t be right: every hitter had a hole. But Paul had watched him plenty of times and he still couldn’t find Hatteberg’s weakness.

These secondary traits in a hitter, especially in the extreme form in which they were found in Scott Hatteberg, had real value to a baseball offense. And yet they were being priced by the market as if they were worth nothing at all.”

This quotation describes the advantages Scott Hatteberg had as a batter. Hatteberg was one of the players acquired to replace Jason Giambi, and they both tended to wear out pitchers with their extended count. Unlike with Giambi, it wasn’t that pitchers were afraid of Hatteberg; instead it was his patience and the fact that he had no weakness (“hole”). This meant there was no obvious placement over the plate that a pitcher could go to when Hatteberg had two strikes. This illustrates the A’s method in choosing players, which Lewis compares to trading stocks in the financial markets: value is derived from inefficiencies in the market. That is, other teams were not taking information like this into account, so Hatteberg’s true worth was much higher than the market indicated. This is how the A’s got quality at bargain prices.

“The reason the Oakland A’s, as run by Billy Beane, played as if they were a different team in the second half of the season is that they were a different team. As spring turned to summer the market allowed Billy to do things that he could do at no other time of the year. The bad teams lost hope. With the loss of hope came a desire to cut costs. With the desire to cut costs came the dumping of players. As the supply of players rose, their prices fell. By midsummer, Billy Beane was able to acquire players he could never have afforded at the start of the season.”

This explains another reason for Billy Beane’s success, as he made wholesale changes to the makeup of the team at mid-season. He found that with other teams shedding players, he could find some bargains among players he might otherwise be unable to afford. It shows another way that he used ideas of the market (supply and demand) to his advantage.

“From the moment he started to talk to Omar Minaya about Cliff Floyd, Billy Beane was after Youkilis.

Omar has no idea who Youkilis is. ‘Kevin Youkilis,’ says Billy, as if that helps. ‘Omar, he’s nobody. He’s just a fat Double-A third baseman.’ A fat Double-A third baseman who is the Greek god of walks. Who just happened to have walked into some power last year. Yes: the Greek god of walks was now hitting a few more home runs. Which is, of course, the true destiny of the Greek god of walks.”

Here is an example of Beane’s approach to horse-trading with other general managers for players. He often took an indirect approach, focusing on a player he wasn’t really interested in so as to create a diversion; then he’d mention another name almost casually, which would be the player he was dying to get. In this case, it was Boston’s Kevin Youkilis. Omar Minaya, the Montreal Expos’ general manager, doesn’t know Youkilis because his main attraction is the number of walks he gets, something baseball insiders don’t pay attention to.

“His twin desires—to succeed, and to remain unnoticed—grow less compatible by the day. Chad Bradford’s 2002 statistics imply, to the A’s front office, that he is not just the best pitcher in their bullpen but one of the most effective relief pitchers in all of baseball. The Oakland A’s pay Chad Bradford $237,000 a year, but his performance justifies many multiples of that. At one point the Oakland A’s front office says that if Bradford simply continues doing what he’s done he’ll one day be looking at a multi-year deal at $3 million plus per. The wonder isn’t merely that they have him so cheaply, but that they have him at all. The wonder is that, until they snapped him up for next to nothing, nobody in the big leagues paid any attention at all to Chad Bradford.”

Chad Bradford is another good illustration of the kind of players that the A’s sought out. Once again, the key is that although he has value, nobody else in the league recognizes it and thus only Oakland wants him. Only after Bradford finds success with the A’s do other teams pay attention, and then his stock rises. When he hits free agency, the A’s can no longer afford him and another team signs him, giving the A’s compensation. This is the cycle they have worked to perfection: always finding new players they can get on the cheap, who are then lost to richer teams when their true value has become apparent.

“All of a sudden Moose had a pitcher he could use, at least in theory. In practice Chad was still, as Moose put it, ‘silly.’ To make him less so, to toughen him up, Moose insisted that Chad cuss each time he threw a pitch. Anyone who wandered by Central Hinds Academy’s baseball field of an evening in the early 1990s would see a gangly, peach-fuzzed young man sidearming pitches at his preacher, with each pitch booming out: ‘Shit!’”

Another example of Lewis’s writing style, this describes Bradford’s early days as a high school pitcher. The baseball coach, nicknamed “Moose,” was also Bradford’s minister at church. The incongruity of a kid’s minister trying to make him tougher by encouraging him to swear as he practiced pitching adds an ironic humor to the story.

“That night in early September he’s fighting himself more fiercely than ever before. Billy Beane knows it. His cheap out-getting machine has a programming glitch. He has no idea how to fix it—how to get inside Chad Bradford’s head. Sloth, indolence, a lack of discipline, an insufficient fear of management—these problems Billy knows how to attack. Insecurity is beyond him. If he knew how to solve the problem, he might be finishing up his playing career and preparing himself for election to the Hall of Fame. But he still doesn’t know; and it worries him. Chad doesn’t know that he will retire batters at such a predictable rate, in such a predictable way, that he might as well be a robot. As a result, he might not do it.”

This comes toward the end of the book and introduces an idea that ultimately interferes with Billy Beane’s intricate system. As the chapter title indicates, there is a human element to baseball that sometimes causes all of DePodesta’s statistics to go out the window. The passage refers to the game in September 2002 when the A’s were about to make history as the only Major League Baseball team to win 20 games in a row; they just needed to win this game. Bradford is called on to relieve pitcher Tim Hudson. Bradford is their go-to guy in such situations, yet he doesn’t fully believe in himself and insecurity always dogs him. On this night, Bradford falters and allows one run and runners on all three bases before being relieved himself. The A’s hold on to win, but it foreshadows what happens in the playoffs the following month.

“I’ve stumbled upon a revolutionary cell within the Oakland A’s, three men who still believe in the need for speed. These aren’t stupid men. Ray’s obviously as shrewd as a loan shark. Ron Washington can’t open his mouth without saying something that belongs in Bartlett’s. Boz had succeeded in more than just baseball. After thirteen seasons in the big leagues, he’d spent seven more writing and producing music. Boz had something of the outsider’s perspective—which is why Billy had hired him. Boz embraced his unusual role with the Oakland A’s, not ‘hitting coach,’ but ‘on-base instructor.’ He didn’t mind the front office’s indifference to batting average. Their indifference to the running game was another matter.”

This scene takes place at the end of the regular season in 2002 and involves infield coach Ron Washington and hitting coach Thad Bosley chatting while they watch slugger Ray Durham practice hitting. They’ve all outwardly committed to Beane’s methods, but when the talk turns to base stealing, their true feelings come out. It illustrates how hard it is to change the insiders who still see things in conventional ways. In short, old habits die hard. It’s also another example of Lewis’s humor, as he exaggeratingly refers to the three as a “revolutionary cell.”

“Because science doesn’t work in the games that matter most, the people who play them are given one more excuse to revert to barbarism. The game is structured, psychologically (though not financially), as a winner-take-all affair. There isn’t much place for the notion that a team that falls short of the World Series has had a great season. At the end of what was now widely viewed as a failed season, all Paul DePodesta could say was, ‘I hope they continue to believe that our way doesn’t work. It buys us a few more years.’”

In the end, Oakland loses in the first round of the 2002 playoffs. As DePodesta explains it, their method of statistical analysis requires a large sample size—that is, a large number of games—to work. Within a short series like the best of five games, luck and the human element come to the fore and often decide games. Probability is on their side only in the long run. Yet DePodesta sees the bright side; he’s convinced that sabermetrics will eventually dominate the league’s front offices, but losses like this will keep enough people skeptical long enough that the A’s can keep up their program of signing bargain players that nobody else wants.