Michael Lewis
Author
of Moneyball
talks with Robert Birnbaum
Michael Lewis is the author of Liar's Poker,
The Money Culture, Pacific Rift, Losers, The New New Thing, Next
and now Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. He
attended Princeton University and The London School of Economics
and has been an investment banker for Salomon Brothers. That experience
led to his first book, Liar's Poker. He is a contributing
writer to the New York Times Magazine, a contributor to
Slate and a columnist for Bloomberg News, and
he has also done work for "Nightline" and "This American
Life." Michael Lewis lives in Berkeley, California with his
family.
Moneyball is a well-researched, well-written look at the
methodology and the people (mainly general manager Billy Beane)
who help make a small-budget baseball team (the Oakland Athletics)
extremely competitive in the big money world of Major League baseball.
It is greatly to Lewis' credit that he has put together a book about
baseball that is appealing to long-time fans as well as those recently
attracted by the game's charms. As he asks (and answers) in what
follows, “How many truly original stories does baseball produce?”
Moneyball is certainly that and more.
Robert Birnbaum: As long as we are in the belly
of the beast, let's talk about Billy Beane's courtship by the Red
Sox. Were you suggesting he was not really serious about taking
the general manager position?
Michael Lewis: I never meant to suggest that.
He took the job for a day. He was obviously serious about it. I
don't think he ever really wanted the job, is what I said. There
was no reason for him to want the job other than the money. He doesn't
like the East Coast or living on the East Coast. He has a daughter
from a first marriage out in San Diego, who is thirteen years old,
and he spends a lot of time with her. And the media here around
the baseball team [Boston Red Sox] is rabid.
RB: (laughs)
ML: And the media drives Billy Beane crazy. He gets no pleasure
from it. He doesn't like seeing his name in print. It seems odd
to say from someone who has just written a book that has him as
a main character. The curious thing to me was that he got as close
as he did to taking the job. I think what happened was he was just
very frustrated. For years they [the Oakland Athletics] have been
putting together these ball clubs on a shoestring that have done
extremely well, and no one has paid much attention to the fact that
it is done on a shoestring. The A's are held to the standard of
the Yankees in a funny kind of way. That if they don't win the World
Series it is regarded as a failure. And so he was feeling a little
unappreciated and when John Henry offered him twelve and a half
million dollars to come and work for the Red Sox. I think he thought
that was a validation--that it would demonstrate to the world that
someone understood that he knows what he is doing. I watched it
very closely and it was funny what happened. The minute the news
got out that he was offered this money, he lost interest. Because
that's all that he cared about, that the news was out. Also, he
has this superstition about money. It goes back to his boyhood.
He took money from the New York Mets to be their first-round draft
choice instead of going to Stanford —which is what he should
have done —on a scholarship. He attributes that to a decision
he made because of money. He's promised himself ever since that
he is not going to let money influence his life that way. When he
looked at the decision that he made to take the Red Sox job he couldn't
think of any reason he was taking it other than the money. And it
made him very nervous.
RB: In the New Yorker mention of your book, there was
an interesting take on Beane's decision. Which was that taking the
Red Sox job would no longer be challenging since they have a big
budget.
ML: (laughs) It’s true there is more long-term glory for
him to operate with a smaller budget because what they do that is
so extraordinary is find value where no one else can find value.
If you have a hundred-million-dollar payroll, you don't need to
do it as much. So in a way it would be a waste to put him with a
big-budget team. On the other hand he would be very, very effective
because he would have all the benefit of the knowledge and insights
that they have at the Oakland A's and his own natural aptitude for
horse swapping and running a ball club harnessed to this big payroll.
He would make different kinds of decisions that he can't make in
Oakland. But yes, I don't think that's completely unfair. There
is in some sense his use value is maximized if he is with small-budget
team.
RB: Was the reason you wrote this book this charismatic colorful
personality, Billy Beane?
ML: No, I drifted into it because I was curious how they won all
these games with no money. I realized it was a book when the assistant
GM of the A's, Paul Podesta, said to me, "You have to understand
that for someone to become an Oakland A, he has to have something
wrong with him."
RB: [laughs]
ML: "Because if he doesn't have something wrong with him,
he gets valued properly by the marketplace, and we can't afford
him anymore." [Paul Podesta speaking]
RB: You met Paul Podesta before you met Billy Beane?
ML: No, I was already in there and when I realized that this juggernaut
that they put on the field was an assemblage of defective parts,
I thought, "This is a great story." And the fact that
Billy Beane had dimensions as a character was very important because
I knew he could carry the story. That's when I committed to the
book and then I realized that the players were central to this thing,
that they were the undervalued assets, and I was curious how they
coped with that.
RB: Is it the case that you were surprised by the fullness of Billy Beane as a personality? As you said, he seems to be media shy, but
it really seems that you were sitting on his shoulder for so much
of this story.
ML: It's because I wasn't the media. I was this guy who was saying
I was going to write this book. After a couple of months, nothing
is appearing in print, I am just kind of there all the time, and
I became a kind of sidekick, almost. There has been so much noise
about this book in baseball and so much noise about this book in
his life and it has just been out three weeks. I think if you asked
him now, "Would you do it all over again?" I think he
would have second thoughts.
RB: You do mention that a couple of general managers are wary of
dealing with him because he snookers them in their dealings, continuously.
Is the jig up for him with everyone?
…people who
think they know what they are talking about when they talk
about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports
press—no matter how much evidence you present them to
the contrary they will continue to think that what they think
is right. |
ML: You would have thought so. Apparently not.
There are some general managers, who because he has gotten the better
end of the deal, so many times—they are scared of him. They
don't know why. They think he is a witch. Those people won't do
business with him anyway. I know, because I have been in touch with
him since the book has come out, that several general mangers have
reassured him that they would still do business. [But] It can't
help his life. It can't make it easier for him to deal with other
baseball teams.
RB: How long are their memories?
ML: Also this question of how long this advantage that Billy Beane
has can last. These insights and this knowledge that he is working
with isn't original to him. A lot of it is in the public domain.
It's just a question of baseball teams being willing to understand
it. If that happens he is in a little trouble. You can't put $40
million worth of players against $120 million and compete if you
don't have some kind of advantage. So I think in the long term it's
probably not good for that franchise, but in the short term it creates
a lot of interest around him.
RB: Will it be better for baseball?
ML: There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that
I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game.
That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to
your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget
on one guy. And that's something a lot of owners and general managers
don't understand. They go and spend ungodly amounts for some superstar
and my god they are still at the bottom of their division. And baseball
is more fun to watch, if it is understood as a team game, to me.
The second thing, one of the broad insights that is important to
the A's is that there are guys whose value is not on the surface.
It's difficult to see. This leads to them having a particular affection
for pitchers who don't throw very hard but have crafty stuff. For
hitters who don't hit huge numbers of home runs and have high batting
averages but have crafty stuff at the plate. If you like crafty
stuff they are going to open the market for crafty people. When
Jaime Moyer of the Seattle Mariners pitches, I love watching him.
In a way it is a much more interesting game than watching Randy
Johnson pitch. You are not only watching a game you are watching
a thought process. So to the extent that they open up the game to
that, I think that's kind of neat. On the other hand if baseball
doesn't correct its revenue discrepancies—it's still 40 million
against a 150 million or whatever it is and the intellectual discrepancies
vanish--then it's just going to be rich guys beating up on poor
guys, and that won't be fun to watch.
RB: There are a couple of people besides Beane who understand this
Sabremetric approach to baseball—Ricciardi…
ML: Who came out of the Oakland organization who is now in Toronto.
RB: And to some degree, Theo Epstein of the Red Sox.
ML: He more than understands it. Theo Epstein would have preferred
that Billy Beane become the GM of the Boston Red Sox and that Theo
be his assistant. That's what Theo wanted. And the Red Sox have
gone and hired Bill James who is —in some ways the father
of this whole movement. My favorite hire--and it gets no attention
in the Boston press--is this fellow Voros McCracken, who is an analyst
of pitchers. He is this kid who lives out in Phoenix with his parents
because he couldn't stand his paralegal job, he quit it. He started
playing fantasy baseball and asked a very simple question because
he wanted to evaluate pitchers for his fantasy baseball team. The
question was, "How do you distinguish pitching from defense?
What part of what happens on the defensive end is the pitcher’s
responsibility?" And he devised this very clever way of looking
at pitchers and that in fact that the A's had come up with. The
Red Sox have now embraced it. And he's a great story because he
would seem otherwise unemployable, but he has a gift as a baseball
analyst.
RB: One of my favorite moments in your book is when you are describing
some theory and then Joe Morgan is not only contradicting it but
it is actually happening in the game he is announcing and he just
doesn't acknowledge it.
ML: Right. It's in the playoffs and this is what happens. When
the A's get to the playoffs—one of the things that it has
been very interesting for me to watch up close is the way vested
baseball interests don't want the A's to succeed. Or are looking
for reasons, whatever they are doing—and they don't understand
what they are doing—doesn't make sense. It is implicitly very
condemnatory of traditional baseball. It's saying, "Look, you
must be a moron if you have a $120 million and you are the underdog
when you come up against us with $40 million. And you are doing
it the traditional way." One of the many things they say is
that, "All right, maybe it works during the regular season
and whatever they do it gets them to the playoffs, but once they
get to the playoffs they can't compete." Joe Morgan says this.
What he was saying in that case was they don't manufacture runs.
They don't bunt. They don't steal. There are reasons for that. They
figured out what an out is worth and it is worth much more than
people who risk it by stealing bases and sacrificing know. So Joe
Morgan says they play for the three-run homer and if you play for
the three-run homer you are going to lose in the playoffs and as
he is saying it, Eric Chavez of the Oakland A's hits a three-run
homer. And no one says anything. The game keeps plugging right along.
It's like the soundtrack and the action are completely out of sync.
The fact is they score more runs in the playoffs than during the
regular season, but everyone says well they lose because they don't
score runs in the playoffs. I'm telling you people who think they
know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include
the announcers and all of the sports press—no matter how much
evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to
think that what they think is right. I have done a number of interviews
with sports radio types, and that's the part of the book where they
get very upset. The idea that the playoffs has a large crapshoot
component, there is a limit to what management can do in the playoffs
because it's a short series and there is a lot of luck in baseball.
The point is that what the A's are trying to do is eliminate the
chance and you can do it over a long season because in a large sample,
luck evens out. But in the playoffs luck doesn't even out. One of
the sacred truths of baseball is that are some secrets to winning
in the postseason that some people mysteriously know. And that the
A's have not had success in the postseason shows that they don't
know something.
RB: Tell me about the subtitle of the book, The art of winning
an unfair game.
ML: It's a patently unfair game that $40 million has to play against
$120 million. It just violates all of our notions of fairness that
money is one of the determining factors in the outcome of a sporting
contest. But there is a double meaning because it is really unfair
the A's know all this stuff about baseball and nobody else does.
[laughs] In some cases it’s unfair for the other side, even
though they have the money. There is a chapter called “The
Science of Winning an Unfair Game,” but I wanted to make it
clear with the subtitle it wasn't just science. Part of what their
success is that they had applied the scientific method to baseball
and had found these insights and the knowledge that was really valid
and objective, but another part of it was how they applied it. And
what Billy Beane's real gift is, and it's hard to replicate, is
imposing it in a big-league clubhouse. If you took some nerd with
a computer who knew these things and told him to run a big-league
team, he would have no effect. They would just not listen to him.
RB: Does Harvard boy Paul Podesta fit that nerd description?
ML: No, it's funny. He would count as a jock at Harvard. He played
football and baseball. But in the Oakland organization since he
went to Harvard he would count as a nerd. But he has kind of the
street cred. He'll probably be running a baseball team. But there
are plenty of people who fit that description. If you put Bill James
on top of a big league team no one would listen to him. In addition,
there is this whole business of how you trade. This guy Billy Beane
is a born Wall Street trader. I have seen this. I worked at Salomon
Brothers; I worked on Wall Street. If Billy Beane has been at Salomon
Brothers he would be a managing partner. He is excellent at walking
into a jungle, seeing the opportunities and seeing the threats,
and adapting accordingly. He has wonderful antennae. He knows what
you want and he is going to give it to you.
RB: Those times you mention when he is calling [Mets GM] Steve
Phillips are hilarious—with him joking and talking to his
Phillips' secretary.
ML: [both laugh] It's very funny. The way he insinuates himself
into the minds of other general mangers was fun to watch. This is
something you can't teach. So, that's the art.
RB: It was impressive that even if he is not looking to make a
trade he involves himself in all the talks and he is very aware
that something might shake loose. He doesn't wait until an urgent
need appears.
 ML:
He needs the market information. He is always trying to find who
might be shaken loose. Here's an example. He wanted a pitcher from
the Yankees, Ted Lilly, who fit the A's profile. He was cheap and
going to be cheap for a while. He was in the beginning of his major
league career. He was not flashy, didn't throw real hard. But he
was very effective in the way they measured pitchers. He found out
because he had been constantly rapping with other GMs that the Detroit
Tigers were willing to part with their fireballer Jeff Weaver. He
had no interest in Weaver. He would cost him ten times what Lilly
would cost him. Everybody knew that Weaver was good. He knew that
the Yankees would like Weaver. So he baits his hook with Weaver
and goes to the Yankees organization and by the time he is done
he got Weaver as a Yankee and Billy has Ted Lilly plus 600 grand
from the Tigers, in his pocket. And if the Tigers and the Yankees
stepped back and asked why was Billy Beane in this at all. This
was really a trade between the Tigers and the Yankees; there is
no particular reason except that he made it happen. So for that
to happen you have to be relentless and you have to be very good
at acquiring market information.
RB: The information that you relay in the book implies an impressive
and almost intimate kind of access.
ML: I think it is a credit to him the way he handled this. I got
in to his offices on the pretext of writing a piece for the New
York Times Magazine, and that would have implied a much shorter-term
commitment from him. After a few weeks it was clear that it was
just a wonderful story. How many original stories about baseball
are there? One after the other books about nostalgia. Something
very interesting and innovative was happening in baseball and it
was right here in that office. And I was particularly equipped to
see it because so much of it came out of Wall Street. So many natural
analogies with Wall Street —and I had that background. He
knew that. He didn't particularly want a book written about him.
In fact, he was resistant at first. He knew how enthusiastic I was.
He knew I understood the spirit of it and he just said, "Look,
you’re invested. I don't mind having you around. Don't make
yourself too much of a nuisance. And just tell me what you need
to see." I wanted to be a fly on the wall and he let me. He
never once said, “Don't put that on” or “I want
to see what you are going to write.” Or any of that stuff.
And then the book comes out and he is paying a price. He got a lot
of grief in the sports press for letting me in. But it will pass.
He has a lot of guts to let it happen, deal with the fallout and
move on.
RB: Well, this is clearly a book that even if
you are not a baseball person is readable and enjoyable. Janet Maslin
[in the NYT] who may never have been to a ballgame made
that the thrust of her review.
| It's
knuckle-headed stuff. The sports world is an echo chamber.
All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand
sports columns bloom. |
ML: [laughs]
RB: Certainly a few lines in her review give you
that impression. You're right, there aren't very many original baseball
stories.
ML: I think that's why he let me in. He understood that I thought
of it that way. I thought of it as anybody who wants to see someone
walk into a hidebound world and think about the problems differently
that's the story and it could happen in any walk of life—the
trials and tribulations of originality. He saw that and he participated
in the spirit of the thing.
RB: What is the criticism from the sports press?
ML: It's easy to summarize. First he was indiscreet.
And this is weird coming from reporters.
RB: Right. He was indiscreet to you, not to them.
ML: Yeah, that's right, so that's a silly one. What happens is
the way they write that is, they get Steve Phillips from the Mets
to say, "Books like this are bad ideas." "It's going
to hurt Billy." "This is bad for Billy." "Billy
was stupid to do this."
RB: What reasons are given?
ML: Then they go, "Why would he do this?" And it's because
he is arrogant or has a big ego and wants that ego fed. I know the
guy better than those guys do and I know, yes, he has a big ego,
but this isn't the way it gets fed. It gets fed when he wins. So,
they mistake his motive. It's more complicated. In fact, if his
name was never in the newspapers again for the rest of his life
he'd be happy—as long as he was winning. [chuckles] And then
what they do is, “Oh this guy has the arrogance to have book
written about him.” They don't actually read the book. What
they do is say, "It’s Billy Beane's book." As if
he wrote the book. In it he is set up to be the smartest general
manager in the game. "Well, who is this guy to say he is the
smartest general manager? He's never won a World Series." It's
knuckle-headed stuff. The sports world is an echo chamber. All it
takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports
columns bloom. So that's the nature of the grief. That's transitory.
There is nothing real about it.
RB: When I talked to Roger Angell, he did say that the baseball
people don't want anyone to shine any light in the darkness of baseball.
ML: [both laugh]
RB: This nostalgia-mongering Field of Dreams stuff is
bullshit especially in the face of the baseball business marketing
everything from luxury suites to who knows what in the world.
ML: Very cynical. The sentimentality of baseball
is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one
sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons. What do you do when
you have a boy or a girl? You throw a ball with them. And you take
them to a ball game. Football and basketball is not quite that way.
We learn baseball from our parents, from our fathers. And people
get very emotional. I think that's what is going on when people
get caught up in the sentiment of the game. It's their personal
memories of childhood.
RB: Let me ask you what I asked Roger Angell, "Is baseball
still the national past time?"
ML: I think it's too complicated a society to have a national past
time. I don't think there is a national past time. Watching TV is
a national past time. Really. If there is a national past time it
is watching TV.
RB: A national waste of time.
ML: Watching TV and eating.
RB: And…shopping.
ML: So baseball is well behind all of those things. As a sport
it is obviously not as popular as football is now. It certainly
doesn't hit the highs of football even basketball. There are a162
bloody games for each team each season. There is a steadiness about
it that is —it's in better shape now than it has been many
times in its past. There have been periods in its history where
the stands have been empty. I don't think it's in any kind of crisis
but it should be in a more of a crisis than it is, given how badly
it is run. When you ask the question, "How's baseball doing?"
The first thing I think to look at is how is little league doing.
That kind of thing. I think they are doing pretty well.
RB: There is a concern about getting kids in —what's the
euphemism?—urban areas.
ML: [laughs]
RB: To play baseball.
ML: Yeah poor black kids don't think, "I'm going to be a baseball
player." There's lots of reasons for that. The first is that
all you need is a ball, a hoop and crummy piece of asphalt to start
developing into a basketball player. Baseball requires a social
infrastructure. In a way that basketball doesn't. That explains
that, partly. But Michael Jordan wanted to be a baseball player.
[laughs]
RB: Will the next big step be the internationalization,
that there will be a major American league in Japan? Play in the
Caribbean basin beyond a few games in San Juan?
ML: Until they invent a faster method of air travel, the idea of
routinely flying to Japan for games would be just be too much. It
is happening. The Minnesota Twins very cleverly figured out that
Australia has a pretty thriving baseball culture now. And they have
picked up a lot of pretty cheap talent by going there in the way
that teams went to the Dominican Republic twenty years ago. The
Europeans don't have any particular interest in the game and they
have a substitute, the English do in cricket and in the Asian subcontinent
that's true too. I do think there is a future in—you can see
this in the Olympics—in international competition. And how
that manifests itself I don't know. It would make complete sense
if Major League Baseball could find a city that could sustain it
to put a team in Latin America somewhere.
RB: Havana
 ML:
Really that's not hard to see. Cuba becomes a democracy. Havana
is a natural place to put it.
RB: How are the A's doing this year?
ML: They are doing well. The A's have the second or third best
record depending on what the Yankees did last night. But they would
be in the playoffs right now if the season ended. For them that
is extraordinary because all they try to do, all they hope to do
is struggle into the All Star break at .500. — what Billy Beane does is start buying players on the cheap in the middle of
the season. They will be a different team at the back end than the
front end.
RB: And what about poor Art Howe [New York Mets manager]?
ML: He's not doing so well. He's doing well only in one way.
RB: He can't be blamed.
ML: No one can blame him for it but they do. The real way he is
doing well is that he got a big contract. He got a 10-million-dollar
contract or something.
RB: He shouldn't have gotten the credit in Oakland and he shouldn't
get the blame in New York.
ML: That's absolutely right.
RB: Which is one of your theses—that middle managers aren't
really affecting the game anymore.
ML: I don't think anyone could have done anything with that organization.
What they need is new front office management.
RB: That would be why Steve Phillips is…
ML: Upset. He's probably going to lose his job. [Steve Phillips
was. before we posted this, fired by the New York Mets] Why shouldn't
he be upset? The thing is that there is a difference between an
environment in which people are saying, "Aw, things aren't
going so well with the Mets and they have had some bad breaks and
all those guys on the DL, poor Steve Phillips" to an environment
in which, here is how you run a baseball team. A fine point has
been put on his predicament, so no wonder he is upset. If they clean
house and they fire Art, they have to pay him ten million dollars.
He has to be happy about that.
RB: This weekend’s deal with Shea Hillenbrand going to Arizona
and Byung-Hyun Kim coming here seems like it makes sense for Arizona
but is a high risk for the Red Sox.
ML: Hillenbrand is the classic player who Billy Beane would trade.
The reason is that he has the attributes that the market values
highly. But when it comes to his actual contribution to the offense
it's not as important. He has r.b.i.s and a pretty good batting
average and hits with some power. He has poor plate discipline.
He doesn't walk a lot, so his on-base percentage is not so great.
That's the most important thing when you look at how runs are created.
RB: And traditionally he performs worse in the second half of the
season.
ML: I didn't know that. When Bill James was hired by Boston one
of the first things he was asked to do was answer this question—which
my book deals with—can plate discipline be learned at the
major league level? If a guy like Shea Hillenbrand, a young guy
has no plate discipline, will he develop it? Any chance? James went
and did a study. It was easy. He said basically, "No."
The A's have answered this more fundamentally. They think you can't
even teach it at the minor league level. This is something that
it is almost an innate trait in a hitter. The minute they got that
answer they sort of thought they want all their hitters to have
this quality. He [Hillenbrand] is not going to have it. Other people
think he is worth a lot. The Sox think that moving him they lose
very little on the offense. And that Kim is a really good pitcher.
It's easy to have opinions about ballplayers, harder to test them
against the evidence. Let's see how he does. They are wheeling him
out as a starter aren't they? That's interesting.
RB: Yeah, in Pittsburgh.
ML: He was pretty great as a closer for the Diamondbacks except
in that World Series.
RB: Sure out in the benign precincts of baseball in the Sonora
Desert. Now he is in Boston, which is a shark pool.
ML: Well, that's another issue. Does it change your performance
…maybe one thing he has going, does he read English? If he
can't read the newspapers…
RB: 'Boo' is international.
ML: [laughs]
RB: And bum. [laughs] The bad vibes are palpable at Fenway Park
when they don't like a player.
ML: Is it possible that part of the Boston Red Sox problem is its
fans?
RB: Yes. New England is an evil place. Starting with those so-called
seekers of religious freedom and it hasn't let up. Unforgiving and
mean spirited.
ML: And you live here.
The sentimentality
of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball
fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers
to sons. |
RB: And I live here. I grew up in Chicago, but
to quote Johnny Guitar, "I'm a stranger here myself."
ML: I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame.
Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror? Because baseball
is a game of failure, if you treat it like football you are going
to get bad results. Even great, well-performing guys are going to
have bad stretches. It does not help them in those bad stretches
to tell them that they suck. You make a head case out of them. And
why the fans do that here—I mean you can explain. I can't.
If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the
Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people
that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around
it.
RB: Last year one of the sports writers called Jose Offerman, "a
piece of junk or garbage." And then came back a few weeks later
and did it again.
ML: That's awful. In addition the game is hard to play. It's hard
to play.
RB: The American fan …the people who go shirtless in 10-degree
temperatures with painted faces…
ML: [laughs]
RB: …who can't play any game at all. Where does that come
from?
ML: People get on TV for looking like that, so they look like that.
RB: Talking about creating head cases, can you imagine what Pedro
Martinez may think when has one bad outing every…
ML: Twenty years. That's out of control. I would think that the
sophisticated way to respond to a bad outing, a guy struggling is
to cheer him. Because that's when he needs to be lifted up. That's
when you as a fan can do some good. And when a guy like Pedro Martinez,
who is maybe one of the best pitchers to ever pitch, has a bad outing,
you acknowledge that this is one time…
RB: Okay, let's say the Red Sox actually won a World Series?
ML: What would these people do?
RB: And what would actually accrue to them? What would they have?
ML: [both laugh] Well they would lose something. Clearly a lot
of the meaning of their lives is premised being able to blame the
Red Sox for what ails them. The Red Sox are the local scapegoats.
It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat
too.
RB: Any sense of the reception of Moneyball beyond the
sports press?
ML: It's hard to know at this point. It hit the bestseller list,
so you know it's out there. I've had two interesting institutional
responses outside of baseball. One is from the NFL. I gave speech
in New York a week before last and someone from the Commissioner's
office came and he said this thing is spreading in the NFL. Bill
Parcells is giving it out to the Dallas Cowboy's organization. Some
guy I never heard of who is the GM of the New York Giants is handing
it out to his scouts. I thought, "That's extraordinary."
Because the NFL is actually well run. The guy was saying, "The
descriptions that you have in the book of the discussions between
the scouts and the GM, that was something that died in the NFL thirty
years ago. We have become more rigorous the way we think about amateur
players and baseball is way behind. The spirit of enterprise is
clearly alive in the NFL. People are still looking for a way to
get an edge.” The other interesting institutional response
has been from Wall Street. The lead investment strategist for Credit
Suisse/First Boston, the investment bank, devoted his whole research
report a week or two ago to this book. The gist of it was if you
want to know how to manage money the Oakland A's are a good example—if
you want to look at allocation of resources and how you think about
it.
RB: I thought what you did was to bring your Wall Street experience
to bear on the baseball management tactics. So it's come full circle.
ML: It's going back into Wall Street. Very funny. It's gotten around
Wall Street in this way. I would expect there is one other natural
institutional response and it's from anybody who is in a business
where the employees are talent with a capitol T. Hollywood, music,
publishing and just how you manage people who are prima donnas.
And how you think about how bad is it if you lose one guy or one
band or one star or actor? Do you actually have to lay out all this
money up front?
RB: Well, the answer probably should be no in book publishing.
As far as I know the mega advances don't pay out.
ML: Absolutely right.
RB: I'm told the big authors are loss leaders.
ML: Yeah, I don't know. The movie stars, why pay twenty million
dollars to Harrison Ford? I don't even understand that. They think
they have to do it. The broad spirit of what the A's do is say,
"Nobody is irreplaceable." It's all a team. If someone
puts a price on himself that suggests he is irreplaceable, then
he better find somewhere else to work.
RB: Football seems to have good access and make use of the parametrics.
Understanding the personnel for a third-down play and so forth.
ML: You see baseball —endlessly in the dugouts—[guys
like] Tony Larussa numbers crunching and making little notes. What
baseball does is use statistics badly. So there this guy is 1 for
6 against this pitcher. But 1 for 6 is just six examples. It’s
statistically insignificant.
RB: Especially if you don't consider other variables.
 ML:
Maybe he hit six screaming line drives and five of them were caught?
There has been this—and it's reflected in the broadcasts—this
moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is
intelligent the use of statistics is moronic. There is a whole other
way to approach this where it isn't so moronic. That's what drove
Bill James out of his business. He couldn't believe the way people
misunderstood what he was trying to say.
RB: How widely did you talk to baseball people outside the A's
organization?
ML: I spent a lot more time with other baseball people than Moneyball
indicates. I had to get perspective. I spent time in Toronto with
the Blue Jays. I spent some time here in Boston with the Red Sox
owner, Theo Epstein, Larry Lucchino. Some time in Texas with people
in the Rangers organization. I talked to people in the Seattle organization
and scouts from the Mets and the Astros and I spent some time talking
to the Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro. I got around a lot. Enough to
know that what I was seeing was indeed unusual and special. That's
what I needed to know.
RB: Were the others as open as Beane was?
ML: It depended on the circumstance. There were few cases where
people said, "Can we have an off-the-record conversation?"
Most of the time it was on the record. A lot of it I just didn't
have use for. There is some wonderful material that ended up on
the cutting-room floor because the story is a very focused story.
There wasn't room to go into digressions with the Red Sox and the
Blue Jays.
RB: What happened to the bad-bodied catcher from Alabama that you
mentioned in the book?
ML: Jeremy Brown started his life in rookie ball in Vancouver.
Was bounced very quickly to the high Single A team because he was
successful and so successful there that Billy Beane had him to the
big league Spring training camp and he made it to last the cut before
they sent him down. They sent him to Double A. Two kids they drafted
in 2002 have gotten as far as Double A, he is one of them. The other
one is Steve Stanley who was so small that when he got to the Single
A team they didn't have a uniform that fit him and he had to use
the batboy's uniform.
RB: [laughs]
ML: And the two guys whose bodies were considered by the scouts
to be the least well suited to play pro baseball are moving the
fastest through the organization. Brown got off to a slow start
and now he is doing real well. Stanley has been doing real well
from the beginning. The front office of the A's think they are going
to be in the Oakland Coliseum in the next few years. They are both
going to be big league baseball players.
RB: Given these two examples of scouting ineptitude what's going
to happen to the scouting part of baseball?
ML: It’s going to change but slowly. If you want to see how—the
Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven.
You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends
with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.
In Toronto JP Ricciardi went in and identified what he called malpractice
in the scouting department. The scouts had been on the record about
the players in other minor league organizations. And he looked through
and just laughed. Eric Hinske, who was their rookie of the year
last year, half their scouts said he wasn't even a minor league
player. He went and fired twenty something scouts. You still need
scouts, but they need to do something different than what they do.
They need to have some understanding of how the numbers work. They
need to gather statistics and they need to get to know the kids.
That's what they don't do. They kind of stare and take the radar
gun out and they keep their distance. You need almost journalists
out there. I think that's the way it's going to go.
RB: How long do you with a book before you move on to the next
project?
ML: It depends how well it does.
RB: I had the sense that all your books have done well.
ML: I've had one that didn't make the bestseller list. And a couple
that came and went. In this case, five and a half weeks. And after
that there are basically constant demands—if I wanted to be
on the road for four months doing media, I could do that. I can't
do that. It would drive me crazy. I'll stop after five and a half
weeks and I will give the publisher two or three day windows. A
little bit of a mopping-up operation. And then I'll be done. And
then I will try to ignore it, all requests for interviews and get
on with my life. Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an
author any affection he has for his book.
RB: [laughs]
ML: By the end of it you are just sick of it. And you really don't
want to be that way about it. So you have to cut it short. But there
will be a paperback. There is even talk of a movie. So this sort
of stuff lingers. As much as I complain it is much worse if it isn't
a success. It's a joy when it is a success. And this is a particular
joy because baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't
speak very much for the larger culture. It sounds odd to say. People
watch their games, but as Angell said they don't want the light
shined on the dark places. The book is creating a dialogue—it's
just happening —between the larger culture and the subculture.
And the larger culture is saying, "How on earth can you run
your affairs that way?" and that's kind of fun. I get a kick
out of Wall Street saying read this to learn how to manage money.
If Hollywood picks up this and says read this to learn how to put
together a movie there's real pleasure in that.
RB: After every strike, baseball has concerns about fan loyalty.
People suggest that both parties are greedy and out of touch. Your
book certainly makes the owners guilty of not running their business
well.
I don't think there
is a national past time. Watching TV is a national past time.
Really. If there is a national past time it is watching TV. |
ML: They are not running their business well.
As the same time what drove my interest in it is, it gives you someone
to root for. These guys are great. The Oakland clubhouse is a wonderful
place. A lot of these guys feel like rejects. They were rejects
and they feel —they can tell you how baseball screwed up.
Barry Zito can tell you that he had a workout with the San Diego
Padres when he was at USC and that he wanted to play for them. The
Padres told him that he didn't throw hard enough to pitch in the
big leagues. He throws as hard now as he threw then and he won the
Cy Young Award last year. These guys know this and they aren't over
paid and the reason they play for the A's is they are underpaid.
They are paid well but they are not paid hundreds of millions. They
are undervalued in some way. That makes them very sympathetic. They
are very well run and that side of it is refreshing. To me, that
was the story that wasn't told. Everyone knew there are greedy scoundrels
out there who were running their businesses badly but that there
was this shining example of how to do it well and that the consequences
of how the game was played were kind of wonderful. That's what made
it great to me as a story.
RB: Do you know what you want to do next?
ML: Not really. Not seriously. My judgement is not good when I
am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens
is I will go back home. I have a four year old and a one year old
and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where
her husband is. And I will sort through what looks like it might
be fun to do. Like this started. I will go wander around and will
go see if there is a story. I will do some reporting, see if there
is a story in this or that and see if there is something worth pursuing.
It would be unlikely that I would start another book for at least
six months, maybe a year. I will do some magazine work. There is
a film script I am probably going to write. I have many things to
occupy my time until I find another book subject. There are enough
books in the world. You want to write the ones that are good. The
minute you write books because you need the income not because you
think you have a good subject, you should just stop. There are sixty
thousand books published in this country every year, and most of
them are crap. You are making someone make a serious commitment.
Not the money but the time, to sit down with a book and enter this
world. You want them to be good. You want the book to be special,
and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want
that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you
are not pressing to write a book.
RB: You are clearly in a special position.
ML: Yes, I am very lucky.
RB: Thank you.
ML: Thank you.
|
Posted:
June 16, 2003
