Moneyball by Lewis, Michael (mobile ebook reader txt) 📕

the team performed, the fans stayed away—which was the opposite of the truth. All the A’s marketing studies showed that the main thing fans cared about was winning. Win with nobodies and the fans showed up, and the nobodies became stars; lose with stars and the fans stayed home, and the stars became nobodies. Assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games, and watching them become stars, was one of the pleasures of running a poor baseball team.

Billy also told the Blue Ribbon Panel that his inability to pay the going rate for baseball players meant that his success was likely to be ephemeral. It might have been what they wanted to hear but it wasn’t what he believed. What he believed was what Paul Volcker seemed to suspect, that the market for baseball players was so inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash. He then went out and created more evidence in support of his belief. Having won 87 games in 1999, the Oakland A’s went on to win 91 games in 2000, and an astonishing 102 games in 2001, and made the play-offs both years.

They weren’t getting worse, they were getting better. The rapidly expanding difference between the size of everyone else’s money pile and Oakland’s had no apparent effect. Each year the Oakland A’s seemed more the financial underdog and each year they won more games. Maybe they were just lucky. Or maybe they knew something other people didn’t. Maybe they were, as they privately thought, becoming more efficient. When, in 2001, for the second year in a row, they lost to the Yankees in the fifth and deciding game of the play-offs, the Oakland front office was certain that theirs had been the better team and that it was the Yankees who had gotten lucky—and that the Yankees front office knew it. And that some fraction of the $120 million the Yankees had paid Jason Giambi after the 2001 play-offs to lure him away from the Oakland A’s was to prevent him from ever again playing for the Oakland A’s.

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.

To a financial determinist like Bud Selig, the wonder must have been that they hadn’t simply given up. Of course, no one in pro sports ever admits to quitting. But it was perfectly possible to abandon all hope of winning and at the same time show up every day for work to collect a paycheck. Professional sports had a word for this: “rebuilding.” That’s what half a dozen big league teams did more or less all the time. The Kansas City Royals had been rebuilding for the past four or five years. Bud Selig’s Brewers had been taking a dive for at least a decade. The A’s didn’t do this, for the simple reason that they actually believed they were going to keep on winning—perhaps not so many games as they had in 2001, but enough to get themselves back to the play-offs.

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 Jamesean 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. “There aren’t a lot of teams that win ninety-five games and don’t make it to the play-offs,” he said. “If we win ninety-five games and don’t make the play-offs, we’re fine with that.”

They wound up scoring 800 and allowing 653.

The 2001 Oakland A’s had won 102 regular season games. The 2002 Oakland A’s entered the season without the three players widely regarded by the market to be among their best and the expected result was a net loss of seven wins. How could that be? The only way to understand the math was to look a bit more closely at what, exactly, the team lost, or believed they lost, when other, richer teams hired away each of the three stars.

The first, and easiest, player to understand was their old flame-throwing closer, Jason Isringhausen. When Billy Beane had traded for him in the middle of the 1999 season, Isringhausen was pitching in the minor leagues with the New York Mets. To get him and a more expensive pitcher named Greg McMichael and the money to pay McMichael’s salary, all Billy Beane had given up was his own established closer, Billy Taylor. Taylor, who ceased