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

Tejada vs. Wells. Menechino vs. Wells. Chavez vs. Wells. I looked at the tapes, and then at Feiny, who said, “I don’t have a good feeling about tonight.” “Why not?” I asked. “They’re better than us,” he said.

Next to Feiny, at one end of the video room, sat David Forst, twenty-five-year-old former Harvard shortstop. Two years earlier, after he’d graduated with an honors degree in sociology, Forst had been invited to the Red Sox spring training camp. Dismissed in the final cut, he sent his resume around big league front offices and it caught Paul DePodesta’s eye. And so, surely for the first time since the dead ball era, the Harvard Old Boys’ network came to baseball. Paul himself sat at the desk on the other end of the room. I ask them if it ever troubled them to devote their lives, and expensive educations, to a trivial game. They look at me as if I’ve lost my mind, and Paul actually laughed. “Oh, you mean as opposed to working in some deeply meaningful job on Wall Street?” he said.

It wasn’t hard to see what Billy had seen in Paul when he’d hired him: an antidote to himself. Billy was an undisciplined omnivore. He let everything in and then worried about the consequences later. He ate about ten thousand calories of junk food each day on the assumption that he could always run them off. Ideas he consumed as rapidly and indiscriminately as cheese puffs. He had been put on this earth to devour all of it; Paul, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to establish some kind of record for fuel efficiency. Food he treated with suspicion, as if the world’s chefs were conspiring to poison him. He’d somehow gotten through a private prep school and college without ever allowing a sip of alcohol to pass his lips, not because he had any conventional moral objection to drinking but because research had established that alcohol killed brain cells. About his career he was fantastically deliberate. He’d already turned down one lucrative offer, from the Toronto Blue jays, to become, at twenty-eight, the youngest general manager in the history of baseball, and he was prepared to turn down more until exactly the right one came along. Paul was finicky about ideas, too, but he had let in one big one: that there was still such a thing as new baseball knowledge.

Paul was obviously a creature of reason but, beneath his reason, other qualities percolated. He’d played sports in high school, and then proved that a young man with the build of St. Francis of Assisi could play wide receiver for the Harvard varsity football team. (“He had the big heart,” said his former coach, Mac Singleton.) 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.”

The question Paul might have been asking on this night early in the 2002 season was: why the hell did we let Jason Giambi leave? The question that he had, in fact, asked was: why does it matter that we let Jason Giambi leave?

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.

The A’s front office had broken down Giambi into his obvious offensive statistics—walks, singles, doubles, home runs—along with his less obvious ones—pitches seen per plate appearance, walk to strikeout ratio—and asked: which can we afford to replace? And they realized that they could afford, in a roundabout way, to replace his most critical offensive trait, his on-base percentage, along with several less obvious ones.

The previous season Giambi’s on-base percentage had been .477, the highest in the American League by 50 points. (Seattle’s Edgar Martinez had been second at .423; the average American League on-base percentage was .334.) There was no one player who got on base half the time he came to bat that the A’s could afford; on the other hand, Jason Giambi wasn’t the only player in the Oakland A’s lineup who needed replacing. Johnny Damon (onbase percentage .324) was gone from center field, and the designated hitter Olmedo Saenz (.291) was headed for the bench. The average on-base percentage of those three players (.364) was what Billy and Paul had set out to replace. They went looking for three players who could play, between them, first base, outfield, and DH, and who shared an ability to get on base at a rate thirty points higher than the average big league player. The astonishing thing, given how important on-base percentage was, or the Oakland A’s front office believed it was, was how little it cost. To buy it they simply had to be willing to sacrifice other qualities in a player—such as the ability to outrun the hot dog vendor in a sixty-yard dash. “We don’t get the guys who are perfect,” said Paul. “There has to be something wrong