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

of Baseball, once calculated that the average difference in baseball due to skill is about one run a game, while the average difference due to luck is about four runs a game. Over a long season the luck evens out, and the skill shines through. But in a series of three out of five, or even four out of seven, anything can happen. In a five-game series, the worst team in baseball will beat the best about 15 percent of the time; the Devil Rays have a prayer against the Yankees. Baseball science may still give a team a slight edge, but that edge is overwhelmed by chance. The baseball season is structured to mock reason.

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.”

Billy Beane had been surprisingly calm throughout his team’s play-off debacle. Before the second game against the Twins, when I’d asked him why he seemed so detached—why he wasn’t walking around the parking lot with his white box—he said, “My shit doesn’t work in the play-offs. My job is to get us to the play-offs. What happens after that is fucking luck.” It was Paul who took a bat to the chair in the video room, late at night after the fifth game, after everyone else had gone home for good. Billy’s attitude seemed to be, all that management can produce is a team good enough to triumph in a long season. There are no secret recipes for the postseason, except maybe having three great starting pitchers, and he had that.

His objective spirit survived his team’s defeat a week. The fact that his team had lost to the clearly inferior Minnesota Twins festered. He never said it, but it was nonetheless evident that he couldn’t quite believe how little appreciation there was for what he’d done. Even his owner, who was getting multiples more for his money than any owner in baseball, complained. The public reaction to the thing ate at Billy. In these situations, when his mind was disturbed, he often went looking to make a trade. But there was no player on whom his mind naturally fixed; the only person in the organization whose riddance would make him happier was his manager, Art Howe. It wasn’t long before he had a novel idea: trade Art.

It took him about a week to do it. He called New York Mets GM Steve Phillips and told him that Art was a superb manager but his latest one-year contract called for a big raise, and Oakland couldn’t really afford to pay it. Phillips had just fired his own manager, Bobby Valentine, and was in a bit of a fix. Billy had thought he might even get a player from the Mets for Art but in the end settled on moving Art’s salary. Art signed a five-year deal for $2 million a year to manage the New York Mets. In Art’s place Billy installed Ken Macha, the A’s bench coach.

That made him feel better for a bit. Then it didn’t. He had the feeling he’d come to the end of some line. Here they had run this low-budget franchise as efficiently as a low-budget franchise could be run and no one had even noticed. No one cared if you found radically better ways to run a big league baseball team. All anyone cared about was how you fared in the postseason crapshoot. For his work he’d been paid about as well as a third-year relief pitcher, and Paul had been paid less than the major league minimum. Billy was worth, easily, more than any player; his services were more dramatically undervalued than those of any player he’d ever acquired. He could see only one way to exploit this grotesque market inefficiency: trade himself.

His timing was about perfect. The market for Billy Beane’s services was changing rapidly. What appeared to be a new trend had started a year ago, in Toronto. Rogers Communications, the Blue Jays’ new owner, had made it clear that the team, which had been losing more money than any in baseball, had to be self-sustaining. After the 2001 season the Blue jays’ new CEO Paul Godfrey, formerly the metro chairman of Toronto (i.e., mayor) and a man with no baseball experience, set out to run the business along rational lines. He started by firing his general manager. He then piled up on his desk the media guides for the other twenty-nine teams in baseball, and went looking for a replacement. He called just about everyone in baseball, and interviewed most of them. Buck Showalter, who had run the Diamondbacks and was now a TV announcer. Dave Dombrowski, who ran the Detroit Tigers. Pat Gillick, who had been the Blue Jays’ GM during the glory years and was now the GM of the Seattle Mariners. Doug Melvin, who just had been fired by the Rangers. John Hart, the GM of the Cleveland Indians, who would wind up replacing Melvin at the Rangers. “They all said the same thing to me,” says Godfrey. “It always came back to: give me the bucks to compete with the Yankees and I’ll do it. They didn’t understand what I was even talking about when I said I wanted someone who had a strategy going forward. I didn’t want a guy who said, ‘Give me a hundred fifty million bucks and I’ll give you a winner.’”

In all of baseball Godfrey found one exception to the general money madness: Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. He concluded that