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6/9/2012 Submitted By: Adnan Rais Khan

BOOK REVIEW:
Michael Lewis has a gift: He can walk into an area already mined by hundreds of writers and find gems there all along but somehow missed by his predecessors. Lewis did this in the The New New Thing, his book on the Internet and the new economy. Now he does it with Major League Baseball in Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game but that time he was writing about himself, so he had an edge.) Of all the thousands of baseball books, there are none, so far as I know, like this one, about the remarkable recent history of the Oakland Athletics and the team's general manager, Billy Beane. For decades now, Major League Baseball has been divided between big-market teams such as the New York Yankees and small-market teams such as the Minnesota Twins. Big-market teams have money to pay free agents and wind up with payrolls as much as three times that of small-market teams. Teams like the Yankees and the Atlanta Braves (backed by cable television revenue) have tended to be successful. But the A's have been very successful as well, which leads to the question that animates the book: "How did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?" At the opening of the 2002 season, the Yankees had a payroll of $126 million, and the A's had a payroll of about $40 million. Despite the disparity, the two teams tied for the best record in baseball, each winning 103 games, though both lost in the playoffs. The A's, as it happened, lost to the Twins, who paid their players just a smidgeon more than the A's. It has long been an article of faith among fans and team owners--especially small-market owners-that the poorer teams could not compete with the richer teams, at least not for long. The A's have defied this logic and embarrassed the economic determinists, including Bud Selig, baseball's commissioner, who happens to own the small-market and underperforming Milwaukee Brewers. Oakland won its division two out of the last three years, and made the playoffs in all three, even as some of its best players have signed with richer squads. Indeed, after the 2001 season, Jason Giambi, the A's first baseman and the American League's Most Valuable Player, signed a $120 million contract with the Yankees. His defection should have doomed his old team, but amazingly it didn't. Lewis asks why. The answer is that the A's have taken advantage of the statistical analysis developed over the last 25 years or so by Bill James, author of the Baseball Abstract, and an army of fellow statisticians. Many in baseball focus only on traditional statistics such as batting average and runs batted in. But Beane is a devotee of James and his fellow sabermetricians, nearly all of them unpaid amateurs, who collectively have revolutionized the ways in which a ballplayer's performance can be measured. Beane's front office team, having absorbed James, understands that on-base percentage (including walks) and total bases are far more determinative of a team's success than the traditional measures. Perhaps even more important is the shift to a reliance on objective statistics, as

opposed to more subjective measures of performance such as the strength of a player's arm, his speed afoot or the beauty of his swing. These insights have dramatic implications for how amateur players are drafted, who is promoted to the majors and in the trading and signing of veteran players. Getting on base--that is, not making an out--is systemically undervalued. Being a slick outfielder and stolen bases are overvalued. Lewis shows how Beane built a winning club by drafting and trading for cheap traits and refusing to sign overvalued types. Along the way, Lewis offers wonderful vignettes about odd duck players such as Jeremy Brown, a short, fat, slow catcher from Alabama who, according to Lewis, no one else wanted, but who is progressing rapidly in the A's minor league system. These sections of the book are terrific, and the stuff on James and the movement he inspired is compelling. If the book has a fault, it is that Beane, Lewis' main character, just isn't very interesting. In his youth, Beane was a ballplayer from Southern California with all the "tools." He was so fast, so good-looking in his uniform and had such a strong arm that, even in high school, scouts pegged him as a sure Major League all-star. But after a few years as a marginal big leaguer, Beane quit and got himself a job as a scout instead. He then learned to appreciate players who were his polar opposite: solid performers who know how to hit, however artless. Lewis presents Beane's decision to quit playing as stunning, unimaginable. But despite unfettered access to Beane, he never solves this particular riddle. He does, however, lavish Beane with praise. "It was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence or his ability to scarevery large professional baseball players," Lewis writes. Lewis overstates the case. After all, the foundation of the team's success is three star pitchers. Tim Hudson, a slight right-hander, may have been a bit of a sleeper, having been drafted in the sixth round of the amateur draft--but that was before Beane became GM. The other two, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder, were both early first-round picks out of top college programs, the kind of players any GM would have taken. Nor are the A's the only small-market team to win with a modest payroll. In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won 116 games, a modern record, after losing superstars like Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson. Seattle spent more than the A's, but a lot less than the Yankees. The Anaheim Angels won the World Series with a mid-level payroll. While no one can quarrel with the A's triumphs over the last three years, the team has--dare I say it--a winning tradition, having won four World Series titles since moving to Oakland, including one in 1989 during the free agent era. And Beane, for all his success as GM, has yet to win a pennant, let alone a World Series. It's when Lewis gets away from Beane that he takes us places we've never been, and, as always, is an illuminating guide. Anyone interested in baseball, or even in the broader subject of human performance--finding the right person for the right job--should enjoy the ride