Moneyball: The Most Influential Book in the History of Sport

2023 marks the 20th anniversary of the book that changed sport's analytics forever. This is the story of Moneyball.

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Transcript

EARLY ON IN Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball,” we’re introduced to the idea of “the good face”. The good face is something promising young baseballers are thought to have. It’s not a major attribute, but along with running speed and a good arm and quick feet, upper body strength and height, having the good face is part of the package.

Grizzled old scouts talk without irony about the good face. They might not be able to list the ingredients that make the good face good, but they know a good face when they see one. That’s good enough for them.

Billy Beane, the Southern Californian wunderkind who is the volcanic hero (or possibly anti-hero) of “Moneyball”, had a good face. He also had all the other major attributes for a promising young baseballer known to man. His height and strength were impressive. He was a polymath, capable of playing basketball and American football to a high standard. His hitting power was off the charts. His running speed was phenomenal.

Within the first few pages of the book Lewis immerses us in a kind of representative scene. Beane and four other promising young Southern Californian stars are being physically assessed by a group of scouts at the grounds of Herbert Hoover High in San Diego. The scouts, stopwatches at the ready, want the boys to sprint.

One of the five draft prospects, Darnell Coles, has just received a scholarship to play football at UCLA. Another, Cecil Espy, is expected to beat the other four. They line up on the track, a portrait, Lewis tells us, of “studied cool”. In the sprint, Beane beats Espy by three strides.

The scouts are puzzled by the result. Espy and Coles are widely predicted to take the first two places, with the other three making up the numbers. Beane will be lucky to come in third, they predict. But they are more than puzzled. They are perplexed, so perplexed, in fact, they ask the kids to sprint a second time.

The kids – their presence at Herbert Hoover High is contingent on them having written permission from their parents or guardians to do so – line up again. The result is exactly the same. Beane smokes the other four. The scouts look at their stop-watches in disbelief. Again. They must now wrap their heads around what they have seen because what they have seen can’t be lying.

Here young Beane stands on the threshold of the Kingdom of Baseball. Except, he vacillates. He equivocates. He comes from a middle-class military family and his mother prizes education. She would love for him to go to Stanford University. Beane himself – or at least part of him – wants to go to Stanford. He isn’t sure. Importantly for the unfolding “Moneyball” narrative, no-one senses Beane’s uncertainty. They don’t sense it, perhaps, because they are indulging in that age-old sporting past-time: Predicting the next biggest thing.

What clinches it for Beane is when the Mets, whose scout has seen him at the track at Herbert Hoover High, come to San Diego to play the Padres. By this stage Billy has already been picked by the Mets in the draft. He is invited into the Mets’ dressing-room, where he meets some of the players. They tell him to get on with it, they’ve heard about him and want him around. He even meets their coach. A shirt with his name on it appears and he puts it on. His selection in the draft suddenly becomes tangible. The super-talented kid, possessor of “the good face” and much else besides, has stepped over the threshold. He is now in the kingdom.

But is he in the kingdom with all his heart? Part of him wants to keep his mother happy. He asks Stanford if he can attend classes in the off-season. Stanford send him a polite but firm reply. They regret to inform him that, no, this will not be possible. So there you go. His dad is of the view that he has made his bed – he must now sleep in it.

Now a Met, Beane gets sent to the minor leagues in Little Falls, upstate New York, before enrolling at the University of Southern California during the off-season. Ominously, Lewis informs us, he doesn’t give a second thought to what it means to be a professional baseball player during his time on campus.

The following season and Beane and his fellow rookie, Darryl Strawberry, progress to the Mets’ Double-A team in Jackson, Mississippi. There, Lewis tells us, they are introduced not to a different standard of ball, but a different standard of female. This is the Southern Belle in all her demure, coiffed and winsome glory. “He played left, Strawberry played right, and the whole team played the field,” says Lewis.

The fact of the matter is – and we know this already – but Beane never really left Little Falls and Jackson, Mississippi, behind. He never left because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to be doing. And he was scared, which is an entirely understandable response to having a sizzling fastball thrown somewhere close to your head at speed faster than you can blink.

He was scared of his talent and scared of his failure. He was even scared of the blithe bluster that allowed him to routinely keep his fear at bay. Most of all he was scared of the thought that someday someone might look carefully at him and see that he was bluffing.

They would look into his secret heart and see a baseball prodigy whose soul and talent were forever at odds.

In “Moneyball” Lewis shows how Beane takes-off for years but he never really climbs to the stratospheric heights predicted for him in those early days when he became a Met just out of school. He never soars at the altitudes where baseball gods go. For several agonising seasons he does a reasonable approximation of flying but, finally, he can sort-of fly no longer.

With questions burning in his head, with fears and what used to be called “complexes”, he returns to earth. He returns to earth an angry man, wondering why he didn’t please his mother. And why he listened to his father.

By the time he has become manager of the Oakland A’s, this anger has subsided. It hasn’t entirely disappeared, however. Beane’s anger bubbles inside of him like a seething cauldron of lava. Sometimes it explodes. Sometimes days it merely simmers. Sometimes Beane throws chairs through pasteboard walls. Sometimes Beane can get hold of it just long enough to turn it away from himself.

When this happens, he is creative. He thinks: “How can I turn the Oakland A’s around on our limited budget? And how, if I don’t believe in the good face and the associated stereotypes, can I find competitive advantage to help us find players overlooked by everyone else?”

Beane always thought too much as a player. His mind was a canyon whipped by winds of self-doubt. Turn this doubt and anger outward however, to focus it on the cant, stale pieties and shibboleths of baseball, and the doubt can be put to good use.

Billy looked to statistics to help the Oakland A’s. He looked to statistics and a nerd called Bill James and James’s all-but-forgotten “Baseball Abstract”. In a word, he “deconstructed” many of baseball’s assumptions, from selection to statistics.

He discovered, for example – and here I must apologise in advance for my profound baseball ignorance – that hitting average, one of the statistical cornerstones of the game, was way less important than on-base average. The statistics also proved that picking pitchers from college rather than from high school was time and again the smarter strategy.

Having discovered such things, he set about finding players overlooked by everyone else. Such players might be from Carbuncle Point, Iowa, or the sleepy town of Mardi Gras, Missouri. It didn’t matter to Beane and his new team of scouts. Such players might be wildly idiosyncratic or just plain odd. They need not have the good face. If they had the numbers, he wanted their number.   

Such suspicion about baseball’s complacent scouting assumptions co-incided with the rise of the internet. The nooks and crannies of the ‘net were the perfect place in which to secret arcane baseball knowledge. Recruiting some Harvard graduates with good statistical and legal brains, Beane trawled the statistics. He increasingly came to disregard the sage old scouts’ advice. They were has-beens, relying on a sly blend of superstition and knowhow to get them through their days.

Armed with a couple of laptops and some print-outs, the Oakland A’s began to govern their behaviour in the draft – and their behaviour in the marketplace generally – on what the number-crunchers and the statistics told them. They threw questionably subjective notions like the “good face” onto the scrapheap of baseball history.

In this way, Beane underwent a kind of redemption. With “the good face” and the great physique, Beane once embodied all the necessary attributes like few other young baseballers of his generation. As managers, Beane and others over-turned the very knowledge that had held him as a young player in its grasp. His revolution was revenge. Revenge on the system he loved but also revenge on the complacent claims that system had over him as a player.

Those claims weren’t fair, he was saying. There were better claims, claims based in the hard data of statistics. And who are we to argue, because under Beane and Bill James’ abstract, the Oakland A’s became not only wildly successful but wildly observed. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” said Oscar Wilde. Many teams, including the Boston Red Sox, adopted the A’s method and found it to their liking.

As a result of the book, there was the film with Brad Pitt as Beane and Jonah Hill as Paul DePodesta, Beane’s chief boffin. The book – and film’s – insights, travelled across the Atlantic. Managers, coaches and scouts began to think that some of “Moneyball’s” conclusions might be applicable to their sport. Football and rugby began to be engulfed in statistics, metres run, assists, successful passes. Other sports did too.

The advantage of rooting your match analysis or acquisition strategy in so-called hard facts is that they brook no argument. If you as a manager, suspect your box-to-box midfielder hadn’t been running enough, you look at the numbers to justify hauling him off after 47 minutes. If he gets stroppy, you point to the screen.

The fetishisation of numbers in sport finds expression elsewhere in everyday culture. In the last 20 years in the developed world it’s become all about numbers in every facet of life, from education to health-care, to pharmaceuticals to performance appraisals. Numbers run our lives with their iron quantitative hand.

Both in the events it describes and as a book in its own right, Moneyball is very much an artefact of the cultural moment. That moment is best described in the form of a question and answer. If the question is: “How can we, as a poor club, maximise our chances of competing against the rich guys”, the answer to that question is as follows: “You can use the obtuse science of numbers as your new foundation, over-turning the ‘knowledge’ of grizzled old dinosaurs called scouts.”

The story is told through the figure of Beane, an interesting fellow. We’re familiar with heroes and anti-heroes, but who of us have heard of pre-heroes? Such guys were heroes before their time, which kind of compromised their heroic quest.

In the Moneyball story, the hero (or the pre-hero) never-quite-makes-it, but never-quite-makes-it just enough to still be respected. This respect gives him the power to initiate a strategic revolution. He brings in the intellectuals and nerds, a cultural and media staple since Dustin Hoffman bumbled around in Rain Man in the 1980s, the autistic savant who could rattle off the square root of 15 678 but found it slightly more challenging to squeeze his own orange juice in the mornings.

And so, post-Moneyball, with all the early adopters and evangelists, we now have Moneyball dogma. Every smart guy in a baseball cap and a laptop associated with a club or team is wildly influential. Trades and buys are based on the numbers. Stars have become commodities. The smarter of the clubs dig around in an about-to-be-traded player’s past. They are chasing the Holy Grail of “character.” There are numbers for that too.

We have Moneyball orthodoxy, which leads to the suspicion that too much faith is vested in the data. Numbers are always partial, because they are always part of a story. Numbers mean nothing in and of themselves. Handré Pollard’s kicking average from the 45th minute of the World Cup quarter-final against France was stupendous, but it was only stupendous because South Africa beat France.

He came on in the 31st minute against England in the semi-final, and again he was magnificent, magnificent enough to play in the final. His numbers are numbers in a story. That story is the story of the Springboks’ defence of their World Cup title. His numbers might have been only slightly different in the story of Springbok failure and they would have been deemed irrelevant. Conversely, they could have been exactly the same in a Springbok defeat at any stage of the knock-outs and they would have been deemed irrelevant too. The dividing line between numbers that mean something and those that don’t would appear to be thinner than we’re comfortable accepting.

Beane and Lewis would presumably say that they have the best numbers, the most powerful numbers, the ones others never accorded them the weight they deserved. True, but even such numbers need the scaffolding of story. Without story, the numbers are simply motes of dust on a raging wind.

So let’s not be seduced – as many are – into thinking that sport is reducible to the numbers. How, for instance, does one quantify memory? Memory in a sportsman or woman is that ineffable, difficult-to-quantify thing that no-one but us sportswriters with the institutional memories of elephants seem to notice. Take JP Duminy, the former Protea left-hander, and his performances against Australia, for example.

It all started for Duminy in Perth, in mid-December 2008, where he scored 50 not out in a remarkable South African fourth-innings victory (see the Luke Alfred Show episode four on the “Slow Death of South African Test Cricket”).

For Duminy, these were 50 confidence-boosting runs on debut, because in the next Test, in Melbourne, he went on to score 166, coming to the crease when the Proteas’ were 132 for five and losing Mark Boucher with the score on 141 for six. South Africa won the MCG Test, too, winning the series. It was the first time Australia had lost a series at home for 19 years.

Duminy struggled after such stellar beginnings. He became susceptible to the short-stuff and found that Test cricket wasn’t as straightforward as it appeared to be. In his 46 Tests he only scored two Test centuries at home, where he might have been expected to do better. Strangely, he seemed to leave his best for Australia.

In November 2016, back in Perth, where he had made his debut eight years before in a magnificent victory, he scored 141. He only scored six centuries in his entire Test career, and three of them were against Australia, with two of the three happening in Australia, that enduringly difficult place to score Test tons.

What does one make of such curiosities? Can they be converted into an algorithm or formula? And, if so, what would the memory formula look like? Duminy’s Test average was a workmanlike 32. 85. His Test average in Australia was 47.77, better again by a third.

Sport caters for many human needs and impulses. One of them, I suggest, is mystery. Duminy’s entire career, when you think about it, was a mystery. His peerless record against Australia was a mystery within the greater mystery of comparative under-achievement.

Sometimes a mystery is best left alone to remain being a mystery. We don’t need it explained by the numbers, although there are always people who want to try.

It was in the Westin Hotel in Melbourne in 2008, within walking distance of the MCG where Duminy had scored his 166, that I read Lewis’ “Moneyball” for the first time. I loved it. It told a compelling story rooted in a clever narrative arc. I’ve often felt like a bit of an outsider in the conformist and anti-intellectual world of South African sport myself, and James, with his science of Sabermetrics, was nothing if not the outsider’s outsider. Beane was a pre-hero hero but he was also a kind of insider’s-outsider. The entire book was about how the outsiders stormed the Castle walls and sacked the Empire. What wasn’t there to enjoy?

In time, I’ve become a little more sceptical of “Moneyball”. My scepticism takes several forms. My first quibble has to do with the gentle purring of the smooth Lewis style. Take the following representative sentence found on page 52 of my copy.

“Billy’s failure was less interesting than the many attempts to explain it.” I’ll read that again, “Billy’s failure was less interesting than the many attempts to explain it.” There’s a fateful imprecision to this sentence. If Billy’s failure really wasn’t interesting then it presumably wouldn’t have inspired the many attempts to explain it? That others attempted to explain it surely gave lie to the fact that Billy’s failure wasn’t interesting.

Uninteresting failures remain just that, uninteresting failures, which suggests that Billy’s “less interesting” failure is not quite as uninteresting as the slick sentence makes out. “Moneyball” is, in fact, a book devoted to the trajectory of Beane’s uninteresting failure, so it’s quite a claim to make that his failure was less interesting than the many attempts to describe it.

That there’s quite a bit of this Malcolm Gladwell-type imprecision and hollow neatness in “Moneyball”, isn’t finally that important. It’s a long time, after all, since I dusted off my copy of FR Leavis’s “The Great Tradition” and got out my textual tweezers to pluck a dubious sentence or two off the page.

What is important, is to suggest that to reduce sport to numbers is to make it shallow. Such a gambit robs sport of some of its mystery. Mystery is close to hand for all Springbok rugby fans. How is it, they have asked for weeks now, that the national rugby team could win three knock-out matches in the World Cup by one point?

The answer to such questions won’t be found in the numbers. But they might be found in a story. For this, finally, is one of the important reasons why we love sport. It tells us a good story. And we are never averse to a good story.