Turning failures into heroes
Michael Howard
MONEYBALL by Michael Lewis W. W. Norton, £8.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0393324818 Baseball is a minority sport in Britain, and a tiny minority at that. It is played in parts of South Wales and, by American expatriates, in Hyde Park. But it is for the most part regarded as an alien pastime and ignored.
I became a baseball fan in 1964 when I spent a few months living and working in New York. It is a gripping game and its history is intertwined with the very fabric of the history of the United States. Its aficionados have a very strong sense of that history. Major League baseball, for example, was a white only sport until after the second world war. The first black player in the Major Leagues was Jackie Robinson who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The number on his uniform was 42. To this day, you see fans turning up to games wearing shirts with that number on their back.
In 1958 Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved them, lock, stock and barrel, to Los Angeles. That too has not been forgotten — or forgiven. A friend of mine once told me that there were three arch-villains in the 20th century — Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley.
None of this is likely to encourage British readers to start reading books about baseball. But Moneyball is an unusual book and Michael Lewis is an unusual author.
He is best known for Liar’s Poker, an exposé of unacceptable behaviour on Wall Street. He is not a sports writer. And in Moneyball he uses baseball as a setting to explore a wider theme — the benefits of identifying and exploiting undervalued assets.
Moneyball is the story of the Oakland A’s and their general manager Billy Beane. The A’s are one of the poorest teams in Major League baseball. Beane himself was a failed baseball player when he was appointed general manager of the club. He achieved enormous success by throwing conventional approaches out of the window and challenging decades of the game’s folklore.
Assisted by the work of some pioneer students of the game, Beane reached the conclusion that the conventional criteria by which the performance, and therefore the value, of players was assessed were fundamentally flawed. Baseball is an intensely statistical game. There are statistics for every aspect of a player’s performance. Beane concluded that the statistics were measuring the wrong things. A different statistical approach was devised. This enabled Beane, with the assistance of someone with no baseball experience but a degree from Harvard, to find players who were likely to succeed but were ignored by other clubs. The result was that the A’s prospered and consistently outperformed clubs with far greater resources.
Clearly the technique of spotting undervalued assets is a key element of success in many fields of activity. But could the Beane approach be translated to other sports? Could it be imported and applied to football?
It is certainly easier in baseball, precisely because the statistics which measure every aspect of a team’s performance are so extensive. Statistics play a much smaller part in football, though the extent of statistical analysis is growing. The prizes which await the first football manager to do a Billy Beane would be enormous.
Meanwhile enjoy the book. Even if you know nothing about baseball and care less, you will savour its humour and become absorbed in its stories of the individual players who had been rejected as failures but became Beane’s heroes. And for those football managers who subscribe to the Spectator it should be compulsory reading.
Previous page
