Thinking and winning
Ed Smith
MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME by Michael Lewis WW Norton, 19.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0393324818 Twenty years ago there were two pages of sport a day in the broadsheets. A third felt like a guilty pleasure. Now it is more like 13. Far from being tucked between the weather and the TV guide, the sports section now stands alone on several days a week, slipping out from the rest of the paper without a businessman or politician in sight.
Surely, with all this reporting at his fingertips, both the fan and the coach are ideally placed to make informed judgments about players? Not necessarily. In fact, these 'extra' ten pages of sportswriting often comprise not match reports but opinion pieces and personality-driven 'inside chat'. The articles about the postmatch press conferences now take up almost as much space as the reports about the matches themselves.
There is now an industry of opinionmakers 'helping' people to make up their minds about sportsmen, a fourth estate that is getting ever more powerful. The lens — literally the media — through which people (even professional insiders) experience sport has become more sophisticated. It may also — for all the superclear high-tech slow-motion replays — have become more opaque. It is certainly harder to see around it, harder to get to the sport direct. As in modern politics, so in modern sport: the spin, to some extent, has become the story.
Every industry, once it is in place, likes to feel important, that it serves a purpose. And the sports media often does. Great commentators actually enhance their sport by increasing the viewers' pleasure. Ditto great journalists. But the industry also recycles a lot of familiar information, some of it false, which, simply by being repeated often and loudly enough, becomes ingrained as revealed truth. Attack these dubious revealed truths and you take on the industry itself. You place yourself outside the sporting Westminster village.
That is what Moneyball is about: a fan, a manager, a team that defied the sports industry, chucked out the recycled chat, broke the rules, thought independently, didn't give a damn — and won, won, won. If you've come this far with me, I can now risk revealing that the team is the Oakland Athletics and the sport is baseball. But the concepts are universal. The subtitle might even have been 'The Open Society and its Enemies'.
Baseball is not a fair game. Money helps. The New York Yankees — the game's aristocrats — have a payroll three times bigger than the impoverished Oakland As. The Yankees simply buy the best players. The As had to come up with a different way to win. They had to find the flawed champions whom the sporting village underestimated and hence underpriced. They needed to find a scientific method for picking up bargain athletes on the free market.
Talent, they discovered, is rated too highly. One cliché that bounces around most dressing-room walls is, 'He's got the talent, so he's bound to get better.' In fact, talent only matures when harnessed within a personality that is capable of selfimprovement. And talent, ironically, has a nasty knack of protecting the talented from the urge to self-improve. Supertalented young sportsmen, never having needed resilience thus far, often lack the psychological capacity to develop it when life gets tough in the big leagues. Like high-school beauty queens, they crumple at the first adult rejection.
Conclusion one: the As stopped signing high-school prodigies who looked great in a baseball uniform and just had to train on, and started signing college players who had a proven track record of being able to score runs — and something going for them beyond baseball. Everyone said the As were mad. But the runs kept coming.
If talent was overrated, the As discovered that personality was too often ignored by scouts and managers. The baseball community overestimated its own capacity to graft real psychological resilience on to inert, talented young men. But it also suffered from a reflexive fear of players who operated outside the predictable range of jock-sportsman routine behaviour. Many coaches wanted clay models to mould with their own imprints of what a champion should look like, The difficulty, of course, is that real champions want to be themselves. So while show ponies were patiently indulged by the baseball community, independent-minded performers were written off as difficult 'eccentrics'. Principle two: we'll have the eccentrics, you can keep the show ponies.
The As also re-examined how a game is won. Received wisdom — such as the truism that games are won by pitchers not batters — proved not to be so wise after all, The As stopped generalising about large chunks of the game that were too complex to analyse statistically with any accuracy. Instead, they broke the game up into tiny pieces with definite outcomes. They did to baseball statistics what derivatives traders did to the financial markets, and struck gold by exploiting market inefficiencies in exactly the same way.
The As, it must be admitted, didn't begin this statistical revolution. Appropriately, the hard thinking was done not by a baseball insider, journalist or manager, but by an independent baseball nut and mathematical wizard called Bill James. All the As did was use James's theoretical ideas in a real ball club. The original thing was that the As were brave enough not to listen to the massed hordes of insiders who exclaimed they were mad. Principle three: read the scores, not the press. In 2002, the As won 103 games in the regular season, more than anyone else, including the clubs with three times the cash.
If all that sounds a bit dry, it isn't when Michael Lewis tells the story. Moneyball is a Tom Wolfe-style narrative tour de force: witty, relentlessly researched, cleanly written. Its only flaws are also Wolfian. First, a tendency to over-clarify an argument to the point where a contrary view is held up as stupid by definition. Secondly, a proneness to over-mauling his stooges until they demand pity as much as censure. But alongside so much rhetorical fun and provocative conceptual thinking, I can forgive a little bit of bullying.
But it is as a study of a clique under fire that Moneyball is most compelling. Guess what: the club of baseball pundits and insiders didn't like it. They accused the As of arrogance, wrong-headedness, hubris and over-intellectualism, neatly ignoring the fact that the As hadn't written Moneyball, Michael Lewis had. And the fans? They bought it and loved it, sending Moneyball to the top of the bestseller lists. When the words got direct to the readers, they went down a treat. Just like sport at its best, really.
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