Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

The first chapter tells the story of Billy Beane’s success in sports up through high school. He was a natural athlete who excelled at baseball, football, and basketball. By the time he was a junior in high school, he stood six feet four inches, weighed 180 pounds, and “could beat anyone at anything” (6). Already in high school, he attracted scouts from many major league clubs, who recognized his talent and wanted to get him on their teams.

There were several warning signs that Beane’s success in the big leagues would not be so assured. First, his batting average fell from roughly .500 to .300 his last year in high school. Second, Beane had trouble dealing with failure. In the rare instances he did not accomplish what he wanted to, he exploded with anger. One such incident, in fact, got him thrown off the team temporarily. The third sign was that he had his heart set on going to college rather than jumping straight to the major leagues. He had a scholarship to play quarterback for Stanford University, succeeding John Elway, which seemed like a good opportunity.

The New York Mets held three first-round draft picks the year Beane graduated, and they chose him 23rd overall with their third pick. Their scout actually thought he was the best prospect, but their first pick was used for pitcher Darryl Strawberry. The team had allowed Sports Illustrated to follow their decision-making that year for an article, and its writers suggested Strawberry as first pick for a compelling rags-to-riches story. The Mets went along. Billy Beane was still undecided until the club brought him to meet their star players. This impressed him enough to verbally agree to sign, but he changed his mind and again leaned toward going to college. His father, however, said he had already made his decision and given his word, so Beane officially signed with the Mets. He planned to attend Stanford in the off-season until his admission was revoked since he would no longer be providing the school with his athletic services.

This chapter jumps to 2002 when Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A’s and recounts a meeting regarding the upcoming draft. Beane is meeting with his scouts and other assistants to review the 680 players that the scouts had chosen to consider. Lewis writes, “For the first time in his career Billy was about to start an argument about how [the scouts] did what they did” (15).

Lewis first explains what happened during the previous year’s draft. The players that Beane wanted were taken by other teams before the A’s second first-round pick. The head of scouting, Grady Fuson, chose a high school pitcher with a strong fastball who looked the part. All the scouts loved him. Yet Beane was furious, throwing his chair against the wall and smashing it. His view was that scouts tended to go by unfounded gut instinct and stereotypical models of baseball players instead of using evidence. He and his group of college-educated assistants were more likely to use computers and statistics to crunch the numbers in order to find players with a greater likelihood of success—no matter what they looked like. By the end of that year, a new scouting director had been hired to replace Fuson.

Beane’s methodology led to back-and-forth in the 2002 meeting. The team tries to categorize each player, often using colorful shorthand labels such as “bad makeup” (too many problems to take a chance on) and “rockhead” (too stupid to teach anything). Three days later, they have winnowed the group down to about 400 possibilities. Beane is focusing that year on strong hitters, so they review the top candidates. He criticizes most of the scouts’ top prospects. Where they see potential for growth, he sees the lack of a record; when they remark at someone’s athletic build, he retorts, “We’re not selling jeans here” (31).

Much discussion is given to a catcher named Jeremy Brown. One of the influential baseball publications chose 25 of the top catching prospects, and Brown was not among them. The scouts deride him as fat. Beane, however, relies on statistics, and one of his assistants points out Brown’s high number of hits and walks in college. Beane identifies him as a likely first-round pick.

The third chapter returns to the story of Billy Beane’s playing years, picking up the tale from the first chapter. It covers the decade of the 1980s, when he bounced between the minor leagues and several stints in the majors and ends with his transition to the front office of the Oakland A’s in the 1990s as an advance scout. First, Lewis details the start of Beane’s time with the New York Mets. The team had high expectations for him, judging him to be more developed than his fellow rookie Darryl Strawberry. Strawberry went to a lower rookie team consisting of players right out of high school while Beane was sent to a higher-level team composed of college graduates.

The author explains that from the start, the Mets “had set him up to fail” (44), which was the one thing Beane had trouble handling. He wasn’t comfortable with the limelight, and he felt out of place with the older players. He did well enough, however, to make it to the Double-A team within two years, where he played with Strawberry in the outfield. When Strawberry developed faster and became a better hitter, Beane started to question himself and wonder if he’d made the right decision to jump from high school to professional baseball.

Even worse was his teammate and roommate Lenny Dykstra. They played alongside each other for almost two years beginning in 1984. Dykstra couldn’t compare to Beane in terms of physical gifts, but he had a mentality that would take him far. Where Beane was cerebral and hyperaware of things, Dykstra was like a slate that was wiped blank every day. He paid no attention to pecking order and instantly forgot his failures, always assuming that he was destined to be in the same rank as the top players (yet he was a 13th-round draft pick).

Beane was a great outfielder and had a strong presence and competitive streak. His weakness was hitting. If things didn’t go well, he fumed and his next at-bats would be failures. He had no confidence in the batter’s box and his form suffered as he tried all kinds of different fixes, from batting left-handed to crouching down to shortening his swing. The problem was the pressure. When it didn’t matter and no one was watching, he still showed flashes of his old brilliance. The A’s sent him to the team psychologist to try to work through it. Beane later saw this as futile. Success in baseball wasn’t something you could develop over time. Instead, players were more or less fully formed early on, and “I just didn’t have it in me,” he said (54).

Early in 1990, Beane decided to quit and asked the A’s if he could be an advance scout, someone who traveled to watch competitors and analyze them. He was only 27 years old, and many thought he was crazy as it was considered a step backwards, but Sandy Alderson, the A’s general manager (GM), hired him anyway. Alderson was an outsider in baseball, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School who had also been an officer in the Marine Corps. Beane’s methods originated with Alderson who started utilizing statistics in the 1990s.

When the A’s longtime owner died in 1995, the team was bought by a couple of businessmen whose approach was much more corporate. The team had long been losing money, and they wanted to trim the budget. Alderson now had to run the team with a bare-bones approach, seeking a single competitive edge rather than a full complement of tools. He decided to prioritize hitting. An analysis Alderson had made showed that the most important element of winning was on-base percentage (how often hitters got on base). Part of his strategy to increase this percentage was to reduce wild swinging and encourage his players to take walks.

Beane impressed Alderson enough to make him his assistant. Beane’s task was to find minor league players with talent whom others had overlooked.

This chapter is about baseball writer Bill James. Alderson had gotten most of his ideas about baseball statistics from James, and when he hired Billy Beane he gave Beane some of James’s pamphlets to read. James grew up with no connection to either writing or baseball. After college and a stint in the army, he was working at a pork and beans factory when he began writing down his ideas on baseball. He self-published an annual booklet that he called Baseball Abstract.

In the booklet, he included statistics to help answer certain questions he posed, such as whether umpire crews influenced the length of a game and whether fielding errors were an accurate measurement of a player’s potential. Overall, his argument was that only data (as opposed to observation) could yield the information necessary to make useful judgments about players and teams. James presented ideas for new statistics, including the “range factor,” which was a fielder’s total number of successful plays per game (the flip side of errors). They weren’t perfect measures either, Lewis writes, but James was at least shining a light on an area of the game that needed reassessment.

Lewis explains that James wasn’t the first to see that statistical analysis could yield important information about the game of baseball. In particular, Henry Chadwick, improved the figures used in the box score as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. However, Chadwick based much of his analysis of baseball on the game of cricket, an imperfect comparison. He also sought to attribute events to individual players, when in fact they resulted from a group of players or relied on random circumstances. Thus, Chadwick’s statistics were imperfect and needed updating, as they caused baseball managers to make poor decisions.

In the late 1970s, when James started writing, two new trends were imminent. The computer revolution was just beginning (which would make statistical analysis easier and cheaper) and baseball players’ salaries would soon skyrocket, making effective personnel decisions even more important. James continued his annual Abstract for a decade, focusing more and more on hitting statistics because of their abundance. In his third edition of Abstract, he published a mathematical formula for runs created by a team, which he tweaked until it fit past data. In other words, it was a hypothesis that he tested against known information from the past. When it was perfected, it could be used to reasonably predict future performance.

James’s work caught on and started to snowball with amateur baseball fans, some of whom had statistical skills greater than his—economists and scientists, for instance. Dick Cramer worked for a pharmaceutical company and used his company computer to compile statistics that would eventually form the basis of a business he founded, named STATS, Inc. The goal of the company was to collect statistics on every baseball game played and sell them to baseball teams. One effect all this had was to improve the accuracy of baseball statistics, since well-trained mathematical minds were brought to bear on the information, and serious fans collected even more information. This new approach even had a name, coined by James: “sabermetrics.”

Major League Baseball had its own company, the Elias Sports Bureau, to collect statistics and produce box scores, but it was unwilling to share all its data with anyone else. James realized that Major League Baseball was ignoring its own customers by not giving them the information they wanted. What was more, baseball insiders had no interest in the new statistics James and others were collecting. For example, STATS, Inc. tried in vain to sell its data to baseball teams until it gave up and sold them to fans instead. In the 1980s, teams did start to hire computer savvy “number crunchers,” but Lewis argues this was more for show than anything else. Teams still didn’t buy into the new methods. James became cynical and quit producing his Abstract in the late 1980s, and teams by and large stuck with their old ways well into the 1990s.