Moneyball: Chapters 3–4

The Mets failed to consider the cause or implications of his reticence.

The only thing worse than an ambivalent minor league baseball player was an ambivalent minor league baseball player with a terror of failure, forced to compare himself every afternoon to Darryl Strawberry.

Living with Lenny, Billy became even less sure that he was destined to be the star everyone told him he would be. He began, in the private casino of his mind, to hedge his bets. He told teammates he might quit baseball and go back to college and play football.

One afternoon during Billy's one-month stint with the Detroit Tigers, he was asked by the general manager, Bill Lajoie, to come out to Tiger Stadium on an off-day.

While the coaches and the GM scrutinized their precious pitcher, Billy took the first pitch he liked and launched a major league fastball into the upper deck of Tiger Stadium.

The A's minor league coordinator Karl Kuehl, with whom Dorfman wrote the seminal book, The Mental Game of Baseball, had actually put Dorfman in uniform and let him sit in the dugout during games, so he could deal with the players' assorted brain screams in real time.

He was who he was. Baseball was what it was. And they were a bad match. "It wasn't anyone's fault," he said. "I just didn't have it in me."
During spring training of 1990 he finally capitulated to this realization.

"He was a neophyte. But he was a progressive thinker. And he wanted to understand how the game worked. He also had the capacity to instill fear in others."

He wasn't particularly facile with numbers, but he could understand them well enough to use their conclusions.

Deferring to success became an untenable strategy in 1995, when Walter Haas died. His estate sold the team to a pair of Bay Area real estate developers, Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, who were, by instinct, more businessmen than philanthropists.

The system's central tenet was, in Alderson's words, "the system was the star. The reason the system works is that everyone buys into it. If they don't, there is a weakness in the system."

The need to treat the big league team as the sacrosanct province of people who had played in the big leagues struck Alderson, who liked the idea of order and discipline cascading unimpeded from the top, as a kind of madness.

A player would come up through the A's farm system being told that he needed to be patient, that he needed to take his walks; and then the moment he got to the big club, he was told to unleash his natural aggression. Even players brainwashed by Alderson's minor league system in the new approach were susceptible to these arguments.

Tony La Russa left when the new owners renounced the old habit of bankrolling millions of dollars in losses.

He was bright. He had a natural coruscating skepticism about baseball's traditional wisdom.

He could see that Eric Walker's pamphlet was just the beginning of a radical, and rational, approach to the game—one that would concentrate unprecedented powers in the hands of the general manager.

But he had found James's approach to the game completely persuasive, and had reshaped a professional baseball organization in James's spirit. That's why he had hired Eric Walker, in the hope of "getting some Bill James-like stuff that was proprietary to us."

Astonishingly short and abrupt paragraphs followed by pages and pages of numbers: that was James's quixotic early approach to getting across what he had to say.

What to most people was a dull record of ephemeral events without deep meaning or lasting value was for James a safe deposit box containing life's secrets.

Baseball keeps copious records, and people talk about them and argue about them and think about them a great deal.

But to get 191 hits in a season demands (or seems to demand, which is as good for the drama) a consistency, a day-in, day-out devotion, a self-discipline, a willingness to play with pain and (to some degree) a predisposition to the team game which is wholly inconsistent with flakiness.

Hitting 48 homers is something done by large, slow men three-quarters thespian.

But he was also a pragmatist: he had happened upon something broken and wanted to fix it.

Cramer, like James, understood that the search for baseball knowledge was constrained by the raw statistics, and began to think seriously about starting a company to collect better data about Major League Baseball games than did Major League Baseball.

James was forever moaning about the paucity of the information kept by major league baseball teams.

"The problem with the Elias Bureau," he wrote, "is that the Elias Bureau never turns loose of a statistic unless they get a dollar for it. Their overarching concern in life is to get every dollar they can from you and give you as little as possible in return for it—like a lot of other businesses, I suppose, only with a more naked display of greed than is really usual."

Presented with new information by STATS Inc., they showed little interest in it, even when it was offered to them gratis.

Would the team, as currently composed, do better or worse in a smaller, more hitter-friendly park? Cramer ran the numbers—showing the relative propensity of the Astros versus their opponents to hit long pop flies—and told Rosen, "Sorry, if you do that, you lose more games."

What the baseball professionals did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was to hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife.

There was a profusion of new knowledge and it was ignored.

Well into the late 1990s you didn't have to look at big league baseball very closely to see its fierce unwillingness to rethink anything. It was as if it had been inoculated against outside ideas.

Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence—as if it's inert.

For a man who had never played professional baseball to impose upon even a pathetic major league franchise an entirely new way of doing things meant alienating the baseball insiders he employed: the manager, the scouts, the players. In the end, he would have been ostracized by his own organization.

The image is indelible: We are sitting there with this guy who looks like a superannuated ferret, his pale skinny arms protruding from the billowing short sleeves of his white-on-white shirt, and he brushes us off with a dismissive wave of his hand.

Although the company finally divulged some of the statistics they had long withheld from James and other analysts, they failed to do anything much with them.

...the [Elias Bureau] launched their own competitor, the main purposes of which were to:
a) make money

b) steal all of my ideas

c) make as many disparaging comments as possible about me

"This is a book about what baseball looks like if you step back from it and study it intensely and minutely, but from a distance."

...I am encountering more and more of my own readers that I don't even like, nitwits who glom onto something superficial in the book and misunderstand its underlying message.

Intelligence about baseball had become equated in the public mind with the ability to recite arcane baseball stats.

"I wonder," James wrote, "if we haven't become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them."