Drinking the MONEYBALL Kool-Aid

[Writer's Note: I'm posting the following as a sort of public shaming. blogger tells me I started this post on August 27. I never finished it. I suppose it's better that I didn't. Think of everything that's happened to the MONEYBALL crowd since 8/27. The A's collapsed and didn't make the playoffs. Kenny Williams, the GM derided in the book as Oakland's biggest fan for the lopsided trades Beane wrung from the Chisox, now has one more World Series ring than Beane. Paul DePodesta, his once and maybe future right-hand man, was canned by the Dodgers for being unable to win despite bucketloads of cash. Anyway, on to the obsolete.]

Did you check the baseball standings this morning? The relevant stats read like this:

WINS LOSSES % GB PAYROLL COST PER WIN
OAKLAND A'S 75 56 .573 -- $55,425,762 $739,010

CLEVELAND INDIANS 74 58 .561 1.5 $41,502,500 $560,844

PITTSBURGH PIRATES 55 78 .414 20.5 $38,133,000 $693,327

The cost per win isn't right, I know, because that needs to be done with a full year's record, and as far as I know, that's opening-day roster. Throwing the Indians into the mix was a last-minute decision prompted by my incredulity with how well they're doing in comparison to what they're paying out. As for the A's and the Pirates, it's merely the comparison between the baseball team I follow (informally) and the one I wish I was following.

In May of 2003 I finished a week-long trial in federal court that concluded a thirty-year piece of litigation, seven of which had happened on my watch. Winding down from that, we were set to take a five-day trip to Washington D.C. to visit my aunt and see some of the sights. I went to Barnes & Noble to pick out a vacation book, and I narrowed it down to two choices: Eric Schlosser's book about black markets in America and Michael Lewis's Moneyball. I chose Schlosser's book and might have made it to page seventy-five. I didn't catch up to Moneyball until our trip to the beach this year, and it made me all the more disappointed that I went the other way two years ago.

At one level, this is the book that Kevin McClatchy doesn't want me to read, as it shows that an unconventional and whip-smart approach to managing baseball resources can beat pure wealth. The book dissects Billy Beane's success in producing regular-season wins, and consequently destroys every argument the Pirates routinely make about why they are mired in their thirteenth consecutive losing season. It's funny that I read it when I did, as the A's didn't make the postseason last year and nosedived in May to a sub-.500 level. All of the hype and the offseason trades of Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder had caught up to the front-office savant, or so went the conventional wisdom. Now, of course, they're headed for the postseason again after a torrid summer. They'll have an asterisk affixed to their success until they win in the playoffs, but maybe this will be the year. Last year Theo Epstein got to show that sabermetrics plus $125 million could overcome the postseason crap shoot. Why not the A's?

At another level, the book is so satisfying because the Oakland approach can be applied to any number of areas/markets that are mired in stagnating groupthink...