The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
A fat hitter smashes a fly ball. As he lumbers toward first base, he momentarily overcomes his fear of running to second base. As he starts to waddle tentatively around first fear reasserts itself. He abruptly changes his mind, executes a hasty U-turn, and falls flat on his face as he scrambles frantically back toward the bag. After reaching safety, he looks up at the umpire and is chagrined to learn that he hit a home run.
In the movie Moneyball directed by Bennett Miller, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) shows a tape of the hapless home run hitter to Billy Beane (Brad Pitt). “It's a metaphor,” Brand tells Beane who snaps back, “I know it's a metaphor.” Sometimes we hit home runs – real or metaphorical, earned or unearned – and do not realize it.
In 2002, Beane was the general manager of Oakland A’s, a team that won 103 games after a poor start and a field manager who did not agree with Beane’s methods. Twenty of the wins were in a row and set a new record for consecutive victories. Before the 2002 season, the A’s lost three of their best players to free agency because the team could not match the astronomical salaries offered by those in bigger markets. However, by discovering and acquiring players who excelled in ways not appreciated by the baseball establishment, the A’s were able recover and win one more game than the year before.
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Like many boys of my generation, I was weaned on baseball. The first book I remember reading was a thin paperback about the first five players who were elected to the Hall of Fame when it was established in 1936. Their black-and-white photos are engraved on my memory and evoke qualities comparable to the gods and heroes of Olympus.
· Babe Ruth revolutionized the game with prodigious home runs while indulging appetites worthy of Zeus.
· Ty Cobb, fleet of foot, rapped out singles and stole bases like Hermes.
· Honus Wagner, steady, loyal, dependable, and ugly like Hephaestus, played faultlessly as a shortstop while winning eight batting titles in a row.
· Walter “Big Train” Johnson, powerful like Poseidon, won over 400 games and set strikeout records that lasted decades while playing for the lowly Washington Senators (“First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”)
· Christy Mathewson, a graduate of Bucknell College – professional ballplayers with college degrees were rare in the early 1900s – exhibited the intelligence and calm reason of Apollo.
As an overweight, near-sighted kid, condemned to wear “husky” pants and thick glasses, I eagerly awaited the arrival of The Sporting News each week and pored over The Baseball Encyclopedia, memorizing the statistics that constitute a framework through which I was able to comprehend the deeds of my mythological heroes.
Babe Ruth clubbed 714 career homers at time when the game emphasized small ball. The 4,191 career hits by Ty Cobb penciled out to 200 hits per year for 21 seasons. Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games – he did not miss one for over 13 years. These sacrosanct numbers still resonate within the context of a mythology to which I no longer subscribe but whose values seem timeless and true. With the possible exception of Cal Ripken, players like Barry Bonds and Pete Rose who broke the records cited above seem unworthy to fill the shoes of those enshrined in my pantheon.
The quintessential hero of my youth was Sandy Koufax. He informed a story of redemption that that appealed to me in a way that religious narrative never did. After languishing for six years as a “bonus baby” who could not be sent down to the minors, he achieved apotheosis when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and he put together the best five consecutive years of any pitcher in history. His fastball and devastating curve enabled him to pitch no-hitters in four consecutive seasons, culminating with the perfect game that he pitched in 1965 in the shadow of the riots in Watts. Yogi Berra said it best: “I can see how he won 25 games. What I don't understand is how he lost five.”
The day in 1966 when he announced his retirement due to debilitating pain in his pitching arm was the saddest of my life. In the season that had just concluded he won 27 games and posted a 1.73 earned run average. It was unthinkable, unacceptable that a star so bright could exit with so little warning, but the gods abide by schedules not divulged to little boys in Grand Junction, Colorado.
***
The movie Moneyball is based on a book by Michael Lewis that describes Beane’s exploitation of underappreciated statistics to ferret out the hidden value of players. With the help of men trained in statistical analysis, Beane drafted and traded for players who were not the buffed up physical specimens touted by scouts. Desirable players in the world according to Beane perform well on metrics (on base percentage or slugging average) that demonstrate an ability to get on base and help score runs (or, the case of pitchers and position players, prevent runs).
Reduced to its fundamentals, baseball games are won by scoring more runs than the other side and outs are scarce resources to be husbanded with the upmost care. Based on a sober analysis of the statistics, the “Beane counters” employed by the Oakland A’s determined that sacrifice bunts, strikeouts, and getting caught stealing in the interest of “manufacturing runs” were counterproductive. Instead, they focused on statistics that betrayed a relentless focus on controlling the strike zone and scoring runs.
The universality of the metaphors – “controlling the strike zone” and “scoring runs” – signal that the implications and influence of Moneyball have spread beyond the confines of major league ballparks and have been applied to business, politics, law, and even philosophy. In the introduction, Lewis claims: “A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about possibilities – and the limits – of reason in human affairs. Baseball – of all things – was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method.”
With those words, Lewis justifies an interest in baseball statistics as part of a well-rounded education and alludes to the difficulties encountered when trying to operate according to the dictates of reason in the face of received opinion. Baseball provides a well-developed, rich microcosm in which observers may devise models – mathematical metaphors – that allow them to explore fundamental questions that affect or rule our lives whether we are aware of them or not. Yet, despite the fact that rational scientific models have improved our lives immeasurably, many people distrust the results and the implications are often ignored or misunderstood in favor of magical thinking – personified in Moneyball by the scouts who refused to accept Beane’s methods.
Billy Beane is the focal character of Moneyball and his backstory provides subtext. Despite astonishing athletic gifts, Beane failed to meet the high expectations of coaches, fans, and, most importantly, himself during a six-year major league career. He participated in 148 games with a .219 batting average with three home runs and an anemic on base percentage of .256.
In 1989, he walked off the field as player for the A’s and into the front office. Sandy Alderson, the general manager of the A’s, hired Beane as a scout and supported his efforts to explore rational evaluations of players. After he became general manager of the A’s, Beane exploited the inefficiencies in the marketplace of major league baseball by finding better ways to price assets in the form of players by ignoring the conventional wisdom of baseball insiders. These lessons apply to all areas of human endeavor that would benefit from evidence-based approaches including business and politics.
The book echoes the efforts of my father to create and test models that tease out the value of discrete events in baseball (singles, doubles, triples, homers, stolen bases, walks, balks) in terms of runs created or prevented. While reading the book, I was often overcome with feelings of déjà vu as Lewis described findings that track almost exactly with those that my father demonstrated years ago (for example, stolen bases are overrated, strikeouts are hugely detrimental, and walks measure the ability of hitters to control the strike zone).
Nevertheless, models only account for a portion of reality – maybe the least important part. As a materialist, I believe that numbers and the scientific method provide the best places to start any analysis, but the movie Moneyball demonstrates that numbers do not provide meaning. In a touching scene, Beane watches his daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), strumming a guitar in a music store as she sings a simple song, “The Show.” At the end of the movie, the camera causes us to recall that scene as it slowly zooms in on Beane as he drives his truck after listening to a CD of his daughter singing the song:
I'm just a little bit caught in the middle
Life is a maze and love is a riddle
I don't know where to go I can't do it alone I've tried
And I don't know why
Some critics have panned the scene, but I believe that it evokes the central message of the movie - life is not baseball, but baseball (like literature or music or art) can provide metaphors, models from which to assess life. But as the camera zooms in on Beane we realize that we are always “just a little bit caught in the middle.”
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