With the Race to the World Series in Full Swing, Michael Lewis Talks Moneyball

The game of baseball is a statistician's dream. Every aspect of the game is recorded, tracked, and dissected to find out what creates success -- including the one figure that some experts consider the most significant these days: money. While big-market teams, with payrolls to match, dominate the post-season baseball landscape on a yearly basis (read: New York Yankees), it would seem the small-market teams, with their no-name players, shouldn't stand a chance.

Enter Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane.

Beane, a former baseball player who never lived up to his potential, is a proponent of the baseball theories espoused by statistician extraordinaire and baseball guru Bill James -- a Kansas man who was so obsessed with tracking baseball stats, and creating new ones, that he made a living out of it and garnered a loyal, almost cult-like following among other innovative baseball thinkers. Among other ideas, James preached the importance of on-base percentage [OBP] and slugging percentage (simply put, a batter's power) as two of the key indicators to a player's present and future success.

While other teams have drafted players based on the old-school opinion of a scout who watched a prospect play a few games (such as the scouts who drafted Beane in 1980), Beane and his management team have followed James' philosophy (called sabermetrics), as well as the ideas of other innovative thinkers, and have drafted future A's players based on "Jamesian" success factors, which were meticulously tracked by computer. The result? Beane and his team have built an annual playoff-caliber baseball team on a quarter of the money spent by big-market baseball teams.

And while Beane has been severely criticized by the media because the A's haven't yet made it past the first round (this year they were knocked out by the Boston Red Sox), the players that the A's farm system has produced have been nothing short of phenomenal: former A's and now Yankee first baseman Jason Giambi, shortstop Miguel Tejada, and pitchers Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, and Tim Hudson.

Beane's innovations and maverick spirit, and the small-market A's success are the subject of Michael Lewis's compelling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Norton). The bestselling book was a July/August 2003 Book Sense 76 pick and has provided sports talk radio with endless baseball fodder this summer.

Recently, Bookselling This Week had a chance to chat via e-mail with Michael Lewis:

BTW: How did it happen that you ended up writing a book about Billy Beane, the A's, and this new "idea" of what constitutes a successful baseball team? Are you a rabid baseball fan?

ML: I'm a fan though not a rabid one. I'd never heard of Bill James, for instance, an ignorance unforgivable for a rabid fan. I slithered into the story sideways, out of simple curiosity about the A's success.

BTW: It seems to me that baseball is the only sport that lends itself to this kind of intellectualizing -- which seems fairly odd considering, as you write in the book, it's run by anti-intellectuals …

ML: That's true -- to a point. There's a movement afoot to complicate and intellectualize both football and basketball. But baseball lends itself especially well to statistical analysis because a) its sample sizes are large, and b) it's relatively easy to assign credit and blame for everything that occurs on a baseball field.

BTW: Do you buy into [James'] theories about OBP and slugging percentage?

ML: They … were argued and, to my mind, proven, by statisticians decades ago. Branch Rickey understood some version of it. Paul DePodesta's refinement -- that OB is worth three times slugging -- has stirred a small controversy in the sabermetrics world, and I'm not sure I completely "buy" it. But even if it's slightly wrong, it merely exaggerates an interesting truth that on-base is a lot more important than slugging.

BTW: I got the feeling that Beane -- frustrated over being built up by everyone as the next great baseball star -- gravitated towards this new way of thinking about baseball almost as a way to explain away his failure, to prove that he just didn't have it -- as much as it was to build a great baseball team and to quell his competitive juices.

ML: Always hard to say why a person does what he does. I think that the analytical approach to the game certainly had an added appeal to Billy because it also helped him to rationalize his failure. But I don't think it's the only reason he found it appealing. He found it appealing mainly because it helped him to build winning teams with less money.

BTW: At one point in the book, Beane explains away the A's failure in the Division Series as being a product of luck. Did you find this explanation (based on unquantifiables) inconsistent, considering that Beane has spent so much time trying to figure out exactly how baseball works?

ML: No. Why should it be? Part of "how baseball works" is to end each season with a short series that has a huge random component. The shorter the series, the more luck that is involved.

BTW: Are teams beginning to take the A's philosophy seriously yet? Are any teams building in a similar manner? Some of James' and Beane's axioms seem so blatantly simple (e.g., the fact that the difference between a .300 and a .276 hitter is just one hit every two weeks), I find it strange that GMs aren't adopting these theories.

ML: You aren't alone in finding it strange. In the past 18 months the Red Sox and the Blue Jays have more or less said: we're re-making ourselves in the image of the A's. More recently, the Cardinals and the Mets have made noise about moving in this direction.

BTW: Do you find any parallels between mavericks in the sports world and mavericks in the business world?

ML: Mavericks in the sports world take a lot more grief for breaking with tradition. Business mavericks are much quicker to be sanctioned. --Interview by David Grogan