The Futility Infielder

During the aftermath of a recent Baseball Prospectus Bookstore Pizza feed, Steven Goldman and I had a good laugh, rolling our eyes as we discussed a recent Selena Roberts New York Times piece that had drawn my ire and gained some infamy in the circles we travel. Goldman told me he was itching to write his own take not only on the Roberts piece but on the anti-intellectual post-Moneyball backlash in general. With the latest (free) installment of his BP column "You Could Look It Up," he's delivered the goods in style.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you're aware that Michael Lewis' Moneyball was lauded in many circles, transcending its status as a baseball book to influence not just other sports but the broader culture, particularly the business world, as well. The most negative reaction, as Lewis reminded us recently, was from "The Club," which he defined as "not only the people in the front office who operate the team but also, in a kind of women's auxiliary, many of the writers and broadcasters who follow the game and purport to explain it." The historically-minded Goldman starts by comparing the reactionary strain of Moneyball responses (de rigueur among Club members) to similarly-toned dismissals of other baseball innovations -- night games, the farm system, radio broadcasts, integration, western expansion, free agency -- and notes, as others have, that many of the book's critics, such as Joe Morgan, clearly didn't read it. But it's the reaction of those who did read it upon which he focuses:

Many of those critics who actually read the book -- or seem to have read it -- have frothed as if they were members of some baseball version of HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] circa 1950. The book has given birth to a retrograde, reactionary movement, all of it provoked by its important but less than revolutionary point: In a money-scarce environment, a business must maximize its chances. A good way to do this is to improve your intelligence-gathering operation, then start looking for opportunities the well-heeled operations might have missed.

Moneyball is not Thomas Paine's Common Sense, inciting a people to rebellion. It isn't Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin or Charles Darwin's Origin of Species; yet we have our own counterrevolution promoted by the establishment.

It's amazing to me how many people missed the major point of Moneyball -- it's not so much about some Billy Beane-led tyranny of numbers at the expense of all subjectivity, it's about using the best information available to gain a competitive advantage and exploit inefficiencies in the market.

Goldman turns his his attention to the infamous Roberts article, siezing upon her dismissal of the Society of American Baseball Research [sic] as "the No-Life Institute." "Anti-intellectualism is the last P.C. prejudice, " he notes, "certainly the Times would not allow one of its writers to refer to 'The Urban League (aka The No-Whites Institute)' -- and it's an easy way of mocking an idea without really addressing it." While Roberts isn't alone in her empty mockery, as an irregular on the baseball beat (no Club membership for her), she's hardly the one with much at stake. But as part of the mainstream press whose so-called expertise and position of privelege are threatened by statheads telling them that everything they know about baseball is wrong, she's near the root of that anti-intellectual sentiment.

Like any good analyst, Goldman recognizes that stats are tools and he takes great care to remind us that they aren't the entire story; subjective observation is still a necessary component. Turning his wayback machine to 1934, he compares the two competing points of view (performance analysis and scouting, or as Dayn Perry famously put it, beer and tacos) regarding 20-year-old San Francisco Seal Joe DiMaggio. While suffering from a knee injury, Joe D. was nonetheless tearing the cover off the ball when the scouts came around. Only by combining the two views could a team -- the Yankees -- justify signing the future Clipper.

The latter part of the article is where Goldman really shines. Shifting gears, he writes:

Unfortunately, the reaction has put many baseball writers in the untenable position of denying facts that are probably true. The vastly overstated Beane/Moneyball/sabermetric bias against scouting is a red herring, as is the macho derision of sabermetricians. The truth is, while statistics provide the evidence for most of the new theories of the game, most of the ideas advocated by the so-called statheads can be explained by plain old common sense.

Hearkening back to an earlier Pinstriped Bible piece, he revisits some of the lessons he's learned in his 20 years of watching baseball, breaking down a great deal of sabermetric wisdom into simple numbers and concepts without relying on the alphabet soup of advanced statistical analysis. Among the nuggets which he explains:

* It's how often a player reaches base that's important, not batting average, not RBI.
* Remember league and position averages: numbers have meaning only in context.
* The main function of the batting order is to distribute plate appearances.
* A strikeout is just another out.
* The 27 outs of a ballgame are precious. Managers should not give them away lightly.

None of this is new, but Goldman's ability to simplify this stuff without condescending and remain entertaining all the while is reminiscent of a pretty fair country writer named Bill James. In fact, his laundry list reminds me of the points from the Other Bearded One's valedictory "Breaking the Wand" essay in the 1988 Baseball Abstract. Whether it's to send to your local representative of the hackocracy along with a "Dear Jackass" letter or to introduce your skeptical pal to a whole new way of looking at baseball, this is an article you'll want to clip and save.