I haven’t seen the movie Moneyball yet, though I’m anxious to (I hear there is a talented, good-looking guy playing David Justice).  As a serious baseball fan (whose mind is still boggled by this season's epic collapses by the Red Sox and Braves), I devoured Michael Lewis’ book upon its publication in 2004.  I enjoyed the character sketches as well as the behind-the-scenes drama, and I finished the book knowing a lot more about the sport than when I started.  However, I had a judgment then that time has only deepened: the story is a bit of an exaggeration.

As you probably know by now, Moneyball is the story of the Oakland A’s and their successful teams at the turn of the century.  Like a mom-and-pop store owner forced to compete with a Wal-Mart outlet down the street, Oakland GM Billy Beane had to come up with inventive ways for his financially strapped team to compete with behemoths like the New York Yankees, which could afford payrolls four times that of the A’s. 

Beane accomplished this by attacking the conventional wisdom, refusing to accept the hidebound views of his old-school scouts and adopting the ideas of the sabremetricians, whose guru, Bill James, had been looking at baseball statistics from a different angle.  Focusing on skills that were undervalued in the market – i.e. a .270 batter who drew a lot of walks was more valuable than a .300 hitter who didn’t – they were able to tout players who would provide more bang for the buck.  Beane assembled a team that is the baseball equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.

Some of the rave reviews for the movie have called it the story of an underdog, the success of the little guy against the system.  However, anyone who has watched American capitalism over the years knows the success of the little guy is both rare and usually brief.

In fact, Oakland’s remarkable success was short-lived.  Since the publication of the book, the team has appeared in the playoffs just once, and has not had a winning record in the last five seasons.  There are several reasons for this.

First, Oakland’s success was built on a lot of luck.  Specifically, it was based on a trio of starting pitchers – Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito – that was as strong as any in baseball then.  Starting pitching is the most important factor in the game (and the reason I think the Phillies are going to win this year’s World Series). Rapid development of pitchers is unpredictable, and the fact that Oakland had these guys for several years before they became eligible for free agency was the biggest reason for the team’s success. It’s like a poker player who develops a new system and gets dealt four aces in the first hand; he suddenly thinks he's a genius. (In Beane's defense, Hudson and Zito had been underrated by other scouts.) 

My prediction then – and it came to pass - was that once Hudson, Mulder and Zito approached free agent eligibility, the A’s would trade them or let them go, rather than bust their budget by paying market value, and that this success would not be duplicated. 

Second, their scouting acumen wasn’t as sharp as they claimed.  A big chunk of the book concerns the scouting and drafting of Jeremy Brown, a catcher at the University of Alabama.  Brown had home run power and the patience at the plate that Beane admired, but he was also, for want of a better word, fat; Baseball America writes that Brown “never met a pizza he didn’t like.”  In fact, Brown’s status is so low that when an A’s representative calls him to tell him that the team is thinking of using a high draft pick on him, Brown interrupts the call to check with his friends to be sure it’s not a crank call.  To the astonishment and derision of the baseball establishment, the A’s draft Brown in the first round.  His success in his first minor league season is supposedly proof of the wisdom of Beane’s way.

Unfortunately, Brown’s career didn’t pan out.  He does reach the major leagues for what is called “a cup of coffee” – ten mere at-bats – before quitting and returning to Alabama.  According to an ESPN story, Brown found it difficult to live up to the expectations that Moneyball’s publicity had created.  While Brown’s case may be a special one, public scrutiny and dealing with pressure is part of the territory for any professional athlete, and Beane may have misjudged Brown's readiness for it.

He should have known better just by looking in the mirror. Beane had been a first-round draft-pick of the New York Mets in 1980 and was considered on the fast-track to baseball stardom.  He was 6’4” with a sculpted body, blazing speed and a quick bat.  However, his career ended after a few seasons as a fringe major-leaguer because he turned out to be temperamentally unsuited for baseball success, unable to deal with failure (and even a .300 hitter is a failure seven out of each ten at-bats). 

By contrast, his roommate for two minor-league seasons was Lenny Dykstra, who had a long, successful career and was Beane’s polar opposite.  Short, with much less raw talent and less intellectual curiosity, Dykstra was much tougher mentally – his nickname was “Nails” - and better suited emotionally to the ups and downs of the game.  “He was able to instantly forget any failure,” said Beane, “and draw strength from every success.  He had no concept of failure.” (Unfortunately, having no “concept of failure” may be why Dykstra is now facing jail time, as he completely mismanaged his businesses and saw his net worth plummet into the red while creditors trailed him everywhere.  The traits that make you successful in athletics may be useless in other endeavors.)

After the 2002 season, Beane was offered the GM job with the Boston Red Sox, but turned it down.  The Sox, who hired as Bill James as a consultant, then offered the GM job to Theo Epstein, another adherent of sabremetrics.  That leads to the final reason why Beane’s Moneyball philosophy ultimately failed – there was no reason why a big-money team couldn’t adopt his analytical insight too.  Like Microsoft co-opting the ideas of a new computer start-up and then developing them on a massive scale, the Red Sox took Beane’s “more bang for the buck” philosophy, while also being able to sign expensive players who provided more bang, period.  The result: the Red Sox won two of the next four World Series.

Moneyball, the book, is a delightful treasure trove of information for the serious baseball fan.  My advice, though, is to take the moral with a grain of salt.  In the end, Billy Beane learned what everyone, whether in sports or in business, has always known: money talks.