"Heresy was good; heresy meant opportunity."
I spoke with Sumana recently (her blog is back!), and she told me I should read Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the story of how the Oakland A's, one of baseball's dirt-poorest teams, managed to put together a winning team by finding undervalued players, using statistics no one else was looking at (called "sabermetrics"). Experience has taught me that if Sumana tells you to do something, it is basically always a good idea to do it. This is one of those cases, because I never would have picked up this book on my own—it's hard to imagine a concept more immediately boring to me than the combination of baseball and statistics.
But in the end, it's not really about either. What's really fascinating about the book (and what led me to devour it in a day) is what it dances around: the coming of the Age of the Geek to an industry that had been assumed to be geekproof. As it turns out, not even professional sports are immune to the awesome power of a bespectacled dweeb with a laptop, and a lot of the tension in the book comes from the friction between the old-school jocks and their new bosses, a gaggle of nerds who come in and tell them they're doing everything wrong. Obviously that's fun to read just from a "nerd power!" perspective, but it's also fascinating to think of all the other industries still out there, plagued by chronic inefficiencies (i.e. opportunities) and just begging for the right nerd to come along and revolutionize them. (Mind you, easier said than done: the only reason it was possible with baseball is that people have been collecting stats on every single baseball game for 150 years or so.)
Of course, given that baseball is a sport, the question (not explicitly addressed in the book, but again danced around) is—do we really want our sports to be optimally efficient? The best players, from a sabermetric point of view, are the ones who take very long at-bats (to tire out the pitcher), are happy with getting walked, never steal bases, and generally don't sparkle. Throughout the book, the A's resident sabermetrician, Paul DePodesta, refers to one of the players he would most like to sign, Kevin Youkilis, as "Euclis, the Greek god of walks". Sabermetricians love walks because they improve the team's field position and increase the likelihood of a run that inning, but do fans? And because of their focus on a player's ability to get on base, either by being walked or hitting, sabermetricians are happy to ignore... well, pretty much everything else about that player, really. Youkilis, for example, is described in the book as "a fat third baseman who couldn't run, throw, or field"—and that's quite charitable compared to the descriptions of poor Jeremy Brown. From the perspective of winning games and therefore making money—which is all the A's could afford to think about—the sabermetric approach may work, but I certainly can't imagine it making baseball any more interesting. As fascinating as I found this book, I found myself wondering if I would have been able to stay awake through all of the games described in it. Really, the ultimate fault for that lies not with the sabermetricians—show a geek an inefficient system that can be gamed through intelligence and analysis, and they'll do so just for the fun of it—but with the ridiculous salaries players began to get in the free agency era (which made sabermetrics a business rather than a hobby) and with the structure of the game itself. If the ability to get on base is so incredibly important that it trumps even the most basic elements of athleticism, then it is baseball itself that is broken, at least insofar as it's a sport.
All that said, a story about geeks beating jocks on their home turf is hard to pass up, and it's both well-told and full of interesting thoughts that apply to more than just baseball. I know it's not exactly new or groundbreaking—the book's been out six years—but it's new to me, so I get to blog about it.