Book review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The forty-eighth book I read in 2018 was Moneyball by Michael Lewis.  I was fifteen years late to this best-seller, but that fact only made it clear how very wrong Lewis (and by extension, Billy Beane) was about pretty much everything.  At the time, moneyball was supposed to be the future of baseball, as the Oakland As were supposedly right at the threshold of postseason success.  Only, of course, the As have just kind of hung around at stasis since then.  They do well for a low-budget team, but, as Beane himself is purported to assert in the book, no one is going to take him and his ideas seriously until he wins the World Series.

The success of the As alone might not have mattered so much as, when the book ends, the Red Sox are portrayed as converts to the moneyball cause and Beane acolytes J. P. Ricciardi has taken over as general manager for the Toronto Blue Jays.  While the Red Sox have certainly enjoyed great success in the last fifteen years, they haven't done it by eschewing superstars and lowering the budget but rather by using sabermetrics to help them decide whom to give their huge contracts, and the Blue Jays haven't made a big smash and have since fired Ricciardi.  What seemed like it was going to be a Big Deal in 2003 has, in fact, barely made a ripple in the business.

Reading with the benefit of hindsight really points out the limitations of Beane's approach, as he emphatically doesn't want Jeremy Bonderman (pitched in the World Series) or Scott Kazmir (three-time all-star and AL strikeouts leader in 2007),  giving instead a list of his dream pitchers available in the 2002 draft which includes only Joe Blanton as a recognizable name.  The overwhelming majority of the players which he believe sabermetrics had revealed to him as sure things never made it as far as Triple-A ball.  Which just goes to show that maybe the numbers guy isn't actually that much more reliable than the old-school scouts whom Lewis's book denigrates.