Well then, there’s a new Brad Pitt movie out. So, in typical lit-net-geek fashion, I went right out and read the book instead of going to the movie. I’ll eventually get around to seeing the movie too, some time. But I’ll probably be disappointed, as is usually the case when I see a movie after I’ve read the book. Maybe I’ll wait for the movie to come out on Telemundo, that way at least I’ll get Spanish lesson out of the deal.
The book is surprisingly well written for a sports book. And I say that, having no idea how well sports books are usually written, because I don’t read many books about sports. Anyway, Moneyball was a pleasure to read. It’s all about the business side, or the money side of professional baseball. It asks the question, can a team with a forty-million dollar budget compete with a team that has a two-hundred-million dollar budget, or are the poorer teams even meant to compete with the richer teams. Perhaps teams like the Oakland A’s and the Cleveland Indians are just cannon fodder for teams like the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves. And if that’s the case, why were the Oakland Athletics winning so many games at the beginning of the last decade?
So mostly it’s a book about the Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane, and the club’s 2001 and 2002 seasons. Beane seems to have had the uncanny ability of finding valuable players for his club that managers of the richer clubs had overlooked or written off. Baseball has been around for a while and, hence, there are some pretty established ways of looking at things – the old boy’s club. That’s the sort of complacency that opens a window of opportunity for an original thinker. When Mr. Beane scoured the farm leagues or college teams for a hot prospect to fill out his roster, he used a different set of metrics than the old-boy’s-club teams did. That would often lead to the A’s finding a good player at a bargain-basement price. It was analogous to a Wall Street trader finding a value stock.
In a nutshell, that is what made the book so much fun to read. The author, Michael Lewis, used a lot of metaphors comparing baseball to: Wall Street, Vegas, Greek Mythology, politics, war, religion, and marriage - just to name a few. Here’s a quote from the book about the old-school general managers starting to think about hiring a few guys with thick glasses and big foreheads.
The metaphors, similes, and analogies all worked well on some level or another in this book and it got me thinking that baseball is a fairly good metaphor for a lot of things in life – these lit-net forums, for instance. In the book, much is made of the A’s front office thinking about baseball in new ways and, not surprisingly, there was a lot resistance. Much of the criticism of the book came from old-boy’s-club baseball commentators lining up to take potshots at Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. That’s not so different from what I’ve seen on these forums. Let’s face it, here, as in life (or in baseball) there are only a few original thinkers. Most of what I read on these forums is simply regurgitated from a textbook somewhere, or a professor’s lecture, or the Paris Review. But every once in a while somebody comes up with something completely original (like Dr. Semmelweis did at the Vienna General Hospital in 1847) and Katy bar the door! Let the feeding frenzy begin.What baseball managers did do, on occasion, beginning in the early 1980s, was hire some guy who knew how to switch on the computer. But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant. Some stat head would impress himself upon a general manager as the sort of guy who crunched numbers and the GM would find him a small office in the back.
At any rate, I enjoyed this book. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I may have to read more books about sports. The Blind Side is by the same author. I hear it’s about a football player from the ghetto, and somehow Sandra Bullock is involved.
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Originally Posted by AuntShecky
