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July 02, 2003MICHAEL LEWIS AT THE BAT HE HITS A GRAND SLAM HOMER WITH HIS NEW BOOK, “MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME”
Michael Lewis’s Moneyball is about baseball the way Moby Dick is about whaling. It is a hard book to put down once you read the first page or two—and I’m only a fair weather friend of baseball. I love it when my friend and colleague Steve Rittenberg, the other Horsefeather and sage of Yankee Stadium, parts with one of his precious season tickets to invite me to a Yankee game. But, in truth, I never got over the trauma of the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. During the long hot summers of the late thirties and wartime Brooklyn when the only air conditioning was in the local movie house there was not much to do for a ten-year-old boy. (In those days the movie theatres had to remind people of this new convenience with a sign outside that said “AIR COOLED.”) You could play stickball if you could find enough other kids to field two teams, or you could read a Hardy Boys adventure, or you could listen to a Dodgers game being announced by Red Barber on the radio. If you wanted to see the Dodgers you had to pester your mother to give you a dollar. That covered ten cents streetcar fare (roundtrip unless you overate), twenty-five cents to buy a bleachers ticket to Ebbets Field, and fifty cents for lunch—a hot dog, a bag of peanuts, and a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda—which left fifteen cents for emergencies. Sitting in those Ebbets Field Bleachers, the sun beating down on you for four or five hours at a time, is probably what has made my aging face so vulnerable to skin pathology, but in 1941 who knew about things like that, and who cared. In those days being out in the sunshine was good for you, your mother told you. (Moral: don’t listen to everything your mother tells you. In fact, I later discovered that it would be better if I didn’t listen to anything my mother told me. Except that she loved me—there she knew what she was talking about. ) Which brings me—almost—to what this book is about—people who know what they’re talking about, and people who don’t—myths, baseball myths and their myth-makers. But, hold on, I’m not quite finished with personal history—the Ebbets Field bleachers. The Brooklyn Dodgers and the Dodger fans were special. The Dodgers were Bums and their fans always knew it. But that never stopped us from loving them and rooting for them and dreaming. The Yankees have always been the classiest team in baseball, and while they lived in Brooklyn the Dodgers were always scrounging and stumbling toward a glory they never achieved until I had already left Brooklyn far behind. They were a bunch of low-paid, cast-off ballplayers, much like the Oakland Athletics team was a few years ago when Billy Beane became their General Manager. The destiny of the Brooklyn Dodgers—Dem Bums—was always marked for tragicomedy. They were good and even near-great at times, and they had heart, plenty of heart, but something, usually something wacky would strike out of nowhere to rob them of glory. The dropped third strike was probably the most famous instance of the gods toying with them and breaking their hearts. It was in October of 1941 and the Brooklyn Dodgers had miraculously won the National League Pennant and now they were up against the mighty New York Yankees in the 1941 World Series. Can you beat that—the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series against the New York Yankees! A David and Goliath situation if there ever was one. The Yanks had won the first two games in Yankee Stadium, and the Dodgers had, with the help of the screaming Brooklyn fans in little Ebbets Field, won the third game. So the score stood two games to one, Yankees favor. And now, in the fourth game in Brooklyn, the Dodgers are in the lead 4 to 3 in the top of the ninth inning and there are two outs. The slugger, Tommy Henrich, comes up to bat to face Hugh Casey, one of the Dodgers’ most reliable pitchers. Slowly Casey works Henrich to a count of 3 balls and two strikes. The Dodgers are one strike away from tying the series 2-2, and maybe doing the impossible, winning the World Series against players like Joe DiMaggio and Charlie Keller. Mickey Owen, the Dodger catcher calls for a curve ball; Casey winds up and delivers and Henrich swings and misses. Strike three. Game’s over, right? Wrong! The feckless God of Catching, makes Owen drop the third strike, thereby canceling the strike call and allowing Henrich to get on base. Within twenty minutes the Yankees get four more runs and win the game 7 to 4. Which means the Yanks go ahead 3 games to 1 instead of being tied 2-2. The next day the Yanks beat the demoralized Dodgers and take the Series. Now if that isn’t tragicomedy I don’t know what is. There is actually a baseball that exists somewhere inscribed by both Mickey Owen and Tommy Henrich telling the story of the dropped third strike each from his own point of view—like some Norse myth inscribed on a walrus tusk. Tommy Henrich wrote: “Curve ball, 3 & 2, guard the plate. Ball -- high -- starts to break. I start swinging - Ball doesn't stop -- keeps curving -- I try now to hold up -- too late -- ump calls me out -- but as I realize what the ball is doing (believe me) I say to myself, maybe Mickey is having trouble, and I look back and there goes the ball. I reach first easily & our power hitters take over. Final 7-4, series 3-1 instead of 2-2. We win WS next day 3-2."
Fast forward 60 years. From a take-it-easy, local, homespun sport, professional baseball has become big, big business. It looks like the baseball of my youth but not really—the way a twenty-five-year-old looks like he was when he was five. You can see the resemblance—but really very different. How did it happen? Among other things, big time, lucrative TV contracts give rise to national recognition of ballplayers—stars are born. Ballplayers form unions and strike for bigger and bigger pieces of the pie. Free agency is discovered: the baseball equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation. After six years of indentured servitude at merely a hundred thousand or two a year, a player begins to be courted by player’s agents, business managers, who promise and get them zillion dollar contracts. What this has led to in Big Baseball is rich players looking out for their own interests and in a constant war with rich baseball franchises (no more teams, franchises), and putting themselves up to the highest bidder. The net result is that the most famous players are paid the highest salaries. Are they the best players? Well, you’ve got to read Moneyball to find out. I’ll tell you this though: the second highest paid team in baseball, the New York Mets, is in last place in its division, and the second lowest paid team in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, is in second place in its division. Until a couple of years ago, the accepted wisdom in Big Baseball was that success followed the money. The more you paid for a team of players, the more wins you would get, the more playoffs you would reach and the more pennants you would win. All of that is going with the wind. And Michael Lewis tells the fascinating story of how and why. Lewis is a journalist with wit, intelligence and a deep understanding of what he writes about. It’s a complex story with many characters, but he’s like a master juggler able to keep all the (base)balls in the air while he teaches you about statistics and entertains you at the same time—all effortlessly. The man who started the revolution in Big Baseball several years ago is Billy Beane, General Manager of the poor little Oakland Athletics—the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 21st century. The problem for Beane became extremely acute after 2001 playoffs when the A’s lost three of their best players to free agency—and thus, to richer teams “—three of their proven stars: Jason Isringhausen, Johnny Damon, and [Jason] Giambi.” Since 1997, when Beane became GM he had been thinking of the way to beat the rich fat Goliath franchises with a secret scientific weapon he had been preparing. 2002 was the season it became imperative to use it or get blown away. Most people who love baseball and write about it well are poets and philosophers of the sport. Not Lewis. The story he has fallen in love with is the struggle to demystify baseball. Which began almost twenty years ago in the antic brain of a guy named Bill James. At the University of Kansas James studied economics and literature, but since then he says about himself, “I’d probably be a writer if there were no such thing as baseball, but because there is such a thing as baseball I can’t imagine writing about anything else.” Studying baseball statistics very closely, James came to realize that most of them—errors, runs batted in, batting average—were meaningless as descriptors of game-winning skills for individual ball-players or teams. The concept of a fielding error, for example, is almost entirely subjective, he realized, and doesn’t tell you much about the player who makes one. Michael Lewis enjoys telling how Bill James developed not only a new outlook about baseball—rational or scientific baseball—but meaningful statistical concepts that could lead to predictable results. And how despite James’ astonishing insights he remained unsung and unappreciated in Big Baseball, that is, until Billy Beane came along. Since time immemorial the search for talented ballplayers has been led by baseball scouts, a cadre of gruff, hard-nosed guys who’ve seen thousands of ballplayers, and even played ball themselves. Every team has a corps of these guys and they all turn out to be, under their gruff, hard-nosed exterior, romantics. Because they’re all looking for some perfect Galahad who can run, hit, throw, and look the Galahad part. Here is Lewis’s beautiful description of the life and dream of the baseball scout: “…the argument ...was about how to find a big league ballplayer. In the scouts’ view, you found a big league ballplayer by driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of two hundred when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen—at least no one who knew the meaning of it. You only had to see him once….And if you saw it once, you, and only you, would know the meaning of what you saw. You had found the boy who was going to make you famous.” But Billy Beane, a former discovered Galahad himself—a failed Galahad—had a different idea about how to find major league ballplayers: inside a computer using the new and radical ideas of Bill James. It was in this way that he would boost the power of his little 40 million dollar budget slingshot to bring down the 180-million-dollar Goliath franchises. Using smarts and radically fresh baseball ideas was going out a very long way on a limb for Beane. It meant going against a hundred years of received wisdom and putting his managerial status on the line. But, by god, using empirical data to find ball players who can be put together to field a winning team works. The A’s reached the playoffs in 2001 and 2002 with the second lowest player budget in baseball. Sure, a rational approach takes some of the poetry and romance out of baseball. After all you’re not looking for the player with the best body—the Galahad look—but only the one who can learn to control the strike zone, and walk to first base. Short guys, skinny guys, fat guys, guys with club feet—anyone who has a good eye and the patience to wait for a good pitch please apply. Moneyball will become a small classic and deserves to. In it Billy Beane is the crafty Odysseus of baseball who learns to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds; reason wins out over mystery; Intelligence prevails over money; ordinary guys beat the swing-for-the-fences superstars; and best of all, independent thinking and ingenuity trumps received wisdom and cant. Posted at 10:48 AM by
 
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What a pleasant and charming piece about MONEYBALL and the Brooklyn Dodgers!
Every morning I read baseball coverage in the morning newspaper and study the box scores as I have since I was a small boy in Brooklyn and New Jersey sitting on my Scottish grandfather's lap. He used to read the Daily News and New York Times baseball coverage to me even before I could read with an inimitable broad Scots accent of the kind that is not really heard anymore even in Scotland.
Auld Pop was a diehard Brooklyn Dodger fan since the days of Zack Wheat. Serving in a Highland regiment in Greece and Palestine he followed the Dodgers fortunes as he could mostly getting news from Canadian soldiers. Auld Pop recounted that after America joined the war in April 1917 he and his mates –many of whom had lived in America as he had- celebrated by playing “kilted baseball” in Salonika against soldiers from the Canadian regiments from Toronto among whom were some very proud Americans. The Scots, Canadians, English, Irish and Americans were exhilarated because they sensed that the war could be won and that they would not be brought back to the meat-grinder of the Western Front for a final last stand before Paris. They sensed they would live. In fact for many of them that day was the genesis of their long travail of final immigration to America. In those days one could not help but be infected with the optimism of the Americans and their stories of work and bread for all, high wages, dignity and opportunity. The only thing that brought Auld Pop back Auld Scotia was his alienation from the fast social pace of American life and his nostalgia for the best of Scottish culture and Gaeldom which resided in the hearts, and on the tongues and in the voices of bonnie, winsome, Godly women. But more of that later.
Auld Pop followed every game on the radio and in his prime saw at least 20 games a year. My father bought our first Color TV in October 1959 just so Auld Pop could see the World Series. That is the first World Series I remember though my only memory, really, was the bright green of the TV, the genial, relaxed atmosphere of everyone present, and playing soldiers –8th Army vs. the Afrika Corps- on the carpet or sitting on Auld Pop’s lap or eating hot dogs, drinking Nettie Och’s farm fresh cider and savoring mother’s delicious onion dip with chips.
Auld Pop knew the starting lineups of the Dodgers for every year backwards and forwards and he used to compare and contrast different players, managers and teams. Of course, I heard the story of Mickey Owen’s dropped third strike many times. He also used to read from John Carmichael’s MY GREATEST DAY IN BASEBALL and the FIRESIDE BOOK OF BASEBALL. Carmichael was a long time sports columnist for the Daily News and his interviews were legendary. I was introduced to all the baseball lore of Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Grover Cleveland Aleander, Connie Mack, King Carl Hubbell, Lefty O’Doul, Mel Ott and Dodger Fred Fitzsimmons who was such a fierce competitor he would knock down opposing batters who dared dig in on him with ptiches so close “they could smell the horsehide.” Fat Freddie, who played for the New York Giants as well was not a strike out pitcher but a pure control pitcher who could help himself with the bat. He is nearly forgotten today, except by true baseball aficcionados, because he was only a near great player always the number two or three pitcher just below the notch of the great Hall of Famers but he played on some great championship teams including the 1933 World Championship Giants. Fitzsimmons was on the mound in game three of the 1941 World Series when Lefty Russo, the opposing pitcher, and also a pretty fair hitter, smashed a savage line drive that caromed off Fitzsimmons leg. Russo was thrown out to end the inning but this play proved a phyrric victory for the Dodgers as Fitzsimmons, who was winning 1-0 after seven innings, had to leave the game The next Dodger pitcher rushed into service, knuckleballer Hugh Casey, who couldn’t get his flutterball over the plate and he walked two batters. The Yankees then chased Larry French to bring in the go ahead runs and the Damn Yankees won 2-1. THAT was the game before the legendary Mickey Owens game so in fact the Dodgers came very close to being not merely tied 2 games a piece but leading the Yanks 3-1. As it turned out my father and mother were on a picnic that day and the radio went dead right after the announcer called strike three so they were under the impression that the Dodgers had won. To their dismay when they returned from upstate the Dodgers were on the ropes. In both game three and four, Casey was the losing pitcher. Owens is much maligned for losing the game but Auld Pop always said if you put the two games together, Casey’s wildness was the difference in each game.
I never thought it peculiar, at the time, that part of my education could have taken place in clachan Fearann Domhnuill near the Highland burn of Allt na lathaid l in 1892 while simultaneously 20th century American baseball was an important part of my relationship with Auld Pop and my father, who was also, in his time, a diehard Brooklyn Dodger fan. During the game Auld Pop followed every pitch but coming or going or in between games of a doubleheader was a chance to expound like a Scottish Mr. Dooley on all the events of the day and on his common sense philosophy of life.
Though it is hard for people to believe now, soccer or football is very much a modern British game and a boy growing up in the Highlands in the 19th century would never have heard of that game nor played such a lowland sassenach (English) game. Auld Pop had been a shinty player –agus tha e a’c cluich ag na caman gu math –and he played at the caman-stick very well indeed. The shinty ball is a stitched leather ball very much like a baseball and you have to toss it up and hit it like a fungo. So when Auld Pop first came to America as 'bird of passage" worker prior to the First World War he took to baseball right away and was a pretty fair player himself for a Highlander and among the immigrants he was rated as a top player. But as they saying goes, is righ am cam am measg nan dall, the man of one eye among the blind ‘tis king-like!” But Auld Pop, despite his partial “Americanization” was, socially, like a fish out of water in fast moving New York City and like many an immigrant he retained close ties to the people who came from his native parish and most of his closest friends were fellow Scots with a few Irish Gaels and Scots Canadians thrown in for measure.
So he returned to Scotland without any intention of returning to America permanently. In 1911 the Clyde Ship yards were booming and Auld Pop a master steel worker built Dreadnoughts for the Royal Navy. I could say also that he had no thoughts of marriage but that would not be true for they say all the men of Munro are raised to think of marriage and children so great is their pride of name. Nonetheless, Auld Pop used to say marriage “ ‘Tis very much like the bee,-och aye!- you dance around in great anticipation and there’s honey in it to be sure but there’s a sting to it as well.” Seadh, seash tha mil ann ‘s tha gath ann! Taste the honey and expect to be stung.- och aye!
Luck in marriage, Auld Pop used to say is like a turn at “the playful lad” (an gille-mirein), the tee totum.
You never know how it is going to turn out but you have to play to have a chance and play often but only with lassies of sense and modesty. Nonetheless , courting a maid is like playing at the whirly-gig ‘tis a game of chance.
First ye’ hae tae help luck along in fishing by being in the right place.
Ye’ll no’ find healthy fish in a sewer!
Och in the bad part of the city, do not trust in female talk! The longer after them you follow, the more you’ll be cheated hollow!
But if you keep your hook always wet, in the right pure stream, sooner or later, ye’ll get ye a guid wee fish!
But ye have to be in the right burn -the best is closest to the source of a loch-, at the right time and wi’ the proper bait! Ye’ have to be ready yersel’ for love so ye can find that certain, sonsie lassie that God has meant for ye and ye, have to have time to spend wi’ her and have “siller in your purse! ”. Only then can ye court a maid that’s worth the while! Of course, he told me how he met his mate. Every Munro passes on the tale of the most important meeting in his or her life. It’s a an ancient tradition. And I know many stories going back generations. Auld Pop’s story was like this
One Sunday in Glasgow about 1910 Auld Pop, who was not a church going man himself was on the old Govan Road tram en route to Argyll street. But he crossed the street when he saw two attractive young women going the opposite way and so he made his way into Govan near auld Cessnock’s banks. Auld Pop thought one of the young women was exceedingly beautiful for grandmother was then but 20.
But it was not her beauty of form which captivated him but her ease of speech and grace as she spoke English clearly and distinctly without difficulty but with a peculiar lilt that marked her as a Gael. Auld Pop just listened and watched for some 20 minutes. He waited until she got off and heard her make her country farewells to her female companion. From a distance, and very unobtrusively, Auld Pop watched her walk up the steps of the Neo-Romanesque parish church of St. Anthony's. . He did not speak to her then or make himself known but he asked after her family with his companions at the Govan shipyards and he learned her name.
The very next Sunday Auld Pop waited until Mass was over and he looked for some men from the shipyards whom he knew belonged to that parish and he called to them. He waited with them and when grandmother appeared he asked them if they knew the woman he spoke of.
“Seadh, seadh, they said ta Mairi dubh nic Erinnach! . Yes, Yes, ’Tis Dark Mary the Irishman’s daughter!
I am writing now of a lost world of long ago that I remember because the old folk spoke of it so often and I love hearing of it.
Auld Pop then began to take the tram to the morning mass –which he never attended himself –being somewhat of a freethinker at the time but he hung around the church door until mutual acquaintances introduced them. One Sunday afternoon Auld Pop asked her to see the Art Gallery and walk in Kelvingrove Park. After about a dozen or so Sunday afternoon walks and a few high teas, Mairi dubh the Irishman’s daughter –our Mary Sweeney consented to get married to Auld Pop. Despite long involuntary separation caused by war and want, they remained happily married until the day Mary died. Auld Pop and my father never ceased talking about her and quoting her and claiming that she was the wisest and kindest woman –though she had no formal education to speak of coming from joad-flittin’ Irish and Highland farm laborers as she did.
They married at auld St. Anthony’s the same church where later he would marry her and where my father was baptized on March 17, 1915 as Auld Pop was under the Big Guns of the Germans in Flanders
Auld Pop, I used to say, did I need to go back to Scotland to find a mate when I grew older?
Auld Pop grinned his mischievous grin and puffed on his Pall-Mall cigarettes. “Och, no, The greatest beauty of women ‘tis modesty and good character and if you want a good mate you have court only that lass and this, the ones of modesty and guid character and they can be found all over the worrrld! In France, far-off Spain, the Germanies and even in America. Ye’ just have to leuk for the goodjins! If ye keep yer e’e pealed for goodjins and stay clear o’ the badjins ye’ll do a’ right, laddie! And though it is true that the silly are sometimes lucky, luck is better where it is than where it was, which means ye’ have to mak’ your luck by exercising guid judgment at all times. Och aye,’ Strrruth, laddie. ‘Tis best the wisdom gained by experience. ‘Tis the truest and deepest. Remember wisdom, honor and understanding are better than gold though they say it is better at times to be happy than wise. (Cuimhnich an gliocas an t-onair, an fios nan t-or ach tha iad ag radh is fhearra bhith SONA na CRIONNA!.) So no’ go after the dowered maid but the kindly one, and the one with a hairt and a saft han’ for the bairns” (heart and a soft hand for the born-ones or young children).
One of my favorite wisdom books of modern times is Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s BOOK OF JEWISH VALUES. I like to compare Jewish wisdom and classical Wisdom with Highland wisdom and Indian wisdom. Of course who could not admire the Greeks and the Jews. Both believed –unlike so many Americans- that public personalities out to be scholars and scholars ought to not only teach but advise rulers. The Jews, like the Greeks, never took the view like so many He-man Americans, Spaniards and Mexicans that intellectual capacity a passion for books and reading somehow deblitiated a man for public office. “Proverbs 8-14 Counsel is mine and sound wisdom: I am understanding, I have strength.” One must have the world and wisdom and one’s wisdom much be applied to the world.
All true Highlanders know that their traditions and literature are one step away from the Greek –and represent the true indigenous tradition of Western Europe- and yet have a strong Judeo-Christian twist since the funnel of Western Civilization was never Caesar’s Rome but St. Patrick’s and St. Columba’s Rome. Though I know the Bible reasonably well in translation I find his commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, the Talmud and the entire spectrum of Judaism’s sacred writings to be very insightful and an encouragement to lead a decent, kind and ethical life in a world whose moral bearings “aft gang agley”.
Telushkin writes (page 354) “ From Judaism’s perspective, making marital choices based on money is immoral, and reflects a low character. Thus the Talmud teaches, “Whoever married a woman for her money will have disreputable children…I believe it means that the father will have a child like himself, one who will do anything for material gain…marrying for money may well lead to misery as well as immorality. As the late Rabbi Wolfe Kelman used to say, “Whoever marries for money ends up paying for it.” Telushkin then speaks of the importance of marrying someone committed to establishing homes with Judaism’s values, having some mutual emotional and physical attraction, being kind and having some personal or professional ambition.
It’s funny but Auld Pop often spoke of France ,‘far-off Spain’ and the Germanies. And as it turned out
I married a Spaniard, live in the Americas and my sister married a Franco-American born in the Panama Canal Zone, raised in Mexico and she lives in Germany. But we have made good marriage choices and are reasonably healthy and happy and some of it we owe to Auld. Pop. For Auld Pop baseball was a very nice common pastime that allowed for talk and companionship coming and going. To him it his seat on the N train was his pulpit and the stadium was his temple. And I, I must admit was often his audience of one and his fondest disciple.
Although I am considered a big intellectual I have always derived pleasure from sport, especially baseball because there, history, legend and literature overlap not to mention the memories of pleasant days with Auld Pop and my father and mother after that. Of course I was always most successful as a reader and as a spectator rather than as a great ball player though in my younger days I played with great passion and not a little strength.
Yale Kramer writes “In it Billy Beane is the crafty Odysseus of baseball who learns to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds; reason wins out over mystery; Intelligence prevails over money; ordinary guys beat the swing-for-the-fences superstars; and best of all, independent thinking and ingenuity trumps received wisdom and cant.”
John Carmichael, Rabbi Telushkin and George Will together could not have said it better!
Fare ye well a while yet, kind sir! And may the God of Abraham be with you and yours!
Posted by: Ricardo Munro on July 2, 2003 08:00 PMInteresting.
Posted by: term life insurance on October 6, 2003 02:56 PM