Say-It-Ain't-So Joe

In simple terms, the A's exalted above all else the out, whose value in any given situation can be readily determined (with none on and none out, for instance, it's worth about a fourth of a run). They placed a premium on players who don't make outs (i.e., players who walk a lot and don't gamble on the base paths) and adopted a style of play to match (they rarely sacrifice, hardly ever hit-and-run, and almost never attempt to steal bases, a risk with little reward). These ideas have been around for years, of course; never has a game been so dissected, analyzed, and ultimately revolutionized by its hobbyists. If there's a spiritual father to the sabermetrics movement, it's Bill James, who 30 years ago, as a boiler-room attendant in Lawrence, Kan., began debunking what he called "baseball's Kilimanjaro of repeated legend and legerdemain." By the time Billy Beane was settling into his office with the A's, James was already a legend in his own right, at least to a small but growing community of like-minded people. Oakland, however, represented the stathead revolution's first step into a live clubhouse; the numbers people, at last, had their petri dish.

This was not greeted warmly, at least not everywhere. It was apostasy, after all. It was not How The Game Should Be Played. Even now, all baseball people seem to want to talk about is the supposedly heretical fact that the A's don't steal bases and don't bunt. As a concept, Moneyball was simplified to such a degree that it's now commonly, and wrongly, understood as a playing style in which nine fat men do little but walk, rather than a kind of arbitrage (one of Beane's pet analogies and an apt one, since what sets the A's apart is not necessarily a superior philosophy, but an ability to isolate and capitalize on price discrepancies and inefficiencies). "The book was beautifully understood outside baseball, and by many baseball owners," Lewis says in an e-mail. But in some quarters, he writes, there's still "the inability, or refusal, to grasp the [book's] most basic point -- that it is about using statistical analysis to shift the odds [of winning] a bit in one's favor, not to achieve perfect certainty, which is impossible."

In the two years since its publication, Moneyball has become a wedge in the baseball world, or at least the world that observes the baseball world. You're either a Moneyball guy or you're not. Morgan, in his capacity as an ESPN analyst and ambassador to The Game, and despite career statistics that should put him squarely in the Moneyball bloc, is not. In fact, owing to his large forum, he has come to be regarded as something of a high priest within the anti-Moneyball camp, which seems to be preening a little these days. Even as front offices scramble to hire just about anyone who can run a statistical regression, at least two books, one by Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, have been written more or less as responses to Moneyball, and, until recently, the A's have scuffled well south of .500.

In an afterword to the paperback edition of the book, Lewis writes that baseball is not so much a business as it is a social club, one that recoiled at a member, Billy Beane, violating its cherished omertà and revealing its inner workings. "The Club," Lewis writes, "includes not only the people who manage the team but also, in a kind of Women's Auxiliary, many of the writers and the commentators who follow it, and purport to explain it." Morgan, he says, is "the closest thing to Club Social Chairman," and when he talked about the book, "the tone of the discourse went from weird to stark raving mad."

The examples are legion. In an ESPN.com chat, Morgan was asked what he thought of Moneyball. He confessed he had only read an excerpt in the New York Times Magazine, then went on to write: "It's typical if you write a book, you want to be the hero. That is apparently what Beane has done. According to what I read in the Times, Beane is smarter than anyone else. I don't think it will make him popular with the other GMs or the other people in baseball." Beane, just to clarify, did not write Moneyball, any more than Joe Morgan has read it. Later, in another chat, Morgan was asked what he would do with the A's if he were Billy Beane. "I wouldn't be Billy Beane first of all!!" Morgan replied. "I wouldn't write the book Moneyball!" (His authorial confusions are still fodder for baseball blogs across the Web, perhaps because they may very well be the quintessential Morganisms: indignant, self-righteous, and hopelessly ignorant.)