Yahoo Sports 'Moneyball' at 20: Hits, misses, consequences of baseball's most disruptive book
For two decades, it has been venerated but also grossly misunderstood. Transformative yet strangely enraging. A glimpse into the future while helping to drive a stake into an industry’s past.
Twenty years ago this month, Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game was released into the world, and the baseball industry – heck, the sports industry and certain swaths of the business world - was forever changed.
Michael Lewis’ best-selling nonfiction – turned into a Sony Pictures Brad Pitt vehicle that grossed more than $110 million – was like a flash bang grenade lobbed into baseball’s insular bunkers of decisionmakers, a haze settling over the game that hasn’t fully dissipated. Traditional Baseball Men railed against its war on hardball orthodoxy. Statistically-inclined fans and analysts nodded knowingly, and anticipated a long-overdue seat at the table.
And Major League Baseball’s owners thirstily turned the pages, forever changing their views on team building because Oakland Athletics executive Billy Beane was so good at it – and most important, did it on the cheap.
Beane has hung up his waiver-wire wizardry; as a minority owner of the A’s and multiple sports franchises overseas, he’s far likelier to opine at a tech conference than on a trade-deadline deal. And while Beane’s role in the book (no, he did not write it) and the rise of statistical analysis (no, he did not invent “analytics”) have been misconstrued, the impact of Moneyball, largely, has not.
As we peer back into 2003 and cast an eye toward the game’s future, a look at four baseball figures whose paths and legacies were altered by a 286-page book, and all that came after it:
Dave Dombrowski: No Pepsi challenge
He can flash World Series title rings from multiple eras, but Dave Dombrowski didn’t wangle a Screen Actors’ Guild card from his Moneyball stint. Instead, Dombrowski’s name is simply invoked as a voice on the other end of the phone line, as another ostensibly easy mark in one of Beane’s trades.
And he was also the soda guy.
No, Dombrowski reiterates, his 2002 acquisition of Carlos Peña from Oakland was not sealed when he agreed to stock the A’s clubhouse soda machine for three years, as the movie depicts. (The notion of professional athletes guzzling soft drinks, and not some sort of performance-optimizing beverage, was silly then and almost unthinkable now).
Dombrowski is a rare bird in an industry that churns at a rapid pace, his baseball lifespan bookended by championships in 1997 and 2018 with the Marlins and Red Sox. In 2002, he took over baseball operations for the Detroit Tigers shortly after they embarked on a 117-loss season.
As he learned the new landscape, he found multiple rival executives speaking the dialect of analytics. But when Moneyball depicted scouts in a less-flattering light than their front office overlords, Dombrowski knew the revolution would accelerate.
“That definitely brought more of the information age public,” he remembers. “There were some scouts that were then against what was being presented. When I started a long time ago, you had player development and scouting. Player development might say scouting should be doing this. Scouting said player development should be doing that.
“And then it became (proprietary) information versus the scouting aspect of it.”
The “soda machine” trade, in retrospect, has tones of irony within. Peña, a top prospect who frustrated Movie Beane with his free-swinging ways, made strides after his trade to Detroit, but did not blossom until signing with the Tampa Bay Rays in 2007, where he immediately posted an elite .411 on-base percentage.
The Rays’ general manager? Andrew Friedman, hired off Wall Street by owner Stuart Sternberg to modernize the Rays – one year after Moneyball was released.
Meanwhile, the player to be named later in the deal showed that all things Moneyball were not gospel.
The book’s second chapter features a brief flashback to the 2001 draft, when A’s scouting director Grady Fuson selected high school pitcher Jeremy Bonderman, which so enraged Beane that he flung a chair against the wall, shattering it (the chair, not the wall). A year later, Beane would assume greater control over the draft process, for which the author Lewis would have a front-row seat.
Lewis goes into great detail about assistant GM Paul DePodesta’s copious research detailing the efficiency of drafting college players – because they are closer to the majors, easier to project their performance, and, with less leverage, easier to sign.
High-school pitchers, then, are the highest risk and far more prone to failure – with likely four years of seasoning to reach the majors and a huge acquisition cost thanks to a large signing bonus required to keep them from college.
Beane’s obsession, then, with Ohio State outfielder Nick Swisher knew no bounds – a college hitter with elite on-base skills and projectable power. Beane eventually gets his man with the 16th pick – thanks in part to a bevy of high school pitchers picked before him. And Swisher would go on to hit 35 home runs in 2006, become an All-Star with the Yankees and remains a key ambassador for the game.
Yet 20 years later, the top six most productive major league players selected in the 2002 first round – based on Wins Above Replacement – are high school draftees, five of them pitchers. That certainly doesn’t scuttle DePodesta’s research; it’s more a tribute to the randomness of the draft and player development. And no matter how great a club’s proprietary system, drafting ballplayers is never like counting cards at a blackjack table.
As for Bonderman?
Beane traded him in the Peña deal, less than a year after he was that fateful chair-shattering draft pick. While his career was curtailed by shoulder woes, four years after the trade, he’d strike out 202 batters and start the pennant-clinching game for the Tigers in the 2006 AL Championship Series – against the A’s.
“He did alright. He did OK,” Dombrowski says, refusing to spike the ball two decades later. “And he was against that. He was a young guy that did well for us.”
Rich Hill: Almost famous
Before he embarked on a 19-year major league career, pitched in two World Series and achieved some level of cult hero status for a dozen major league clubs, Rich Hill was nearly a Moneyball Baby.
Oh, the book hadn’t come out yet, and the eponymous market concept was years from taking hold when Hill, then a University of Michigan left-hander, got a call from the A’s on draft day, 2002. They were going to take him late in the first round, perhaps in the supplemental round with one of their seven picks among the top 39, their compensatory bounty for losing three top-flight free agents.
The A’s never called back.
Perhaps the book offers some clues why: With Beane taking greater control of the first round, it would stand to reason a disconnect might occur between an area scout and the executives doing the picking. Either way, after following up Swisher’s selection with solid big league starter Joe Blanton, the A’s whiffed on the three pitchers chosen before Hill’s name was called by the Cubs in the fourth round.
Ben Fritz (30th overall) and Steve Obenchain (37th) never pitched in the majors while Bill Murphy (98th) appeared in just 18 games, none as a starter.
Hill, 20 years later, is still going: He’s just one of five players still active from the 2002 draft, with pitcher Zack Greinke and first baseman Joey Votto due to receive significant Hall of Fame consideration.
Naturally, Hill has gotten over the draft-day snub. Yet as his two-decade career unfolded, he grew to resent some of the technocratic principles that indirectly spawned from Moneyball and embedded in the game.
Let the old lefty cook.
“There’s definitely been damage done,” says Hill, now 43 and in the Pittsburgh Pirates rotation. “Humans are still playing the game. They’re still throwing the ball and swinging the bat. Analytics are not doing that. Right now it’s a lot of paint by numbers. When you throw a pitch and a hitter tells you something, you’re getting constant feedback. You can’t really throw analytics into that one-on-one competition.
“Fortitude, competition, the will to win – whatever you want to call it, it comes off as something that’s not quantifiable in the game. But, to a lot of us that have been around the game and understand what it takes to win, over time it’s going to be the ability to make decisions when you’re out on the field of play. There’s no calling timeout to check the numbers.
“If you’re a hitter, it’s what the pitcher is showing you. It’s what the infield is giving you. You’re assessing all these different things as opposed to, ‘OK, this is what the numbers are. I’m going to stick to this.’ And it always shows up in the postseason. Analytics obviously are a piece of the pie. It’s not the whole pie.
“Look at the success the Rays are having now, and the argument is, well, they’re using analytics. My counterargument is, look around that infield and that outfield and look at how many guys have been in that organization the last five years, and tell me that experience doesn’t have something to do with their winning.
“Now, they’re getting to that point where guys are going to, by their model, get just a little expensive where they don’t keep them anymore and you refresh it with younger guys. But experience comes into play in winning. And you can’t disregard that at all.”
The information age certainly played a role in Hill’s career revival. He’d gone six years between big league starts – journeyman reliever fighting through injury seemed his destiny – when he failed to make the Washington Nationals in 2015. By June, he opted for independent ball before the Red Sox rescued him from the Long Island Ducks.
It was at Class AAA Pawtucket that Red Sox pitching instructor Brian Bannister convinced Hill to alter the shape of his curveball, and to throw it a lot more. Hill soon was called up for four September starts in Boston, and in 2016 signed with the A’s – they always know a good opportunity – because they offered him the chance to start for the first time since 2007.
Nearly a decade later, Hill is still making the most of his second chance: He’s started 163 more games, while Bannister helped Dombrowski’s Red Sox win a World Series title and now is director of pitching for the San Francisco Giants.
While Hill is quick to credit Bannister, he’s grown weary of modern phrases for concepts that existed for decades. Just as “run prevention” has supplanted “pitching and defense,” “tunneling” and “mirroring” stand in for “deception” – which is something his coaches preached when he was coming up way back in the mid-2000s.
Oh, well. Hill is still around, still adapting, even if the reasons why have ostensibly changed.
“Philosophies come and go,” he says. “Competition continues to grow. That comes with understanding why we’re here.”
MLB PAYROLLS 2023: Full list of every baseball team from highest to lowest
Carter Hawkins: Embrace the tension
As Moneyball hit the printing press in 2003, the current GM of the Chicago Cubs had other things on his mind. Senior Prom, say, or perhaps the décor of his freshman dorm room.
Yes, the next generation of high-ranking baseball officials weren’t around for the Scouts vs. Stats wars, or the turf battles it created. Carter Hawkins was still in high school then, and still harbored dreams of playing in the major leagues when he set off for Vanderbilt.
His batting average dictated otherwise, and soon working in a baseball front office grew appealing. So, Hawkins purchased a book and read all about one of the greatest baseball execs of all time.
Not Billy Beane, silly, but John Schuerholz, longtime Atlanta Braves GM, whose biography, Built To Win, shared management philosophies that shaped his dynastic 1990s teams.
OK, so Hawkins read Moneyball right after that.
“I was trying to figure out, what is this thing I’m thinking about getting into?” says Hawkins, now 38. “At the time, it had been viewed as this stats book. But it was really about creating competitive advantages and finding undervalued assets and thinking creatively about challenges and problems and I think that rings true today in every business.
“It might not be stats that are undervalued; it might be something else. But it’s that constant willingness to challenge the status quo and do everything you can to be better than 29 other teams.”
Talk to Hawkins and you get a sense he's better off for avoiding the most intense industry disruptions of the past 20 years. There was a bloodletting in the scouting industry that still reverberates today, particularly among major league scouts, who have largely been supplanted by video. But while the pendulum has not totally swung back, many franchises realized the seasoned eye of a human being – particularly in the amateur scouting space – could not be replaced.
“That’s the unfortunate, unintended consequence of that book: People felt like it was an indictment on scouting, an indictment on old school baseball views,” says Hawkins. “Really, most people that really understand the game think no, it’s just a different way to collate information to make decisions.
“When you include those opinions, from those that originally weren’t included in the Moneyball calculations, you get better calculations.”
Hawkins was fortunate to land an advanced scouting internship with Cleveland in 2008, which led to a full-time job in scouting and a 13-year career there under club president Mark Shapiro and, eventually, Chris Antonetti and Mike Chernoff.
His superiors stressed that the front office, coaches, scouts and R&D employees would not work in silos, that collaboration would yield better outcomes. It’s an ethos he continues to embrace since his hiring as Cubs GM, working under baseball operations president Jed Hoyer.
“I never experienced those hornets’ nests,” he says. “You’d hear about them on the outside. And that’s not to say there weren’t tensions, but we leaned into those as opportunities to get better versus a desire to defend our different sections of land.
“The people that leaned into the tensions ended up in a really good place over time. I think the people that tried to defend their turf got left out in the cold.”
John Mozeliak: Innovation is inevitable
At 54, John Mozeliak might epitomize the Gen X baseball executive – old enough to see how things were done, nimble enough to know what’s coming next.
He was assistant GM of the St. Louis Cardinals when Moneyball dropped, became the club’s GM in October 2007 and literally bridged the gap from old school to new: Mozeliak worked under longtime GM Walt Jocketty, then over transformative and now exiled future Astros GM Jeff Luhnow.
Along the way, Mozeliak put together a Cardinals roster that won the 2011 World Series and remains a consistent playoff contender, all through a time of industry tumult.
Technology, he says, was going to upend the industry. Moneyball, in a sense, was just an accelerant.
“You look back on those 20 years, it has been an amazing evolution of how people make decisions,” he says. “Was Moneyball the first step? Yeah. But when you think about where technology is today and what it can allow you to do – the ability to measure what’s happening on the field is far more than advanced analytics. It’s high-speed cameras. It’s the ability to process information in a timely manner.
“I like to tell people that (data) we used to collect in a year, we collect in a night. And to be able to turn over that much information, you need the technology and speed to do it.”
Scouts vs. stats? That’s almost quaint compared to humans vs. artificial intelligence, a quandary Mozeliak envisions playing out in both the public and private sector.
As for Moneyball? Mozeliak says it shook the decision tree for sports franchises and corporations. Yet he also knows that baseball is more than just 30 franchises under a centralized umbrella; disruption is inevitable.
“One of the greatest things of the human race is to innovate,” he says. “The phone you carry now, you couldn’t imagine in high school. To try to identify where that’s happening, where that’s suppressed, it’s probably not a good use of energy.
“Because people are always looking to improve or enhance the business they’re in.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Moneyball at 20: Baseball's most disruptive book forever changed game
