There isn’t a lot happening in Yankee world right now, so I’m going to do something a little different. I want to tell you about the book that changed my life: Michael Lewis’ Moneyball.
I was somewhere in the middle of High School (somewhere around 2003) when my father recommended that I read Moneyball. I owe everything in my career to that recommendation.
If you haven’t read Moneyball, I can’t recommend it more. Michael Lewis is both the best storyteller in the world. The right way to understand Moneyball is that it’s a book about psychology and business within the sports industry, not a book about baseball.
Lewis is most famous for writing about finance in books like Liar’s Poker, about the downfall of the investment bank Solomon Brothers and the Big Short, about the people who saw the financial crisis coming. Lewis likes to write about smart but somewhat tragic oddballs who figured out that the smart people running their industries are doing it wrong.
Moneyball is a story about how the Oakland Athletics can win as many games as the New York Yankees while being outspent 10:1. You probably know the story by now, even if you haven’t read the book: Oakland General Manager Billy Beane builds a cheap 100-win team of misfit toys during the 2002 season. Faced with losing some of his best players to free agency to higher budget teams, Beane has to reevaluate many of the assumptions about how baseball is played and what makes baseball players valuable.
There was a lot that captivated teenage me in Moneyball. It told a captivating baseball story that lured me back from being mostly a hockey fan. Its stories about the baseball draft created a lifelong obsession with baseball prospects. Years later, I now study how human psychological limitations impact how our organizations and systems make decisions. But most of all, Moneyball introduced me to statistics.
If you read the book today, the statistics in Moneyball seem antiquated. We didn’t have much in the way of defensive statistics, let alone WAR or xwOBA. In Moneyball’s story, the two big statistics that people didn’t pay attention to were FIP and on base percentage. FIP was a story about how luck and defense can make a good pitcher look bad, and therefore cheap. On base percentage was a story of how baseball’s obsession with batting average and hitting .300 and cultural distaste with walking led the industry to undervalue players who walked a lot. There were other discussions as well, such as about how saves were overvalued, about how bunting is often counterproductive and how RBIs were more about context than a player’s value.
Armed with a few basic statistical tools from the book, I started arguing with old school types on baseball forums. Like a lot of young people, I was brash and arrogant. There were intense, and in retrospective, very dumb, debates about baseball epistemology. I always wanted to write for a living, but was never sure if I wanted to be a creative writer or a persuasive one. Moneyball firmly put me on the track of persuasion. I wanted to convince people that they were wrong and I was right.
I went off to college, set on being the world’s next great writer. In my first semester, an English professor approached me. I told him I wanted to write for a living. He told me that I had potential, but wasn’t very good. If I wanted to be a writer, I needed to write. A lot. He recommended that I find some excuse to write every day. So, I started a little Blogspot blog called Fire Joe Torre.
I wrote a lot of very bad blog posts about why Joe Torre was a pre-Moneyball manager, and the Yankees needed to be modern. Over the next year, I would write two or three posts per day. Somehow, I found an audience. In retrospect, the content was awful. But at the time it felt like I was on to something.
I bounced around a few websites over the next few years. I was even paid to write about baseball briefly, at an old defunct website called Most Valuable Network. I got better. Most of my posts are long gone from the internet, but I don’t think that I would cringe at reading most of what I wrote in my early 20s. Practice works.
I thought about going into writing about baseball, but ended up going into politics. I loved to write to persuade people. Baseball helped me get hired for a wonderful internship at a little non-profit called Global Financial Integrity. Blogging was still big back in the late 2000s. I wrote a ton of blog posts about financial crime, money laundering and illicit financial flows. They eventually hired me full time. I was finally a professional writer of op-eds, press releases and many, many blog posts. After work, I would go home and write about baseball. I was living the dream.
Eventually, I went to graduate school to get a PhD in political science. I learned a lot of basic statistical skills when writing about baseball, giving me a bit of a head start when compared with a lot of other graduate students. But most of all, I had been writing persuasive, analytical content for a decade. I had figured out a writing style by writing thousands of blog posts. I had to unlearn some things that didn’t fit in well with an academic product, but was able to start publishing articles a few years ahead of my peers. Academia is a cutthroat business, but I was able to land the job of my dreams.
I came full circle back to Moneyball in graduate school. The book had initially set me down a path studying statistics and eventually toward using science to understand the world. But it also kindled an interest in how human psychology affects our behavior. I encountered a book called Politics of Attention by political scientists Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner. Attention builds a vast theory of political behavior on a simple premise: there’s more going on in the world than any person can possibly keep track of, so they have to ignore most of it and focus on one or two things. Their larger body of work focuses on how smart people make basic mistakes, like those made by baseball executives in Moneyball. They build on work by a number of social scientists who study what is called bounded rationality, or the predictable mistakes that humans make when trying to achieve their goals. The most famous social scientists they draw on are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. I applied to study under them for my PhD, and spent six years learning from both.
A lot of people wrote reviews of Moneyball, but Lewis found most of them boring. The one review that he found interesting was written by behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. They argued that the mistakes that baseball executives were making in Moneyball were all mistakes predicted by bounded rationalist theory, and that Lewis should check out Kahneman and Tversky’s research. He did, writing up their fascinating stories in The Undoing Project. Undoing is a pretty standard Michael Lewis narrative: two interesting oddball psychologists set out to tell the economics discipline that they are wrong about how humans make decisions. It’s basically the same book as Moneyball, but about behavioral economics.
Its been awhile since I read Moneyball. One day, I will reread it knowing what I know now. I am eternally thankful that Michael Lewis’ little book about baseball set me down the path toward where I am today.