Former Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane is credited with popularizing the use of analytics in baseball when he guided the low-budget A’s to success in the early 2000s using the so-called “Moneyball” strategy.
That approach inspired the popular 2011 movie, Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Beane. But Michael Lewis is the guy who wrote the book on Moneyball. Literally. He wrote Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), detailing Beane’s new strategy that changed the game.
Some 20 years later, Lewis thinks that the analytics-driven approach has hurt the game in many ways. Lewis told the San Francisco Chronicle the strategy has slowed the game and made it less colorful and interesting.
“It turns out that the smart way to play baseball is boring,” Lewis said (via the Chronicle). “Don’t steal bases. Don’t swing at bad pitches. Position fielders so the ball is hit right to them. It does make what is already a pretty sedentary sport less kinetic. … They are kind of addressing it now, making the bases bigger, not letting people shift. The problem is that it’s already a slow sport in an age that doesn’t like slow sports and if you’re going to do it smart, you make it slower.
“It’s much less fun having geeks from MIT running the baseball team than it was having colorful tobacco-chewing former players who you knew. It’s much less fun when the manager is clearly less important, more like a middle manager. The way reason permeated the front offices has bled onto the field, and the players are more reasonable, more rational and not likely to go off half-cocked.”
Lewis mentioned one player from the 1970s and ’80s in particular, Al Hrabosky, who would fare poorly in the new era. The reliever known as the “Mad Hungarian” would theatrically talk to himself before pounding his glove and turning to face the hitter.
“Could you imagine if Al Hrabosky rolled into baseball now?” Lewis asked. “It would be fun to watch, but it would be just like, ‘Oh, that’s weird. That’s not optimal.’”
Beane remains with the Athletics today as a minority owner and advisor to owner John Fisher.
The A’s, of course, are leaving Oakland after 57 seasons, moving to Sacramento next year as they await a stadium in Las Vegas.
