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Something different from Robert Spencer: The death of Moneyball

Oct 1, 2014 7:05 pm By Robert Spencer

This post has nothing to do with jihad whatsoever. My voluminous non-jihad-related thoughts I generally keep to myself, and to those in my immediate vicinity. But last night, after the Oakland Athletics finally expired after a brutal August and September on life support, I wrote a piece, “The Death of Moneyball.” It’s at PJ Lifestyle today. And since I write mostly about jihad, here for Jihad Watch readers is an excerpt.

I have just watched the Athletics blow a 7-3 lead all the way to hibernation for the winter, and as that last Royal run crossed the plate, it sealed the deal: Moneyball is dead.

You have seen the movie. Brad Pitt as the general manager of a baseball team. No money, no stars, just smarts, extreme smarts, just a willingness to buck baseball tradition and assemble a team no one – not even its field manager, in the Hollywood fable that also gave him an untrue-to-life beer gut and sour mien – thought would work. But it could work and it did work. By the numbers.

The numbers. WHIP and WAR and BABIP and CERA and DERA and all the Bill-Jamesian glut of incomprehensible statistics that have overwhelmed the game just as Barry Bonds and Jose Canseco and their butt injections rendered HR and RBI and BA essentially meaningless, and (along with Brad Pitt) made Billy Beane into a cult figure, a demigod, an F. Scott Fitzgerald character – The very rich, they are different from you and me. The Pitt/Beane version is The very knowledgeable about arcane baseball numbers, they are different from you and me. And Beane (and Pitt) got very rich playing on this.

To be sure, Beane has done all right by the Athletics, who are anything but very rich. Their small but passionate fanbase has held its own amid his repeated attempts to abandon the unloved Coliseum (or Mausoleum, as Bando, Jackson, Rudi and Tenace – ah, there were baseball players in those days — dubbed it) for presumably greener San Jose pastures, and he has with immense ingenuity parlayed the small budgets he has been handed into on-field success that the small but passionate ones have lustily cheered and magnificently appreciated.

But every Shakespearean character has his fatal flaw, and even if Brad Pitt’s Beane wasn’t precisely Shakespearean, Beane’s particular flaw may have come courtesy of Pitt himself, and George Will, and Michael Lewis, and all the other acolytes of the Moneyball concept. For Beane, like Macbeth himself, is clearly in 2014 suffering from a malady that only the Bard could properly sing: hubris. The 2014 Oakland Athletics would have made a terrific Shakespeare play, with protagonist Beane the polar opposite of Hamlet, not at all hesitant like the Melancholy Dane but all too resolute, all too resolved to act, a Titus Andronicus intent on manifesting his will to power until the stage was littered with corpses, including that of the hero himself. And Yoenis Cespedes.

Beane’s 2014 baseball corpse is still bloody on the ground as I write this and the Kansas City Royals (themselves the bastard children of the hubris of Beane’s illustrious predecessor in Shakespearean overreach, Charles O. Finley) still pouring champagne over one another, wearing those silly goggles that the teams now wear when they conduct revels in this age of the Nanny State, but it has already been remarked many times, as the Athletics fell like a bird hit with grapeshot from their high perch of early August (best record in baseball) to their skin-of-the-teeth hold on the postseason (the second Wild Card, now spent and lost): the Athletics lost themselves when they lost La Potencia, and Yoenis Cespedes’s nickname sums it up neatly. The first game after Beane traded Cespedes for Jon Lester, in a move that was supposed to give the Athletics pitching good enough to carry them through to a World Series victory, the A’s lost (in an eerie foreshadowing of the just-completed debacle) to the Kansas City Royals by the zero-sum score of 1-0.

When I saw that boxscore, I had a feeling this trade was not going to turn out well. The new A’s had pitching, all right, pitching to beat the band, if not the Kansas City Royals, but there was just one problem: you also have to hit the ball. And without the beloved Cespy, there was no one there to do that.

I am sure Billy Beane crunched all the numbers before he made the trade. I am sure he crunched them to a fine and heady powder. I am sure he was certain that Donaldson and Reddick and Moss and the gang would be able to sustain the loss of Cespedes and that the Big Green Machine would go on humming along. He no doubt was sure six ways to Sunday that the Athletics had sufficient offense to carry them through to the playoffs and World Series, and that the Lester/Gray/Kazmir/Samardzija pitching rotation, even if it wasn’t Hunter/Holtzman/Blue/Odom, would still surpass all challengers.

And the crunched numbers were all that mattered. Remember in Moneyball, how Pitt/Beane and his fictional sidekick Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) go up against a roomful of scouts, old baseball hands, who are talking in old baseball clichés (“the ball just jumps off his bat”) that Beane, Brand, and the moviegoer are supposed to hold in amused contempt. Beane and Brand had crunched the numbers, and by jingo, they were right and the old baseball hands were too hidebound to see it.

But life doesn’t always go by the numbers. I have never been in the Athletics’ clubhouse and never will be, but I suspect that Yoenis Cespedes brought some potencia there that didn’t show up in Beane’s DICE and DIPs and LIPs. There was support he gave to Moss (in particular, as he hit .168 after the Break) and the others that just didn’t show up in Beane’s numbers no matter how long he cooked them and how long he left them to simmer. Without him, the A’s tanked.

Read the rest here.

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Comments

  1. jihad3tracker says

    Oct 1, 2014 at 7:46 pm

    Ibrahim Hooper’s gang at CAIR just sent me a note by parakeet messenger — that is their communication path nowadays — I quote :

    ” Baseball — America’s national pastime ? Relaxing from daily stress ? NOT being perpetually pissed enough to slaughter fellow humans ? Such Western nonsense !

    Even though we are terrified of Robert Spencer, he gives us some relief from the misery which Mohammed rains down on our heads every day.

    THAT JERK JAH’KEEM YISRAEL totally screwed up ! There is right now, at this very moment, a cleaning crew vacuuming vomit off our DC headquarter desks.

    Someday when Keith Ellison gives enough money for Ibrahim Hooper to self-publish an autobiography, you will see how disgusted we are with Islam, and the exculpatory explanation will be that we are trapped — like flies that didn’t know what they landed in.

    Until then, we are truly envious of life in these United States : with all our faults, still vastly better than Planet Islam.

  2. Boston Tea Party says

    Oct 1, 2014 at 7:54 pm

    Nice piece, Robert—and I wouldn’t mind more off topic posts from you here and there. I would suggest it’s probably good for you too, to occasionally take a break from reporting on the ceaseless horrors of jihad.

    Oh, and thanks for making me feel better about that Red Sox/A’s trade, too. 🙂

  3. Annie Oakley says

    Oct 1, 2014 at 8:36 pm

    That was fun to read! Thanks, Robert!

  4. Alarmed Pig Farmer says

    Oct 1, 2014 at 9:37 pm

    Billy B has been playing on the thin margin for years now, and has done well. He had no choice but to let Cespedes go, the A’s woulda lost him to free agency anyway. But it will prove out that dealing Addison Russell was the first time Billy was taken downtown on a deal.

    Overall Billy has done well, more good than bad. But, for those in the Moslem Game, our new national pastime, there is no winning. Do a deal with a Moslem and you don’t come out clean; you always lose. The best you can do dealing with Moslems is to lose as little as possible, and to buy time to keep the freedom thing chugging along a little bit farther.

  5. duh_swami says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 8:01 am

    You never write about the Maxwell anymore. I bet few who post here know what I’m talking about. haha, time flies when you’re having fun…

  6. Peter says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 8:44 am

    Nice changeup, Mr. Spencer! Personally, (and even though – or perhaps because – I am a statistician) I think stats in baseball or other sports will only get you so far. It is just complex enough that there are intangibles that can’t easily be measured or predicted – like team spirit, how well the players get along, respect their manager, etc. And we all know of players who appear to have oodles of talent, but seem to never really get anywhere; and then those with mediocre ability but a fierce spirit who do succeed. It’s hard to measure these sorts of things.

  7. R Davis says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 10:05 am

    A movie review Robert.
    It is good – big tick.

  8. vlparker says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 11:48 am

    I don’t understand a lot of this article because, frankly, both Hollywood and Shakespeare bore me. I would rather read Louis L’Amour or Alistair MacLean.
    I have never seen Moneyball, in fact, I don’t do movies at all, and the only things I watch on TV are sports, especially my beloved White Sox, Blackhawks and Bears.

    Since my White Sox are done for the year and the Bears might as well be done with their non-existent defense, it is time to turn my sights to the Blackhawks.

    I don’t really have a dog in this baseball post season fight, but I really enjoyed watching the Royals running game defeat the A’s (Moss’) power game. Yes, Robert, the Cespedes trade was dumb, dumb, dumb. The A’s tried to cover for that mistake by getting Adam Dunn from the White Sox. When Dunn left, White Sox fans breathed a huge sigh of relief. While he had adequate power numbers with the Sox, his 4 year BA was .201 while his strikeout average, if they had such a stat, would have been .390. Whiff, whiff, whiff. All this while making $14 million a year. I would have been too embarrassed to cash my check.

    Moneyball doesn’t need to be dead. It just needs to be intelligent. Make salaries performance based. Not hard to figure out.

  9. Morgaan Sinclair says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 1:40 pm

    Absolutely right!!!! … They lost because Beane operates without heart, not matter how good he looks on TV.

  10. Kalifornia Kafir says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 2:28 pm

    Thank you from this A’s mega-fan. This has been my one longstanding criticism of Billy Beane: he can’t see beyond the numbers to the heart and soul of baseball. All too often, he’s traded away talented be-loved players for some cheaper no-name. Only a blind sheikh could see that getting rid of a power-hitter like Yoenis would end badly. But, that’s Billy Beane for you. I lift my $9.50 glass of O.co Coliseum Bud to you!

    • Neighborhood Bully (Steven) says

      Oct 2, 2014 at 10:46 pm

      For $9.50 do you actually get a glass? I will assume it is in a plastic cup; perhap, a “souvenir” cup.

      At the time of the Cespedes trade, I thought it was an arrogant move by Beane and began rooting against the Athletics. Glad to see the implosion reached its denoument at the conclusion of the ‘play in’ game against the Royals!!

      Never saw the movie, nor read the book. Too busy defending Israel and the West against external and internal enemies. Keep up the great work, Robert S!!!

  11. Robert Spencer says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 4:39 pm

    “a blind sheikh could see that getting rid of a power-hitter like Yoenis would end badly.”

    Can’t stop laughing!

  12. Dave says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 7:56 pm

    Wow. So many misconceptions here. Especially from a statistician!

    If any of you like to place a sporting wager now and then I’d *love* to book your action.

  13. Simon Peterkin says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 9:20 pm

    Nice article. Please post more like this.

  14. Burt says

    Oct 2, 2014 at 9:30 pm

    Being a Brit with zero knowledge or much interest in baseball the review went way over my head. But as someone who marvels at the sheer dedication and relentless work you do in the fight against the biggest threat to civilization we all face, it’s really nice to see you enjoying a little downtime. Like Boston Tea Party said It’s good for you. You’re a great man Robert Spencer, very much appreciated by freedom lovers all over the world.

  15. GhostFlame says

    Oct 8, 2014 at 9:16 pm

    Love the movie Moneyball. Love it. But here’s the flawed concept with the brain trust at the front office: moneyball is the collectivization of baseball. Or as Brad Pitt’s Billy Bean (as in bean counter?) put it; “Guys, you’re still trying to replace Giambi. I told you we can’t do it. And we can’t do it. But maybe we can recreate him in the aggregate.”

    Aggregate? Like collective, perhaps? With Giambi representing the individual. Who actually can be replaced. Just not easily.

    At any rate, it’s like head scout Grady Fuson said, it’s a nice theory, it’s just not working out. Because if moneyball was everything Billy Bean and it’s fans say it is, then the Oakland A’s would have won by now.

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