http://www.ebook-pal.com/203-1-161-1-Moneyball-The-Art-of-Winning-an-Unfair-Game-Michael-Lewis-0393057658.aspx
- From: "asp.net" <harryshine@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 12 Nov 2006 20:14:28 -0800
http://www.ebook-pal.com/203-1-161-1-Moneyball-The-Art-of-Winning-an-Unfair-Game-Michael-Lewis-0393057658.aspx
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
For Billy Fitzgerald I can still hear him shouting at me
Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened
a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he
was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking-had he the
gold? or the gold him?
-John Ruskin, Unto This Last
Preface
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story
concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players
and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big
leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful
franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came
well before I had good reason to write it-before I had a story to
fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did
one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so
many games?
For more than a decade the people who run professional baseball have
argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and
becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was
far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly.
At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York
Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million while the two poorest teams, the
Oakland A's and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a
third of that, about $40 million. A decade before, the highest payroll
team, the New York Mets, had spent about $44 million on baseball
players and the lowest payroll team, the Cleveland Indians, a bit more
than $8 million. The raw disparities meant that only the rich teams
could afford the best players. A poor team could afford only the maimed
and the inept, and was almost certain to fail. Or so argued the people
who ran baseball.
And I was inclined to concede the point. The people with the most money
often win. But when you looked at what actually had happened over the
past few years, you had to wonder. The bottom of each division was
littered with teams-the Rangers, the Orioles, the Dodgers, the
Mets-that had spent huge sums and failed spectacularly. On the other
end of the spectrum was Oakland. For the past several years, working
with either the lowest or next to lowest payroll in the game, the
Oakland A's had won more regular season games than any other team,
except the Atlanta Braves. They'd been to the play-offs three years in
a row and in the previous two taken the richest team in baseball, the
Yankees, to within a few outs of elimination. How on earth had they
done that? The Yankees, after all, were the most egregious example of
financial determinism. The Yankees understood what New York understood,
that there was no shame in buying success, and maybe because of their
lack of shame they did what they did better than anyone in the
business.
As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. ("Bud")
Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A's success "an aberration," but
that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the
question: how'd they do it? What was their secret? How did the second
poorest team in baseball, opposing ever greater mountains of cash,
stand even the faintest chance of success, much less the ability to win
more regular season games than all but one of the other twenty-nine
teams? For that matter, what was it about baseball success that
resisted so many rich men's attempt to buy it? These were the questions
that first interested me, and this book seeks to answer.
That answer begins with an obvious point: in professional baseball it
still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it.
When I first stumbled into the Oakland front office, they were coming
off a season in which they had spent $34 million and won an astonishing
102 games; the year before that, 2000, they'd spent $26 million and won
91 games, and their division. A leading independent authority on
baseball finance, a Manhattan lawyer named Doug Pappas, pointed out a
quantifiable distinction between Oakland and the rest of baseball. The
least you could spend on a twenty-five-man team was $5 million, plus
another $2 million more for players on the disabled list and the
remainder of the forty-man roster. The huge role of luck in any
baseball game, and the relatively small difference in ability between
most major leaguers and the rookies who might work for the minimum
wage, meant that the fewest games a minimum-wage baseball team would
win during a 162-game season is something like 49. The Pappas measure
of financial efficiency was: how many dollars over the minimum $7
million does each team pay for each win over its forty-ninth? How many
marginal dollars does a team spend for each marginal win?
Over the past three years the Oakland A's had paid about half a million
dollars per win. The only other team in six figures was the Minnesota
Twins, at $675,000 per win. The most profligate rich franchises-the
Baltimore Orioles, for instance, or the Texas Rangers-paid nearly $3
million for each win, or more than six times what Oakland paid. Oakland
seemed to be playing a different game than everyone else. In any
ordinary industry the Oakland A's would have long since acquired most
other baseball teams, and built an empire. But this was baseball, so
they could only embarrass other, richer teams on the field, and leave
it at that.
.
- Prev by Date: http://www.ebook-pal.com/
- Next by Date: Re: What is Postback?
- Previous by thread: http://www.ebook-pal.com/
- Next by thread: Allitcertkiller.com exams are now more cheaper than Testking.co.uk
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
