Billy Beane of ‘Moneyball’ Has Given Up on His Own Hollywood Ending
By ADAM STERNBERGH
Billy Beane has a wonderful story. At 18 he was a strapping young baseball prospect, raised in San Diego by a Naval-officer dad and drafted fresh out of high school in the first round by the New York Mets. He was a sure star — until he suddenly wasn’t, his playing career faltering for reasons few could understand, least of all him. Then, at 27, a journeyman outfielder with a lifetime average of .219 who’d bounced from the Mets to the Twins to the Tigers to the A’s, he walked out of the dugout and into the team’s front office, looking for a job. He became a scout, and eight years later, he was promoted to general manager of a losing team. Under his watch, the A’s, a small-market underdog with a minuscule payroll, made the playoffs five times in the next eight seasons.
Let’s call that Chapter 1.
Then in 2003, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” was published. The book, by Michael Lewis, dissected Beane’s success and lionized him as an innovative visionary in a field clogged with myopic traditionalists. It explained how he boldly discarded conventional wisdom and embraced the advanced statistical analysis preached by a small band of radical baseball outsiders, inspired by the self-educated statistician Bill James. The book was a monumental best seller. And now, in what seems like the crowning chapter to this saga, “Moneyball” has just been released as a movie. The starring role of Billy Beane is played by Brad Pitt.
Let’s call that Chapter 2.
If you were going to pitch this story as a movie, you would pitch it as David and Goliath meets “The Bad News Bears” meets “The Tipping Point” — a perfect confluence of sports-underdog drama and the allure of contrarian thinking. In fact, the only thing lacking in this Hollywood tale is a classic Hollywood ending. Because, as it turned out, those miraculous A’s never did manage to topple the bloated Goliaths of the league — their sling always came up one stone short. And when, after the 2002 season, Beane was courted to take over the storied Boston Red Sox (if you can’t beat ’em, etc.), he accepted — then abruptly declined. The jilted Sox instead promoted Theo Epstein, a 28-year-old wunderkind in the Beane mold. The Sox have since won the World Series twice.
The A’s, meanwhile, have tumbled back to mediocrity: the team is on its way to a losing season this year, after compiling a record of 231 wins and 254 losses over the previous three seasons. Most of the innovations introduced or popularized by Beane have been freely adopted by other organizations, thus eliminating whatever stealth advantages he once enjoyed. The Moneyball philosophy ultimately triumphed, but Billy Beane never quite did.
“Moneyball,” the movie, struggles with this inconvenient reality; certainly it’s odd to watch a sports movie that doesn’t — that can’t — end with that rousing ninth-inning game-winner, with Roy Hobbs launching his pennant-winning shot into the lights. (Of course, in the Bernard Malamud novel that “The Natural” was based on — spoiler alert — the aged Roy Hobbs strikes out.) As Pitt-as-Beane says in “Moneyball,” it ultimately doesn’t matter how many games you win if you lose the last game of the season. The film ends with a black title card, announcing elegiacally and somewhat euphemistically that Beane is still waiting to win that last game.
Back in real-life Oakland, the real-life Beane is still playing an unfair game, but he’s no longer winning. He’s also spending a lot of time thinking about what exactly should happen in Chapter 3.
The home field of the A’s was originally called Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, then was renamed Network Associates Coliseum, then McAfee Coliseum, then Overstock.com Coliseum, and is now called, simply and awkwardly, O.co Coliseum, though the temporary signage on the brutal concrete structure suggests that this name, too, is provisional. The team’s marketing motto this year, announced on large banners and billboards all over Oakland, is “Green Collar Baseball,” which is presumably meant to evoke the gritty nature of a team largely free of big-name stars but which also unfortunately conjures the vision of a really unreliable Laundromat. The cover of the team’s media guide features a quartet of promising, if baby-faced, starting pitchers, not one of whom you will have heard of unless you are a fantasy-baseball fanatic or the mother of one of the pitchers. Or Billy Beane.
The team’s administrative offices are located in nearby Oracle Arena, the home of the Golden State Warriors basketball team. With their pale wood doors and cluttered quarters, the offices feel something like the administrative wing of an underfinanced suburban high school. This would make Beane the beleaguered but affable principal. His desk is piled high with papers, stacks of CDs (he’s waiting to get around to the new Beastie Boys album), pictures of his daughters (he has three, from two marriages) and an army of Oakland A’s bobblehead dolls. Beane, on this morning in late August at least, seemed laid back and even slightly goofy — more a West Coast dude than the fidgety tobacco-chomping operator portrayed by Pitt. He’s 6-foot-4 and nearly 50, and he sat slightly slumped in his leather chair, wearing a white polo shirt. ESPN played on a large flat-screen just overhead, drawing his habitual glances.
His cellphone buzzed. He held up his hand to pause the conversation and answered.
A crusty beat reporter, sniffing out a scoop? A rival G.M., looking to horse-trade? Would I now be seeing the legendary Billy Beane in action?
“Sorry,” he said, covering the receiver. “I’m at war with insects in my yard.”
Billy Beane has beetle troubles.
“Well, you know, I’ve got a large tree. I’ve got fruit trees,” he said, after hanging up. “I’ve got this great pear tree, and the leaves are dying. I’ve got this service that comes out to check on stuff, and he leaves me this dire note. He says the trees are covered with ‘shot-hole-boring insects.’ ”
Neither of us knew what this meant, but we agreed: “Shot-hole-boring” sounded ominous.
“Anyway, he’s on the case,” Beane said.
It was a Thursday; the evening promised a game against Toronto, another team, like Oakland, long out of the playoff hunt. The previous night, the A’s beat the Orioles — another also-ran — to bring its record to 55 wins and 68 losses. The team was in third place in its division and going nowhere; 123 games down, 39 to go.
Still, the season wasn’t entirely over. There were a few meaningful games left on the schedule, to be played against the Yankees and Red Sox — meaningful to the Yankees and Red Sox, at least. Both teams were positioned to once again make the playoffs and were battling for first place in their division. “Next week we roll into New York and Boston,” Beane said. “You go into a place like that in August, and they’re fighting each other out, and you become sort of — it can be a little bit overwhelming.” The A’s had become an afterthought, a speed bump on someone else’s road to glory.
So I asked him about the movie. He saw a rough cut, and he liked it — it made him feel a bit nostalgic. “I’d see a scene in the locker room with a player’s name on a jersey and think, Oh, yeah, I forgot he was on that team,” he said. “You know, it was almost 10 years ago, which is a long time in sports.” In the movie, Pitt portrays Beane as an obsessed firebrand, smashing chairs and spinning doughnuts with his truck in the parking lot. I asked him if he has mellowed out since those days.
“Well, naturally age is going to do that to anybody,” he said, and laughed. “As you get old, you get a bit more perspective, you get more experience and you’ve seen things play out. Probably the simple word for that is ‘mellowed out.’ ”
As for that ultimate personal vindication — a championship — he shrugged and said, “It’s not quite — I’m not some Javert, you know, pursuing the loaf of bread that was stolen.”
He still likes Oakland. He likes the small-town feel. He likes the loyal band of associates he has assembled, including the assistant G.M., David Forst, a Harvard grad and Beane’s presumed successor. And it’s not as if he doesn’t have anything to look forward to. “If I can just get through the next few months,” he said, “then I can go fly-fishing.”
This year, the Yankees, who have the highest payroll in baseball, will make the playoffs for the 16th time in the last 17 seasons. The A’s, by contrast, have not made the playoffs since 2006; in fact, the team has made the playoffs 15 times since it became the Oakland A’s in 1968.
A five-year dry spell actually places the A’s among the more fortunate have-not franchises in baseball. The Toronto Blue Jays have not made the playoffs since 1993. The Pittsburgh Pirates have not made the playoffs since 1992. The Kansas City Royals have not made the playoffs since 1985.
Each year, a small-market team with a midrange payroll, like the Milwaukee Brewers or the Tampa Bay Rays, does make the playoffs, usually thanks to a few canny personnel moves, the judicious allocation of limited funds and, most crucially, a stockpile of young talent, collected through high draft picks that are a result of years and years of being absolutely terrible. Such a team has a few seasons to compete with the big boys — the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies, primarily — before its young talent matures and bolts for big money, offered up by the Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies, primarily.
These occasional breakthroughs by midmarket teams allow those who defend the inherent competitive imbalance in baseball to point and say: “See? It’s not impossible.” Conversely, when a free-spending team like the Los Angeles Angels does not make the playoffs, those same people can say: “See? Money doesn’t guarantee wins.” (These people are, more often than not, Yankees fans.)
Ironically, no team did more to perpetuate this perception than Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s of the early aughts. Those teams made the playoffs five times despite having payrolls that were in the bottom third of major-league teams. They did this, in part, by finding overlooked players who excelled in undervalued facets of the game, like drawing walks. Beane didn’t invent — and has never taken credit for — the advanced statistical analysis he utilized; in fact, he didn’t even introduce it to the Oakland A’s. (That was his predecessor, Sandy Alderson, to whom Beane was a protégé.) Still, Beane’s success with the A’s presaged a leaguewide revolution in player evaluation. It also temporarily changed the story line of baseball. The entire premise of “Moneyball” was that a smart operator could thwart the system. In the book, Beane is repeatedly compared to a card-counter at a casino, outsmarting the odds.
The book arrived in 2003, a few years after Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point,” another book that valorizes unorthodox thinkers and offers the titillating prospect of new and radical ways to understand the inner workings of the world. Despite their disparate subjects, both books became unlikely bibles to the business world and sacred texts in a growing canon: the Library of Contrarian Wisdom. The world says, “Zig”; you say, “Zag.” The world says, “Think long and hard before making decisions”; you say, “Blink!” The world says, “A team can’t compete with the Yankees while spending one-third the money on players”; you say, “Have you heard of a statistic called O.P.S.?” As a result, Beane (like Gladwell before him) took on a messianic stature outside his field. Within baseball, many old-timers scoffed at his theories and criticized him for arrogance. Outside baseball, he was viewed as a kind of maverick wizard.
“How do you routinely trump competitors that have twice the budget you do? Billy Beane can show you how,” promised the promotional blurb for Beane on the Web site for the agency that, until recently, handled his corporate speaking engagements. “Beane uses the powerful metaphor of baseball, but his genius lies in his ability to draw striking parallels to almost any industry (health care, insurance, finance, etc.).” In 2008, Beane shared a byline with Newt Gingrich and John Kerry on an Op-Ed article about health care reform in The Times. The argued approach was, essentially, Health-Care-Ball: the application of smarter statistical analysis in order to lower health care costs. “America’s health care system behaves like a hidebound, tradition-based ballclub,” the article said. “The best way to start improving quality and lowering costs is to study the stats.”
Back on the diamond, though, Beane is having less success. He told me baseball is moving “back to an efficient market — albeit one with some random events that don’t offer perfect efficiency — where whatever you spend, that’s where you’re going to finish.” In short, the Yankees spend a lot and make the playoffs pretty much every year. The Pirates don’t, and they don’t. There are aberrations to this pattern, but the pattern itself is unmistakable.
But the more efficient baseball becomes as a market, I asked him, the worse it is for you, right?
“Oh, yeah!” he said, and laughed. He imagines a future for baseball, perhaps not too far off, when the haves — the Yankees, Red Sox, maybe the Dodgers — could split off into their own division, becoming “superfranchises, similar to what you have in soccer,” he said. In European professional soccer, which Beane has become increasingly obsessed with, you have the Champions League, which is loaded with superpowers like Barcelona, Manchester United and Real Madrid, who slug it out in a kind of tournament of the gods. “I think in baseball we’re headed that way,” he said. “Where you have superfranchises that are just getting huge. Where that leaves a lot of the other teams, we’ll see.” It goes without saying, though, that the A’s wouldn’t be asked to join that league of superteams.
After he agreed to stay with the A’s rather then depart to Boston, Beane signed a series of contract extensions that granted him a small ownership stake in the team. His current contract is up in 2014. “I’ve always been somewhat intellectually curious about other things,” he told me, speaking of his future in, or out of, baseball. “Do I have a lot of interests? Yeah. Do I have an idea of what I want to do? Yeah. Am I going to say it right now? No.”
But is it safe to say these will be nonbaseball-related activities?
“Some yes, some no,” he said.
He has no regrets, he said, about turning down the Red Sox job, even though it’s easy to think, in hindsight, that by combining his insights with that team’s resources, he might have been the one to make history there. “I have a wife and kids and parents who all live out here,” he said. “If it was strictly driven by the desire to just win games, and if that was the end-all for me, then yes. But this is the type of environment I like and enjoy.” Or, as Bennett Miller, the director of “Moneyball,” put it: “He would have died in Boston. It wouldn’t have been his show. He likes to be the guerrilla in the mountains in combat fatigues.”
There has also been recent talk of moving the A’s to nearby San Jose or Fremont, which would theoretically boost revenues and payroll. But by then Beane might be done with baseball altogether. He long ago turned his eye to other interests: soccer, for example, another hidebound sport that seems ripe for radical rethinking. He persuaded the A’s ownership to buy a Major League Soccer team, the San Jose Earthquakes, in 2007. He consults informally for Liverpool, the English soccer club that is now owned by the principal owner of the Red Sox. Michael Lewis, who has stayed friendly with Beane, says: “If I had to guess the fantasy for Billy, my guess is the A’s move to San Jose and double the payroll. He hands the team to David Forst, and then they acquire a European soccer team that he could start running.”
But why should Beane limit himself to sports? He also sits on several corporate boards, including that of the software company NetSuite. It’s not hard — in fact, it is exceedingly easy — to imagine him simply walking away from baseball to start, say, a free-ranging consultancy. Billy Beane Associates. The powerful metaphor of baseball. Better results from limited resources.
In that case, there would be no tightfisted owners to haggle with; no sportswriters questioning your allegiance to a philosophy that you introduced them to; no old-timers claiming you’re a huckster fraud. There would be no Yankees to try to topple and no calcified system that keeps them propped up. In that case, you would be the Yankees.
“There are two avenues of escape, once you recognize the predicament that you’re basically doomed if you’re Oakland,” Lewis says. “One is to become the San Jose A’s — to try and go from a small-market team to a big-market team. The second avenue of escape is to find another industry where those kind of inefficiencies still exist.”
For now, though, for Beane, there is this small office in Oakland next to a concrete coliseum. On the wall, there is a whiteboard, covered in cryptic scribbles that he can’t quite bring himself to erase. Part of it holds a chart, drawn up during a recent visit by Beane’s pal who works for Liverpool, to sketch out the statistical advantages of acquiring soccer players at different ages. Lower down on the board, though, are remnants of 2002, the year Lewis tailed him and “Moneyball” came into being. The board reads “39, ZIE” and, under that, “40, PAP BON.” This was a list of players from the 2002 draft — the one Lewis chronicled in his book — that the A’s had yet to sign. “ZIE” was Brad Ziegler, a pitcher who later wound up with the team; “We just traded him,” Beane said. And “PAP BON” was Jonathan Papelbon, the team’s 40th pick in that year’s draft, a long shot who spurned the team when it couldn’t afford his signing-bonus demands. He went back into the draft the following season, was picked by the Red Sox and became a star — a bigger success in the major leagues than any of the 39 players the frugal A’s drafted before him. Papelbon is less an example of the value of Moneyball than of the value of good old-fashioned money.
Beane considered the whiteboard. “It’s not really a board to use anymore,” he said. “It’s more of a time capsule now.” It’s like the Billy Beane of that era was sending a scrawled message to the Beane of this era: Enjoy this streak because it won’t last forever. Once the casino catches on to your card-counting tricks, you can’t prosper at the table for long. And like any good card-counter, you need to know when to cash out and walk away.
No comments:
Post a Comment