Monday, August 30, 2004
I've just about finished "Moneyball", an entertaining and worthwhile read. I can see it having the effect on baseball that the West Coast Offense had on the NFL. A few teams will figure out Billy Beane's core ideas, and adopt them-- the Dodgers may be right now, for example. Then everybody will say that they are playing moneyball, even though they are really just emphasizing the same stuff they always did. Watching the Mets as I read Bill James' "Annuals" every year I kept asking myself stuff like, "Davey Johnson is a smart guy-- doesn't he know that Rafael Santana has a secondary average of about .192?" I'm sure Davey did, but there is only so much a manager can or cannot do. When the Mets fired Bobby Valentine I thought, "Dumb move." When they hired Art Howe I thought, "What did Art Howe have to do with the way the A's have been playing?" Now, having read the book, and seen him run a respectable enough team, we have our answer. Art Howe is like Warren Burger-- he has his job because he looks like what someone who has that job looks like -- not because he has the first idea of what the hell he is doing.
