Michael Lewis holds too high an opinion of his work

I still can’t believe it brought Oakland so many World Series trophies.

The whole, “The A’s are so smart! They just picked Jeremy Brown, the best player on the board, and got him for so little money!” part of it was stupid.

Lewis struck me as someone who didn’t really unerstand his subject matter.

I’m zero percent surprised that he’s now gone and gotten all high on his own self importance.

is that I think it chronicles both the strengths and weaknesses of the Beane approach without really intending to.

I think the irony is that the philosophy described in Moneyball was in its own way really rigid, while mocking the rigidity of the conventional approaches. Billy Beane is too smart by about half, or however that saying goes. He over-thinks things – and sometimes that logic justifies itself at the expense of smart baseball decisions. For all his genius decisions and moves, he has bone-headed ones as well. Just like every other GM. And I think that Theo Epstein and others have been really successful by using the Oakland approach for the very reason that they took the good parts and ignored the bad parts.

of Michael Lewis on local bay area radio station. The arrogance of this guy was astounding. The superiority of Beane’s methods were spoken so matter-of-factly, while the rest of baseball front offices were, according to Lewis, still bumbling in the dark ages.

over at Baseball Musings:

So what do the Athletics do now? One of the premises to success was that winning would bring in more fans, the team would make more money, and they’d be able to use that extra revenue to keep improving the team. That last step failed to happen, possibly because the A’s were so locked into getting value for their money that they missed the fact that the players they could get below market weren’t very good. Rather than look for inefficiencies that no longer existed, the A’s needed to over spend on two or three good players so they would have a solid core.

At one time they were the team of players no one else wanted because others failed to see the value. Now they’re the team of players no one else wants because everyone else values them correctly. As much it pains me to say it, maybe the A’s need a new GM who can get them out of the value rut.

We all talk about the “value” of a player in terms of contracts and trades. I’m not sure I agree with Pinto 100%. The A’s have gone to the well perhaps too many times trying to catch lightning in a bottle. I also think this was a factor in some of Jon Daniels’ early decision making process, and maybe still is. But you simply cannot build a playoff team without taking some of these “value” risks and having them pay off.

Every winning team has a player or two that either overachieves or has a comeback year when everyone else thought he was done (Andruw Jones?). Winning happens with good player development and acquisition mixed with a little luck. Rely on the luck too much and it runs out sooner or later. That seems to have happened with the A’s this year. I agree that the rest of the league has more than caught up with the A’s in valuation of talent, but I also think that Beane is a smart risk taker who just had his luck run out this year.

You try to increase your odds of success with great player development and acquisition and then roll the dice.

is quickly becoming overrated.

I enjoy Lewis’ writing and consider him one of America’s greatest living writers. But yeah, the guy has an ego and he tends to skim over nuance occasionally to the detriment of his writing. Liar’s Poker is still his best work FWIW and would make a much movie then Moneyball partly because it’s auto-biographical and because it is much more relevant to today.

he’s a damn good writer, but something doesn’t add up here.

Is he really that dense? Good grief … I feel sorry for him honestly.