Billy Beane’s Masterpiece – And ‘Moneyball’ Had Nothing To Do With ItIrvin Muchnickbyline‚ Sep. 25‚ 2006Last October, while I was out of the country, my son Nate emailed me the news that Oakland Athletics manager Ken Macha had been fired after negotiations on a new contract hit an impasse. “Beane-ish arrogance,” Nate called it, in reference to general manager Billy Beane, the subject of Michael Lewis’ bestseller Moneyball – a book that a few years later somehow seems both prescient and irrelevant. Prescient because, yes, Lewis did choose to profile one smart fellow in the baseball racket, a guy who knows how to squeeze the mostest out of the leastest. Irrelevant because Lewis’ Wall Street-analyst-driven Moneyball theories (essentially warmed-over Bill James but with a single-mindedness James himself would surely disown) have had almost nothing to do with explaining the A’s success in 2006. |