I've been hanging around FireJoeMorgan.com lately. It's got some truly funny stuff on it, ripping Joe Morgan (obviously) and other knuckle-headed analysts that infest the sport.
Now, Joe seems like an amiable enough guy, but as an analyst, he stinks. He never misses a chance to blow his own trumpet, or one of his old buddies' trumpets. He never seems to watch baseball outside of work, he loves Barry Bonds, he refuses to acknowledge that his friend Dusty Baker is even partly responsible for the Cubs' demise, and he's stuck in the past.
That wouldn't be so bad if he was even remotely modest. See, Joe's won Emmy's and it's gone to his head. He makes Peter King look shy and retiring about his talents. So the guys at FireJoeMorgan.com ride him remorselessly with added humor.
The only trouble is the contributors are patently Billy Beane's guys. Or Bill James's guys. Or Rob Neyer's, Paul DePodesta's — take your pick. FireJoeMorgan.com is the cult of sabermetrics, OPS, OBP, and all the rest of that spreadsheet-inspired stuff that Uncle Joe hates.
The ripping may be funny, but it also opens your eyes to the type of person that gravitates to sabermetrics, moneyball — whatever you want to call it.
These guys are a cult in the true sense of the word. There is absolutely no room for compromise or debate. You either accept their opinion or you're castigated as an idiot. They are truly baseball fascists.
Now, in principle, I've got no problem with black and white distinctions between fact and fiction, or right and wrong. Some things are so self-evident that they are beyond dispute and if you disagree then clearly you deserve idiot status. For example, the earth is clearly flat, root beer is made from skunks' urine, and The Best Damn Sports Show was The Worst Damn Sports Show.
Baseball, as a sport played by humans that evolves gradually to changing circumstances, obviously has more wiggle-room, but the cultist followers of Beane and James refuse to acknowledge the fact.
To try and get a better take on these guys, I re-read Moneyball. It doesn't start well for Beane and Paul DePodesta, his then-assistant. Beane throws a temper tantrum when Grady Fuson, the A's former head of scouting, takes high-schooler Jeremy Bonderman with a first-round pick. We all know how Bonderman turned out.
We've only got to page 16 and already Beane's weaknesses are on show. Fuson has a track record of producing decent drafts, yet Beane thinks DePodesta's laptop knows better. Beane later sent Bonderman, Carlos Pena, and Franklyn German to Detroit for Jeff Weaver, who he immediately sent to New York for Ted Lilly. We're in Scott Kazmir for Carlos Zambrano territory here, folks.
Taking high-schoolers with high draft picks is a Beane no-no. There's too much that can go wrong and (most of all) there's no stats to go on. It's an expensive gamble and the draft is about risk reduction, to Billy Beane.
The problem with that is that Alex Rodriguez was drafted as a high-schooler. So was Ken Griffey, Jr., Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and numerous others. Ignoring potential high school talent is no different to ignoring black or Latin players — it limits your talent pool.
Relying on stats compiled by athletic directors or even students on far away campuses hardly seems like science either. This isn't the Elias Sports Bureau — it's Morehead State on a Tuesday afternoon where it's 250 down right-field and the guy with the pencil is trying to catch the eye of Laura, who's an economics major from Pensacola.
Surely, there's a place for scouting in baseball talent evaluation, as well as computers? If you don't trust your scouts, fire them and get some you do. Relying on spreadsheets isn't scouting — it's fantasy baseball.
Moneyball's big first-round draft pick topic was Jeremy Brown, the fat catcher from Alabama. He's still stuck in the minors four years on and (at best) is projected as a low-power DH/1B type. There's hardly a shortage of those.
Not that Beane's drafts have sucked. Beane finds decent pitchers and the occasional useful bat, but he's hardly embarrassing his peers on draft day.
What Beane has never explained, to my knowledge, is why he doesn't draft high-schoolers with the relevant tools that have a high upside and trade them for cheapish veterans that fit his criteria (walks, OBP, and a bit of power). There's always a market for young players with speed, athleticism, and power and the A's are missing an opportunity to pick up useful veterans. He'll probably counter that it costs too much to sign them, but isn't that worth it compared to wasting picks on the likes of Brown, who come cheap to sign, but languish in the minors forever?
Beane also loves walks, OBP, and OPS. Nothing wrong with that, but there's also a place for moving runners across with "productive outs" (a term cultists despise) and steals.
Some hailed the Red Sox championship in 2004 as vindication of the value of OBP, walks, OPS, and the home run. In some senses it was, as Boston put men on base and wait for the sluggers like Ortiz and Ramirez to bring them home. But the signature play of that championship was Dave Roberts stealing second off Manny Rivera. A stolen base is heresy in the world of Billy Beane.
Without the Dave Roberts' steal Boston loses the ALCS and potentially endures more years of purgatory to the Evil Empire. All the walks, 12-pitch ABs and homers over the monster count for nothing without Roberts snagging second.
In actual fact, Oakland isn't a team that does OBP or OPS very well. It's all hype and smoke and mirrors. The roster may come cheap, but statistically they don't get on base and they don't slug all that well.
Oakland A's MLB rankings:OBP OPS RUNS TEAM ERA 2006 27 30 28 4 2005 14 20 9 6 2004 10 15 15 10 2003 21 20 14 2 2002 7 7 9 3
Since 2002, the A's have relied almost exclusively on pitching to keep them in ball games. They are contending in the AL West this year despite being an awful offensive team, their worst offensive performance under Beane.
JP Ricciardi, the Toronto GM, is trumpeted as an admirer of Beane, which he undoubtedly is. He began his reign in true Beane-style, firing scouts, dumping high-priced veterans, and signing cheap ones.
He didn't win enough ball games because Toronto plays in the ultra-competitive AL East, not the AL West. So last season, he changed tack. Winning ball games as cheaply as possible — the Beane mantra — was out. Winning ball games at any cost was in. The Jays went out and spent huge bucks on Troy Glaus, AJ Burnett, and BJ Ryan. They won more ball games and are in the hunt for the postseason for the first time in years.
Toronto's example is not to say that Beane is wrong. Clearly, the A's win ball games, as their excellent record indicates. They also do it on a shoestring budget. But so do the Minnesota Twins, yet nobody's eulogizing Terry Ryan, the GM, on FireJoeMorgan.com. They should as Ryan is one of the top-three GMs in the game.
Billy Beane has revolutionized baseball thinking and deserves all the plaudits he gets for his work in Oakland. Paul DePodesta, to my mind, did a solid job in Los Angeles and deserved a longer crack of the whip from the insane McCourts. But Beane should have taken the Boston job, though his personal life dictated he didn't want to. It would have been interesting to see how things would have transpired in Boston with Beane in command of the show. Professionally, he missed the boat.
September 1, 2006
Bucky Fay:
This column had some of the worst understanding of words I’ve seen in awhile.
First, as a descendent of a concentration camp survivor, I find it more than mildly offensive to see “facist” thrown around as easily as you use it.
Second, you cannot eulogize Terry Ryan until he is dead. This may be why nobody has eulogized him yet.
Third, you clearly don’t know what a cult is.
The firejoemorgan guys are “a cult in the true sense of the word”? Really? They brainwash their many followers, isolate them from the world, and deprive them of material possessions?
Other than that, and a fairly craptacular use of illogical rambling, this was at least accurate in its analysis of “The Best Damn Sports Show.”