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My Ngst About Moneyball
Baseball or Moneyball? As the World Series curtain rings down, and the Winter Meetings approach, is baseball a sport or an industry?

Brian ROSS
Sr. Editor

10.28.04 - OPINION - I believe in a baseball curse. Not the demonic goat diverting balls at Wrigley Field, or the ballyhooed spirit of the Babe hexing bats from the Green Monster, or the Chicaco Black Sox scandal of 1919.

Baseball's biggest curse is that it has become an industry.

"It's hard in any industry to let an employee go," Los Angeles Dodgers assistant general manager Kim Ng (pronounced "ANG") told American Way magazine in the October 15, 2005 edition. "It's really hard in this industry, because if the player's at the end of his career, there's a big question mark as to what he's going to do next."

You would think that the no. 2 behind former Beane-counter Dodger GM Paul DePodesta would know that baseball is a game. Its organized league play is a sport. Trying to make a buck at it, at best, is a business.

It has become a lousy business. The owner-player hatred of the early 20th century has settled into nasty arbitrations of ridiculous salaries where lousy players get astronomical sums because some arbitrator signed off on a bad deal before, and inspired players are permanently hobbled at the bargaining table with hyped inadequacies to keep their salaries in check.

With millions of dollars on the table, you just can't trust that old gut instinct the way the "old school" guys do. Under 30, business educated, and hip to the "science" of baseball, you know that players can be digested into a computer and spit out into a winning club, right?

Even my twelve year old, with his cocky complete world knowledge, knows better.

 

An industry takes raw materials and puts out a predictable product. Buy so much raw steel, plastic, glass and rubber, bang them around in the right way, and you have a car. A little alchemy in the design and manufacture happens, but it is a very quantifyable and calculatable product.

Baseball is a product made from the intangible dreams of children whose nerves, muscles, and sinew are molded into finished goods as adult ballplayers. A sputtering engine whose most successful pistons only fire three to four times in every ten.

These men injure. They worry. They delight and achieve. There is no computer fast enough to calculate how a player will play from one day to the next. No formula tracking stats or scouting notes to determine if a family tragedy or a change in lucky socks will lead to a series run or a serious slump. No chart that predicts how nine players are going to gel over a long season.

On paper, the Houston Astros at the end of 2005 were a pretty good team. Talk to anyone off the record about their manager and some of the coaches, though, and you got a picture of frustration and uncertainty that had implosion written all over it. That they got to the World Series using the mushroom theory of management (Keep 'em in the dark, feed 'em full of manure) was a miracle that also doesn't reveal itself on a front office spreadsheet.

The "science" of baseball has been a dismal failure. Pitch counts extend careers into semi-productive mediocrity. The ghost in Field of Dreams was wrong: Go the distance, only if you haven't thrown more than 125 times. We keep pitchers longer, preserve their multi-million dollar deals, but we lose a lot of the stamina and courage that made heroes of Koufax, Drysdale, Ryan.

Conditioning and drugs have sharpened the bodies. Has this produced a bumper crop of Ted Williamses? Hank Aarons? Overall, if you deduct steroid-induced performances, modern baseball players have achieved less with more than their peers from the first half of the 20th century. Maybe the Babe had something with his Beers and Broads regimen. At least those won't tarnish his record to the degree that a Barry Bonds will experience with his "supplements."

If the Oakland Athletics, the high priests of moneyball, or the DePodesta desciple-Dodgers turned out winning franchises year after year, we would have an industry. DePodesta is gone because the Dodgers produced another string of lousy clubs under his watch. Ng, a very talented exec who survived Paul's purges because she can embrace both "schools" is being interviewed for her boss' old job. She's smart and she breaks a lot of old-boy racial and gender lines if she gets the gig, for which we applaud her. Ms. Ang though, needs to step back to her old school roots if the Dodgers are to have a hope of success. The sign on her desk should be a variation of the Clinton campaign's election mantra: "It's the Game, stupid."

In the minors, the game still lives: The pitchers' complete game, stealing home, and balls-out play still are the rule of the day. There is no tomorrow for those who give less than 110%.

The game of Ty Cobb and Willy Stargell and Cal Ripken is still healthy in Memphis and Aberdeen, beyond the mental pollution of moneyball's major league factories, where GMs and sports "super" agents play a different game. These industry smokestacks spew pollutants like moneyball at a sound-byte hungry media, touting their shuffing of overpriced, misused, often untalented players from team to team and storing them like so much government cheese.

When guys with ERAs that can cause nose bleeds can get half a million or better, while more talented pitchers languish in the minors because they don't have big enough signing bonuses to rival these prior bad calls by GMs, there is something very wrong with the industry.

It is telling that at the height of the Me era of baseball, clubs like the Angels, Marlins, and White Sox win World Series with what the New York sports mafia would term 'nobody' teams. They continue to prove that old-school rules and raw talent can take 400-lb. gorilla superstar teams with astronomical payrolls at a fraction of the price.

The real competition in baseball isn't the product on the field. It's the fight for the soul of the sport. Sadly, the odds are in favor of the MBAs, lawyers, and big corporations choking major league professional sports to death.

Gimme the game. Stuff the industry.