My problem with “Moneyball” and Michael Lewis

In August of 2002 Lewis asked to interview me in regard to his research for his book eventually titled “Moneyball.” I agreed to cooperate but only with this firm condition in place, presented to him in writing.

I want to read before publication the sections that relate to our interview and point out to you any sections I think are inaccurate or misunderstood. I'm not seeking editorial approval. Whether you make any changes is up to you. It's your name on it, not mine.

Lewis agreed to honor that condition and acknowledged it was “very reasonable.” We did one brief interview over the phone. He estimated it would take about 45 minutes, and I doubt it was any longer than that. He suggested he might want to do a follow-up interview but I never heard from him again, and I assumed there would be nothing in the book that related to our interview. I was wrong. He briefly used our interview, including a couple of direct quotes, and had simply ignored my promised right to review and comment. When I called him on this breach of trust, he wrote:

“I'm sorry. …  I suppose what happened is that I assumed, after our interview, is that you wouldn't appear at all in the book. In the writing of the section about James you wound up appearing … in such a way that added nothing new to what had been written about you by Neyer and others and so I didn't think anything of it.”

His rationalization is a poor one. First, that was not the agreement. Second, even if that was exactly what others were writing – which wasn’t consistently true – that would not be the same as saying it was accurate. More important the perception would be their own, and they would not be offering it under the appearance of having come from me, of being supported by me.

How Mr. Lewis used our interview is exactly why I insisted on that condition in the first place. He manipulated what he got from my interview, used quotes out of context and surrounded by false context, to support the theme of that chapter and his overall story. My actual experience was an anomaly to his theme, which I think is why his first thought was to totally leave it out of the book, and then instead briefly mentioned it while inaccurately portraying it to fit his storyline.

If Mr. Lewis had honored our agreement and shared that section related to our interview, he would have gotten a letter like this.

You tell your reader I “spent many frustrating years” with the Rangers and imply this was around “the early 1990s.” That’s off by a whole decade. By the early 1990s I am already half-way through my 21-year career in the majors. I would hardly use an overall description of my years in Texas as “frustrating.” it is fair to say the first couple of years in Texas were more frustrating and understandably so given the handicap of the utter newness of this perspective. But that doesn’t mean “frustrating” should be the dominating adjective for those years. One could just as easily and with as much accuracy describe them as “rewarding.” But the really big error is your wording in your sentence – “… spent many frustrating years as the sabermetrician with the Texas Rangers, and then many more consulting other big league teams” – where you have incorrectly extrapolated that early frustration as continuing throughout my career. That is very, very wrong. By the end of the 1980s my career experience is overwhelmingly a rewarding one. I am greatly enjoying my work; it is respected, and I am well paid. By “the early 1990s” — the period you specifically mention, I am working as a year-round consultant with a team in each league and turning away offers of employment from other teams.

You quote Larry Lucchino describing a view of those taking a scientific perspective of the game as a “… cult. The cult status of it meant it was something that could be discarded easily.” Set aside that Lucchino is likely prejudiced, known for being unfairly dismissive of Eddie Epstein’s work, though I hear he eventually came around. The mere existence of such a view in those early years, even as a majority view, did not mean there was not a small pocket of teams and GMs with a more open and respectful view. Lucchino was never associated with a team that I worked with, and he certainly didn’t know me. We never met during my career, and the one time we spoke on the phone was shortly after my retirement, when I was trying to decide whether to take up an offer from Boston owner John Henry to come out of retirement to work for the Red Sox.

RE: Your use of my quote "I needed to be a GM if I was going to see my stuff ever used."

You used this without proper context to give a decidedly false impression. That was said in relation to my recent decision to retire from my full-time work with my ML clients. The way you place it and use it in this chapter, you make it sound as if the quote applies to my experiences during my career rather than about the radical stuff that I wanted to do if I were going to continue my career. After 21 years I had run into the ceiling of the work I could do as an advisor, and the ground-breaking ideas I had left in my bag were only likely to get implemented if I were a GM. But what you imply is that I was saying that most of my work during my career was not being used, which is nonsense and a zillion miles from the demonstrable truth.

RE: the quote "And I never even got asked to interview for a single GM job."

You also use this without context to further your theme that no one in baseball thought much of “sabermetrics” until Billy Beane, and that back then no one in baseball would envision someone from my perspective as a GM candidate. It was of course an extremely radical notion at that time, but you neatly steer away from why I sought such an interview — leaving it hanging as to whether it was hubris or whether there actually were some people in baseball who already had developed such respect for this approach that they could see it being useful in a GM.

It would have been a more accurate and complete picture if you had written: "With encouragement and recommendations from people he had worked with – GMs, assistant GMs and scouting directors – Wright applied for a handful of GM jobs as a dark horse candidate during the last eight years of his career, but he was never given an interview."

I realize that acknowledging that as early as 1994 there were a few GMs who were envisioning someone from my perspective being a GM, and recommending exactly that, would not fit with your theme of this section, which was:

“You could count on one hand the number of ‘sabermetricians’ inside of baseball, and none of them appear to have had much effect. After a while they seemed more like fans who second-guessed the general manager than advisors who influenced decisions. They were forever waving printouts to show how foolish the GM had been not to have taken their advice.”

Those are the exact sentences you used to lead into your brief mention of my career. Yet I didn’t tell you anything like that, and I’m sure you didn’t get it from any GM I ever worked with. Fred Claire and Tom Grieve have spoken publicly about how they valued my work and benefitted from it, though Grieve admitted to being a slow convert and wished he had given it more weight early on. In the same early 1990s period that you specifically reference as sabermetrics having no impact within the game, Tom was very serious about spending huge bucks to sign free agent pitcher Mike Moore, who had just had back-to-back 17-win seasons and was already one of the highest paid pitchers in the league. My report argued strongly against pursuing Moore, making a case that he was not just past his prime but that he had a very poor aging profile and was already starting to show signs of the beginning of a serious decline. Tom credits my report with changing his mind and his telling Moore’s agent he was no longer interested. Detroit gave Moore the same deal his agent had pitched to Tom, a big 3-year contract where he continued to be one of the highest paid starting pitchers. His ERAs in those three years went 5.22, 5.42, and 7.53 and then he never pitched again. One day I was visiting with Tom and he was remembering that averted disaster. He thanked me for keeping him from making what he said would have been the biggest mistake of his career. Tim Mead was the Assistant GM during my time working as year-round consultant to the Angels, and among his duties was being the liaison for my work. When I asked Mead about serving as a recommendation for a prospective new client, he readily agreed and, in his reply, wrote: “Your impact was felt by many” and also added, "I will long feel you would have been a great member of a front office staff in a high profile position.”

If you had been more open to the notion, I believe I could have gotten permission to share with you literally over 100 powerful examples from just my career alone. All my contracts were 1-year contracts. Do you really think teams are going to keep shelling out the money year after year just to have you give advice that they will ignore? All the teams lost huge amounts of money in the strike of 1994, and when it was over, a lot of teams were reducing their budget for front office personnel. More than a few folks had their positions either eliminated or they were let go to bring in someone who would do it cheaper. I had friends in traditional baseball jobs who started off their careers at roughly the same time as mine who suddenly found themselves out looking for jobs. When Fred Claire renewed our contract he mentioned his struggles with the budget reduction that was affecting people he dealt with face-to-face every day. He said he was bringing me back because at the bottom line the Dodgers were always getting their money’s worth.

And in selling your theme that this perspective had no impact in the game until Billy Beane came along, that’s not even true for the team you focused on, the Oakland A’s. Sandy Alderson, the prior GM, and Beane’s mentor of sorts, was an early advocate of using a sabermetric perspective build his roster, including acquiring a sleeper player snuck off the 1993 list of minor league free agents.

In January of 1994, Alderson made a late sign of Geronimo Berroa, an older MNL FA, an outfielder who would turn 29 in about six weeks. He was one of 11 outfielders in camp, and was described by the media as a “castoff from the expansion Marlins” who had a

“slim” chance of making the team as a reserve outfielder. But he hit his way on to the roster and soon became a regular, a well above-average regular at that. In his four years in Oakland he led the team in games played, had the team’s best batting average and only Mark McGwire had a higher OPS. By the measure of Win Shares, Berroa gave spectacular return for an overlooked “elderly” MNL FA.

And how do I know Alderson used a sabermetric perspective to nab this surprise sleeper?

Because I provided it. Sandy had an interest in my work. I already had my year-round client in the AL, so we couldn’t work together that way — and he also had an in-house guy, Eric Walker, doing similar work. But Sandy Had hired me for piece work, including being the first to use my Supplemental Advance Scouting Report for Post-Season Play, which he did multiple times, including when the A’s were World Champions in 1989.

My top pitcher in the 1993 MNL FA class was Billy Taylor, and the Dodgers had been interested but Taylor decided to sign with the A’s because they had a thin bullpen, which would make it easier for him to make the majors. I complimented Alderson on getting a good one and shared my report explaining why. I also decided to include my report on my #1 MNL FA, Geronimo Berroa. My year-round clients had declined my multiple recommendations of Berroa, and he had earned a shot. I didn’t want to see him fall through the cracks again. The A’s had been done with their MNL FA signings, but after reading my report Alderson signed Berroa and invited him to spring training as a non-roster player. Berroa did the rest.

RE: your sentence "He eventually quit his profession altogether."

You are clearly going way, way out of your way to make me sound like someone who in mid-career got fed up, couldn't take it anymore, and abruptly quit – particularly when you follow it with your account of Eddie Epstein’s career and write, “… he, too, wound up quitting in a huff.” Applying that to me is absolutely pure invention on your part.

It seems to me you have gone to great lengths to avoid ever mentioning to your reader that I had had a long career, that I worked full-time with the major league teams for 21 years. I had reached my financial goal for retirement. When I reached a point where I felt I had made about as much progress as I could hope for – at least in the context of the near future, I decided to leave baseball in an orderly manner by letting my contracts run out and move on to do the kind of work I had aspired to do in my retirement years.

Was there a level of dissatisfaction with my opportunities to progress in the near future? Sure, I had always directed my career along the route I wanted, and I liked being on the cutting edge. After a couple decades I had advanced to a point where I was starting to feel boxed in, hitting my head against a ceiling and feeling like I was marking time. But so what? It is literally no different than what is felt by a lot of other guys following a more traditional vein who have spent a long time in assistant GM and advisor roles. If I had been one of those guys, and it was under these same circumstances, I’m sure you realize you would not have characterized it that same way.

RE: General context of that section

Shortly after our interview I read an article by Rob Neyer giving a brief history of "sabermetricians" and I found myself balking at an assumption running through Rob's column, and I made a note that if you called again, that we should talk about that, for I had heard that same assumption in some of your questions. There's this idea, this story, that the pioneers in doing this type of work were knocking their heads against a wall and weren't able to accomplish much because the approach was just too new, too radical. Michael, you basically follow that storyline and expand it with their getting so frustrated, they conclude they were wasting their time, and quit.

That simply does not fit my experience, and I feel like you are trying to make me fit your account of Eddie Epstein’s view of his career. But my career in the majors was not like that. It started sooner, lasted longer, and compared to your account of Epstein’s view, I apparently had a lot more fun and greater satisfaction in my work and accomplishments. And I sometimes wonder if Epstein’s actual experience was that different and he just perceives it differently. People are funny in the way they perceive things, and mistaken expectations can make one man miserable where another is happy, even though their actual circumstances are much the same. I can't speak for the experience of others, but I can at least say for my own career that it doesn't really fit that story — your story.

Understand, I'm not saying there wasn't prejudice and unfairness to deal with. There certainly was, including certain GMs and teams who would never consider working with me or someone with a similar perspective. And even with the organizations that were glad to use certain services of mine, there would often be cases where someone in the organization would feel threatened and try to make things difficult. But the question is whether this level of prejudice was sufficient to keep me from being effective? The honest answer you denied yourself by not honoring our agreement is that, no, it wasn't much of a factor.

How much room does a pioneer need to build his beachhead? You certainly don't need every team coming after you. You can only do so much. And in regard to those who tried to interfere with my contributions, they weren't the ones who hired me, and unless they advanced into a significant position, they rarely succeeded in diminishing my effectiveness. In a lot of cases they only served to damage their own credibility and improve my own. (There is something relentless about the ability of good work to eventually shine through.)

Now this is not to say that I don't understand the sense of frustration expressed by, say, an Eddie Epstein. I'm just not convinced that this frustration ties as neatly to an idea that prejudice and resistance to new ideas was really able to stymie progress as much as they believe – or as you claim in this chapter. I see two ways that these frustration levels are simply emotion and perception rather than a reality of their lack of accomplishment.

A certain level of frustration is a common phenomenon among those in advisor roles regardless of whether their perspective is traditional or not. There are darn few advisors -- certainly darn few good ones -- who can honestly say they haven't longed for the role of the decision-maker. And it seems to me that they often mistakenly weigh their influence against the measure of the decision-maker rather than the other advisors. And by that mistaken measure they are of course going to feel frustrated.

And really, the level of frustration one feels, whether it is justified or not, that's just personal drama. Even if you could tie it to prejudice rather than simply an unfortunate side-effect to the advisor role – well, so what? It still doesn't have anything to do with objectively weighing how much you accomplish and how much you are listened to.

Sure, I didn't have the impact on the decision-making that the GM did, or whoever else was given the real weight of making the final decision. But such impact is largely defined by the job itself, and it wasn't my job to be that final decision maker. Comparing my impact to the GM isn't the right comparison for my judging whether I was being treated fairly enough to accomplish anything worthwhile.

Relative to my position, I believe I managed to accomplish a great deal in my career. If I honestly weigh my actual net contributions – and not what I could have contributed – I see that it only took me about a half dozen years before I started stacking up very well with all but the actual decision-makers.

I came into baseball at a time when barely anyone knew such incredibly basic stuff as who led the league in on-base average. There were no significant books of any kind on performance analysis. Bill James had never published anything that didn't come out of his garage. I knew absolutely no one in professional baseball. But thirteen years later I ask Fred Claire, a long-time GM and winner of the TSN Executive of the Year award if he thought I could do the job of a GM. (We had worked together at that point for five years.) He said, "Not only could you do this job, you'd be a good one," and he encouraged me to seek an interview for the GM vacancy in St. Louis with his recommendation. Tom Grieve, Roland Hemond, and Sandy Johnson all agreed with his assessment and added their recommendations. Yes, I didn’t get an interview, but just to have reached that first wave of backing for someone with that radical (at the time) perspective, wasn’t that incredible progress from where I started? But your book gives absolutely no sense of that and paints a completely opposite picture of nothing being accomplished at all.

I reached a point where my work was booming and I had to turn away work or refer it elsewhere. I was better paid than the best scout, and better than just about anybody but the GMs and scouting directors. I had fabulous job security that included leaving the game with two very good offers on the table and I got offers to return to full-time work in MLB for several years after. I got to significantly help the careers of hundreds of individual players, including leveling the playing field for a lot of sleeper players, making literal multi-millionaires out of players who had earned that opportunity but for some reason or another were slipping through the cracks and headed out of the game. I got to play a hugely significant role in the development of a non-prospect into a perennial All-Star. I got to play a role in the birth of a franchise and helped them have the most successful expansion draft ever.

Now how could I suggest with a straight face that I'd only been banging my head against a wall and never really accomplishing anything?

Again, this doesn't deny that there was unfairness at play. I had to be incredibly good at my job to accomplish what I did, while there were others guys with the "right background" who were being given equal say on certain matters even though some of them couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag. That's not fair. And, yes, it wasn't fair that I didn't get any kind of a shot to move from the chair of advisor to the chair of decision when even the weakest traditional candidates were almost guaranteed to get at least a courtesy interview. But none of that means progress wasn’t being made.

The simple existence of unfairness doesn't make it a winner. It doesn't mean that we’re stopped, wasting our time, or that we are not making very real contributions that shape the very landscape of the game. Geez, I hear pitching coaches like Bryan Price and Rick Peterson talking about some theories I brought into the game 15 to 20 years ago, and they speak of them with such acceptance today that you would think it was something learned at their grandfather's knee, something that has always been accepted.

But the “unfairness” that did exist could, and did, have an impact on the subjective perceptions of some of the people involved. It sometimes fueled a frustration that went beyond the fact that advisors are often inherently frustrated from the get-go. As a young teen-ager I was mildly involved in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and while it is not exactly the same analogy, I saw much the same thing happen back then. The unfairness picks away at folks and comes out in a form of frustration that blinds them from seeing and appreciating their very real and significant accomplishments.

If you get an Eddie Epstein talking about his years with Baltimore and San Diego, he may well bubble with frustration and say it was largely a waste as far as having any real impact. But is that the truth speaking or is it the frustration with the unfairness of not being able to do more? I personally believe that if he were to objectively go through his career, Eddie would see that he accomplished a heck of a lot. And certainly the length of his career suggests the clubs felt he was making real contributions.

I know the theme of your story fits with how some people already talk about and write about this period of evolution in baseball history. I can understand how you might have glossed over the distinctions I was trying to make in our interview and assumed it was simply more of the same. But if you had given me the chance you promised me, I could have brought you back to those distinctions and shown you that my own experience doesn't support that common view. I could also have shared with you my doubts about the significance of the frustration that these other pioneers expressed to you. Again, I can’t speak for them, but I don’t believe their experience was really all that different from mine, just their perception of it.

If so, then is it right to tell the story from the perspective of how they felt about what they accomplished, to the exclusion of what they actually did accomplish?

You should have kept your promise simply because you gave it, but there is no doubt that in that failure you denied yourself and your readers a better, or at least more honest, book.