If you’re a fan of the movie Moneyball, you might be interested in knowing how little Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s actually had to do with the data-driven revolution of the baseball we know today.
In fact, the man who developed the system the Athletics pioneered, first wrote its concepts exactly 20 years before Billy Beane was named general manager of the A’s.
We will get to the man who developed this system soon enough.
But first, let’s begin with the characters you already know and talk about some facts you may not be aware of.
Billy Beane & Moneyball:
Using Billy Beane as the centerpiece of the story makes all the sense in the world – being a former athlete, the man is already well known to many in the audience as the movie no doubt drew a lot of baseball fans.
It’s just too bad that the movie couldn’t cover all of the details from the Moneyball book.
One tidbit I found interesting is who Beane bunked with when he joined the Mets.
Did you know that Billy Beane once used to be roommates with Lenny Dykstra?
The funny thing about this relationship is that Billy was drafted in the first round of the same draft in which Dykstra would go unclaimed until the 13th round.
The draft snub aside, Dykstra would go on to be a star while Billy’s incredible potential vanished very quickly.
The difference between the two men, in the end, amounted to mindset.
While Billy couldn’t understand why he was struggling to bring his high school baseball success to the big leagues, Dykstra was unwavering in his belief he’d achieve great things.
One tale Billy mentioned about his time living with Lenny was about a night in which Dykstra came home to find him reading a book and telling him “Dude, you shouldn’t do that. That shit’ll ruin your eyes.”
Lenny’s attitude, paraphrased by Beane was, “I’m going to do nothing that will interfere with getting into the big leagues, including learning.”
Beane also added that “Lenny was perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball.”
Unfortunately Dykstra’s attitude didn’t rub off.
It was in 1990 – six years after his major league debut – that Billy finally realized that he was done going back and forth between the main roster and the minors and asked the front office to employ him as a scout.
The front office was initially taken aback by his request, seeing it as a voluntary demotion on Billy’s part, but granted him his request all the same.
This, of course, would lead Billy towards his future job as the general manager of the A’s – a position that was perhaps far better suited to his skill set than being on the actual baseball diamond.
What made Billy Beane such a renegade leader is that by the time he took over as GM of the Oakland Athletics, he had absorbed 12 books written by a man with such a different view of baseball, it would go on to change the game forever.
As mentioned earlier, we will talk about the man who wrote those books in a moment, but before that, we need to cover Billy’s second in command – a gentleman who had the deepest understanding of these books.
Meet Paul DePodesta:
In the Moneyball movie, Paul DePodesta was portrayed by Jonah Hill, though the character was named Peter Brand.
This would have to do with the fact that DePodesta did not approve of the way his character was portrayed.
These are DePodesta’s statements on the matter:
“There were a handful of things. Some were factual, others were more ephemeral.
Jonah was awesome. He was so respectful of me and my time. It would have been flattering to be portrayed by someone of his expertise. It had nothing to do with the casting.
I just could never get comfortable with the idea of somebody else portraying me to the rest of the world. Like any movie, to make it interesting, there has to be some conflict there. In some respects, a lot of the conflict is going to revolve around my character, and that was never really the case in reality
The other problem was I wasn’t all that interested in the attention. It had already happened from the book. And I didn’t necessarily need to relive it.”
Paul came from a different background than Billy. He graduated from Harvard with a distinction in economics. He had no professional sports experience.
What drew him to baseball was the fascination he developed for humanity’s irrationality while studying psychology in addition to economics.
This is why he found himself applying his very specific skill set to baseball instead of the financial sector.
Paul was a double threat – he was a numbers guy who absorbed the writings of the man behind moneyball like a sponge and had the capacity to also analyze a player’s mindset.
A perfect example of Paul’s alternative way of thinking is how he determined that the number of walks a player had was a clear indicator of how well that player understood the strike zone and how to control it.
Here’s a little known fact about Paul DePodesta: when he was 28, the Toronto Blue Jays offered to make him their GM. Should he have accepted, he would’ve been the youngest GM in MLB history.
Bill James:
So who was truly the man behind the Moneyball revolution?
That man is Bill James and he kicked off his career in 1977.
There are only a couple of vague mentions of Bill James’ work in the Moneyball movie, both of which are likely forgotten very quickly by most viewers.
While the DIY publishing movement at that time was largely owned by the punk rock movement, which self-published zines about their music and politics, Bill James was stapling his piles of Xeroxed baseball insights himself and selling them via tiny classified ads in The Sporting News.
When the first edition of his Baseball Abstracts went public, he sold 71 copies. This first run cost him $113 to produce – that would be $529 in today’s money.
This punk rock baseball movement would completely change the game of baseball almost three decades later.
Small as his initial fanbase was, it grew steadily through Bill’s merciless critiques of all that is held dear by conventional baseball stats compilers.
His science was eagerly absorbed by diehard baseball fans.
Bill’s view of how boxscores determined the value of a player was simple: “The statistics were not merely wrong – they lied,” he wrote.
So what exactly brought Bill to becoming a famed amateur writer?
It began with his studies of economics and literature at the University of Kansas – and then compounded once he had the misfortune of being drafted for the Vietnam war.
But he did have the good fortune of never being deployed into the field.
The moment that would change Bill’s life would be one nobody, perhaps even Bill himself would imagine.
The army assigned him a job as the night-watchman in the Stokely Van Camp pork and beans factory.
With long, empty hours on his hands, James would take to writing to pass the time – and that writing centered obsessively on baseball. He even felt his obsession needed explanation to his readers.
“I’d probably be a writer if there was no such thing as baseball. But because there is such a thing as baseball, I can’t imagine writing about anything else…
…both of my parents died of cancer, and I fully expect that it’s going to get me too, in time.
…I think about cancer research a few times a month; I think about baseball virtually every waking hour of my life.”
The Man Behind Moneyball’s Creation
One of the first readers of Bill’s Baseball Abstract was Dan Okrent, a writer at Sport Illustrated.
Dan was so drawn into Bill’s work that he actually flew out to Lawrence, Kansas to make sure Bill was a real person.
Once Bill’s existence was confirmed, Dan went on to write a profile piece about Bill for Sport Illustrated.
Unfortunately, the editorial team wasn’t as excited as Dan was about what he’d discovered in Bill’s work and they killed Dan’s story.
However, one of the editors who loved the piece and couldn’t get it out of his head asked Dan to resubmit it – a full year after he’d initially submitted it – and this time, the piece was published.
When the second edition of Bill’s Baseball Abstract was released, his readership grew to 250 readers.
While that number might seem small in the age of social media, it really amounted to a big deal in the 1970’s, especially considering Bill’s highly contrarian view of baseball stats.
By year four of Bill’s self-publishing career, he was receiving more reader mail than he could possibly handle.
Come 1984, Bill’s fledgling business would begin working with a company called STATS Inc, a struggling enterprise run by a man named Dick Cramer who was once quoted as saying “Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking.”
Finally, Bill had found someone in the world of business who shared his views on baseball statistics.
Founded in 1980, STATS Inc. set out to sell the same alternative metrics James espounded in his self-published abstracts to major league teams, but found no interest. Even when STATS Inc offered their stats for free, major league teams would still pass on the offer.
It was in 1985 that fans would become the beneficiaries of data company’s hard work as the company had given up trying to do business with the teams, especially when their first big sale of data to the Houston Astros resulted in a complete fiasco.
By this time, it had been 3 years since Ballantine Books published all of Bill’s work to date (which resulted in bestsellers) and introduced him to an even bigger audience (as well as proper financial recognition for his work).
With his labor of love now available to baseball fans on a wide scale, Bill’s work also altered the way fantasy sports would function.
At the end of the day, that only makes sense, doesn’t it?
If you’re not the one playing the game yourself, fantasy sports are just a series of increments cobbled together to achieve victory. The better your stack of stats is, the better your fantasy team will perform.
As his success grew, Bill would go on to invest in STATS Inc and become its creative director. Not long after his investment in the company, ESPN and USA Today both became clients.
In 1999 – 22 years after Bill James published his first Baseball Abstract, STATS Inc. was sold to Fox Sports for $45 million.
Come 2003, Bill was hired by the Boston Red Sox and while this resulted in him receiving four World Series rings, he’d go on to resign in 2019, citing that he had “fallen out of step with the organization.”
Here’s a fun fact: If Billy Beane had accepted the Red Sox’s offer to have him become their GM, he and his idol and inspiration, Bill James, would have gone on to work side-by-side.
Where is Bill Now?
At the time of this video, Bill is now in his seventies and, despite his prediction, cancer has not claimed him as it did his mother and father. I’m knocking on wood.
He was also wrong about his thought that he’d never be a “conventional” writer. Outside of his baseball writing, he’s written two novels – one of which was co-written with his daughter.
Success aside, Bill holds true to his statement that he simply cannot stop thinking about baseball and runs the site billjamesonline.com, where he interacts with baseball fans, writes articles and provides detailed player stats.
Outro
What I enjoyed most while learning about Bill James’ life is how the man followed his passion.
In business circles, you’ll hear one camp telling you to follow your passion and the money will follow.
While that is far from always being the case, it was great to see Bill write about what he loved most and become wealthy from it without actually chasing dollars.
Want to suggest future episodes? Go here.