WEBVTT - Michael Lewis, Sportswashing, Jimmy Butler is Caffeinated 0:00:03.080 --> 0:00:06.520 On this episode of Sports Illustrated Weekly, s I senior 0:00:06.559 --> 0:00:10.440 writer Michael Rosenberg reads his essay on how authoritarian regimes 0:00:10.440 --> 0:00:14.160 like China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia use sports for their 0:00:14.160 --> 0:00:18.320 political benefit. And later, you probably have a coffee fanatic 0:00:18.320 --> 0:00:21.079 in your life. You might even be that fanatic. But 0:00:21.160 --> 0:00:24.280 whether or not you drink coffee, you're probably not nearly 0:00:24.400 --> 0:00:27.880 as into it as Jimmy Butler. SI staffer Rohan not 0:00:28.040 --> 0:00:31.000 Crinny tells us just how much the Heat Star really 0:00:31.040 --> 0:00:35.640 loves coffee. But first, our conversation with best selling author 0:00:35.680 --> 0:00:38.919 Michael Lewis, some twenty years after he began the reporting 0:00:39.000 --> 0:00:44.080 on Moneyball. It's April. I'm your host, John Gonzalez from 0:00:44.080 --> 0:00:48.519 Sports Illustrated and I Heart Radio. This is Sports Illustrated Weekly. 0:00:55.440 --> 0:00:59.480 You're not going to bring in one but three defective 0:00:59.480 --> 0:01:04.399 players to replace job this bill James book. I am. 0:01:04.760 --> 0:01:07.000 This is the new direction of the open heads. We 0:01:07.040 --> 0:01:10.440 are card counts at the Black Jet take. We're gonna 0:01:10.440 --> 0:01:15.240 turn the odds on the casino. It's been two decades 0:01:15.280 --> 0:01:17.560 since Michael Lewis started the reporting that would lead to 0:01:17.600 --> 0:01:21.000 his best selling book, Moneyball. Lewis joins me to discuss 0:01:21.040 --> 0:01:24.280 the reception and pushback he got from sports executives back then, 0:01:24.959 --> 0:01:28.480 how analytics have taken over sports as a result, and 0:01:28.520 --> 0:01:31.000 why the man at the center of Moneyball isn't as 0:01:31.080 --> 0:01:34.600 thrilled as you might think with the revolution he helped create. 0:01:37.280 --> 0:01:40.600 Michael Lewis, Welcome to Sports Illustrated Weekly. That's an honor 0:01:40.640 --> 0:01:43.119 to be here, honor to have you. It has been, 0:01:43.160 --> 0:01:46.280 as we were discussing before the show, twenty years since 0:01:46.319 --> 0:01:48.600 you called up Billy Bean and started working on Moneyball. 0:01:49.120 --> 0:01:52.400 And I would imagine that you knew about Bill James 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:54.680 ahead of time. You figured this would make a perfect 0:01:54.880 --> 0:01:57.840 intersection for your book. Tell us about Bill James and 0:01:57.840 --> 0:01:59.880 how you found him and why you wanted to write 0:02:00.000 --> 0:02:03.800 about his particular area of expertise. So, actually, I've never 0:02:03.800 --> 0:02:05.920 heard of Bill James when I called up Billy Bean. 0:02:06.000 --> 0:02:09.200 I call up Billy Bean because I really had the question, like, 0:02:09.320 --> 0:02:11.799 how are you winning games if you have no money? 0:02:11.840 --> 0:02:14.960 Like why isn't this market more efficient? Like why if 0:02:15.200 --> 0:02:17.160 the Yankees have four times more money than you, they 0:02:17.200 --> 0:02:18.640 should buy all the best players and just beat you 0:02:18.639 --> 0:02:20.359 all the time. I just didn't understand the answer to 0:02:20.400 --> 0:02:24.200 that question. And when I got to him. He was 0:02:24.240 --> 0:02:27.360 the one who told me about Bill James and his existence, 0:02:27.360 --> 0:02:29.560 and in fact, he had all of Bill james early 0:02:29.600 --> 0:02:33.000 abstracts on his bookshelf. And when he come out of 0:02:33.040 --> 0:02:36.120 being a player, he had been introduced by Sandy Alderson 0:02:36.360 --> 0:02:38.960 now runs METS. I think to the work of Bill 0:02:39.040 --> 0:02:42.000 James and an idea of kind of rethinking baseball from 0:02:42.000 --> 0:02:44.800 the ground up. So that's how I discovered Bill James, 0:02:44.800 --> 0:02:47.880 and he Bill James got me through Moneyball. He was 0:02:47.919 --> 0:02:51.440 the intellectual heart of the thing. He was this guy who, 0:02:51.800 --> 0:02:54.280 well before he had a personal computer, well before there 0:02:54.320 --> 0:02:57.160 was a data geek anything anybody was even thinking about data. 0:02:57.680 --> 0:03:00.520 He was cutting box scores out of new papers and 0:03:00.560 --> 0:03:03.960 trying to assemble, you know, better statistics for baseball players, 0:03:03.960 --> 0:03:09.240 and was kind of rethinking the game and started self 0:03:09.320 --> 0:03:13.840 publishing this book in what nineteen seventies seven, I think 0:03:14.280 --> 0:03:16.200 it was called The abstruct And you had to mail 0:03:16.280 --> 0:03:18.480 him a check and he would staple together his mimeograph 0:03:18.560 --> 0:03:21.320 copy and send it back out. And it's really an 0:03:21.360 --> 0:03:27.760 interesting moment in intellectual history because you have this this thing, baseball. 0:03:28.200 --> 0:03:32.119 It's been played the same way forever, and you've got 0:03:32.160 --> 0:03:36.640 these baseball experts supposedly who were running the teams. And 0:03:36.680 --> 0:03:39.160 then you've got this guy. He's actually in a He 0:03:39.240 --> 0:03:42.400 was guarding a stokely Van Camp's pork and bean factory 0:03:42.400 --> 0:03:44.840 at night, working on this thing in in the middle 0:03:44.840 --> 0:03:48.920 of Kansas, questioning things like is the stolen base worth it? 0:03:49.200 --> 0:03:52.200 Or does the runner steal off the picture of the catcher? 0:03:52.320 --> 0:03:55.200 Or is this guy's batting statistics actually more valuable than 0:03:55.320 --> 0:03:58.440 this guy's batting statistics? Or where do runs come from? 0:03:58.480 --> 0:04:04.960 And he was it nord by the inside forever fifteen years, 0:04:05.400 --> 0:04:07.920 and the inside kept running itself the way it always 0:04:08.000 --> 0:04:12.520 ran itself until the wall fell down, and his insights 0:04:13.000 --> 0:04:16.440 in the hands of the next generation data geeks with 0:04:16.520 --> 0:04:20.560 computers end up overrunning the game. So he he was 0:04:20.600 --> 0:04:25.320 the intellectual heart of moneyball. But when I wrote the book, 0:04:25.720 --> 0:04:28.120 I was interested in what he had written, but I 0:04:28.200 --> 0:04:32.120 didn't really dig too deeply into him personally. And when 0:04:32.120 --> 0:04:33.960 I came back to this podcast this season, the podcast 0:04:34.000 --> 0:04:36.120 of Against Rules is about experts, I did think that, 0:04:36.200 --> 0:04:38.640 like this was an important moment in the history of 0:04:38.640 --> 0:04:42.040 experts when the person who who was the expert wasn't 0:04:42.040 --> 0:04:44.520 the person who played the game, who had the experience 0:04:44.520 --> 0:04:47.040 of the thing. It was this intellectual who was thinking 0:04:47.080 --> 0:04:49.599 about it from the outside, and I want to go 0:04:49.600 --> 0:04:51.080 back and find just talk to him about how it 0:04:51.120 --> 0:04:52.760 had happened in the first place. So that's how he 0:04:52.800 --> 0:04:55.800 walks into the podcast. But in many ways he's more 0:04:55.839 --> 0:04:58.440 interesting than the people came that came after him. He 0:04:58.520 --> 0:05:02.480 sees the world in a messier way than the data 0:05:02.520 --> 0:05:06.160 geeks who now run the sports world, and he is 0:05:06.480 --> 0:05:11.800 someone ambivalent about the revolution that he that he created. Yeah, 0:05:11.880 --> 0:05:14.240 I'm really interested in that part. And you know it's 0:05:14.240 --> 0:05:17.240 amazing to me, first just as a journalist that you know, 0:05:17.279 --> 0:05:18.840 you call it Billy Bean and you talked to him, 0:05:18.839 --> 0:05:20.360 and he goes, oh, yeah, you should talk to this guy, 0:05:20.360 --> 0:05:23.800 Bill James, because how fortuitous, Like that's what we all 0:05:23.880 --> 0:05:26.600 dream about. You had him, as you mentioned on your 0:05:26.600 --> 0:05:28.919 podcast Against the Rules, and he said to you that 0:05:29.000 --> 0:05:31.880 he once looked at a baseball diamond and what he 0:05:31.920 --> 0:05:34.839 saw was a field of ignorance. And he was talking 0:05:34.839 --> 0:05:36.839 about baseball, but he could have been talking about football 0:05:36.920 --> 0:05:40.719 or soccer or basketball, and that kind of language. That 0:05:40.800 --> 0:05:43.719 kind of I look at this in a different way 0:05:43.720 --> 0:05:45.400 than the way that you look at this because you're 0:05:45.440 --> 0:05:48.120 not really thinking about it, I would imagine creates some 0:05:48.240 --> 0:05:53.080 enemies for him. No. Yes, though he's a hard person 0:05:53.600 --> 0:05:58.039 to dislike because his basic pose is I don't know. 0:05:58.600 --> 0:06:01.400 You don't know either, and I don't know that I'm 0:06:01.440 --> 0:06:04.000 open to the possibility there are things I don't know. 0:06:04.400 --> 0:06:07.320 There's a deep humility about him, even though it feels 0:06:07.360 --> 0:06:09.200 like an arrogance to come at the game that you 0:06:09.240 --> 0:06:12.400 didn't ever play and tell everybody that how they're thinking 0:06:12.400 --> 0:06:16.680 about it is wrong. He was identifying logical inconsistencies, but 0:06:16.760 --> 0:06:19.320 always open to the possibility that, like, he's not right, 0:06:19.400 --> 0:06:23.719 he's not sure. The movement he created, oh my god, 0:06:23.800 --> 0:06:26.320 it was a war when the book came out. There's 0:06:26.320 --> 0:06:28.760 only I think one other book in my career that 0:06:28.920 --> 0:06:32.800 triggered a firestorm the way Moneyball triggered a firestorm, and 0:06:32.839 --> 0:06:34.880 that was Flashboys. And that was because Flashboys was trying 0:06:34.880 --> 0:06:36.960 to take billions of dollars away from Wall Street people, 0:06:37.360 --> 0:06:39.560 and you don't take money away from Ball Street people 0:06:39.560 --> 0:06:43.800 without a huge fight. But Moneyball, I didn't completely anticipate 0:06:43.920 --> 0:06:48.720 this being the kind of the vehicle for popularizing Bill 0:06:48.880 --> 0:06:51.760 James type thinking and said and It was effectively saying 0:06:52.160 --> 0:06:55.919 to the rest of baseball that these guys kind of 0:06:55.960 --> 0:06:59.320 know what they're doing and you kind of don't, because 0:06:59.360 --> 0:07:01.960 they're actually paying attention to this thinking that's been going 0:07:02.000 --> 0:07:05.359 on outside the game for the last fifteen years. Deeply 0:07:05.440 --> 0:07:08.719 offended a lot of people in baseball. I mean, I 0:07:08.720 --> 0:07:11.240 can remember when the book came out, there was an 0:07:11.240 --> 0:07:15.920 emergency meeting of baseball scouts in New Orleans devoted to 0:07:16.520 --> 0:07:19.000 the book and how they were going to argue back 0:07:19.040 --> 0:07:22.560 against the book because their jobs were risking. They weren't wrong, 0:07:22.960 --> 0:07:26.280 I mean, there really was a changing of the guard 0:07:26.680 --> 0:07:29.760 and the people. The big thing that happened and the 0:07:29.800 --> 0:07:33.160 only reason the book kind of gained real traction in 0:07:33.200 --> 0:07:37.000 the game, I think is that my reader base. Before that, 0:07:37.320 --> 0:07:39.480 a lot of Wall Street people read Red Liars Poker, 0:07:40.080 --> 0:07:44.840 and this thing landed in the lapse of either the 0:07:44.960 --> 0:07:48.240 kind of people who own baseball teams or the kind 0:07:48.240 --> 0:07:50.640 of people who were friends and financial advisors of the 0:07:50.680 --> 0:07:53.440 people who own baseball teams. And I know there were 0:07:53.480 --> 0:07:56.160 several cases where someone handed it an owner of the 0:07:56.200 --> 0:07:59.040 book and said, your guys who are running your team 0:07:59.280 --> 0:08:03.160 are wasting your money. Read this and it was at 0:08:03.160 --> 0:08:05.840 the owner level when they came down into the organization 0:08:05.880 --> 0:08:07.920 and said, what are you doing? This makes total sense, 0:08:08.440 --> 0:08:10.920 and what these guys in Oakland are doing makes total sense, 0:08:10.960 --> 0:08:12.120 and I want to do that. I don't want to 0:08:12.120 --> 0:08:14.640 do whatever you've been doing is it doesn't make any sense. 0:08:15.160 --> 0:08:20.200 And um, that infuriated the management class in baseball, and 0:08:20.240 --> 0:08:23.320 there was it was a war. I mean because the 0:08:23.320 --> 0:08:27.160 management class and the scouting class they're the sources for 0:08:27.240 --> 0:08:31.160 sports journalists. I mean, their friends are the daily baseball writers. 0:08:31.680 --> 0:08:35.800 So the baseball writers were by extension not terribly happy. 0:08:36.240 --> 0:08:38.959 And there was this other thing. There was other undercurrent 0:08:39.160 --> 0:08:41.960 of the response. When I first went in to see 0:08:41.960 --> 0:08:45.280 Billy Bean and I said, asked him this question, how 0:08:45.320 --> 0:08:48.160 are you competing? Like what's going on here? If the 0:08:48.160 --> 0:08:50.560 market's efficient, you should not be able to win. He said, well, 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:52.960 the market is not efficient, and he said, no one's 0:08:53.000 --> 0:08:55.800 asked me the question you just asked me. And I 0:08:55.920 --> 0:08:58.560 spend my life thinking of in those terms, like a 0:08:58.600 --> 0:09:01.360 Wall Street trader, like how do I find value? How 0:09:01.360 --> 0:09:04.160 do I measure the value of the players. I'm spending 0:09:04.200 --> 0:09:06.880 all my time thinking about money and the value of 0:09:06.880 --> 0:09:10.080 the players. But sports journalism isn't all that interested in 0:09:10.080 --> 0:09:13.960 the subject. So there was this feeling that there was 0:09:14.000 --> 0:09:21.040 this wonderful material that had gone neglected by traditional sports journalists, 0:09:21.480 --> 0:09:23.520 and it was offensive that this person who was an 0:09:23.520 --> 0:09:27.040 outsider walked in and sort of plucked the material. So 0:09:27.080 --> 0:09:30.200 there was I got some grief for that reason. But 0:09:30.440 --> 0:09:32.360 it did trigger this war, and the war was the 0:09:32.360 --> 0:09:35.000 battle lines was that. You know, it was a little overstated. 0:09:35.040 --> 0:09:38.080 But on the one hand, you had these data geeks 0:09:38.080 --> 0:09:41.000 with computers who never played the game, and another hand, 0:09:41.000 --> 0:09:43.559 you had the former minor leaguer who thought that he 0:09:43.720 --> 0:09:45.760 was working his way up through the scouting department to 0:09:45.840 --> 0:09:48.560 being an assistant GM to hoping run a team one day. 0:09:48.840 --> 0:09:54.959 And those two people did not always see eye to eye. Okay, 0:09:55.360 --> 0:09:57.680 people who run ball clubs that they think in terms 0:09:57.720 --> 0:10:02.400 of buying players, your goal shouldn't be to buy players. 0:10:02.400 --> 0:10:05.600 Your goal should be to buy winds, and in order 0:10:05.640 --> 0:10:09.360 to buy wins, you need to buy runs. Baseball thinking 0:10:09.440 --> 0:10:13.400 is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions. And 0:10:13.440 --> 0:10:16.840 if I say it to anybody, I'm I'm ostracized. I'm 0:10:17.040 --> 0:10:21.559 I'm a leverer. So on your podcast when you had 0:10:21.559 --> 0:10:23.800 Bill James on you guys had this great exchange that 0:10:23.920 --> 0:10:27.320 perfectly framed that where you said to him people running 0:10:27.320 --> 0:10:30.680 baseball at the time weren't thinking, and Bill James replied, well, 0:10:30.720 --> 0:10:33.520 why weren't they thinking because they thought they knew right, 0:10:33.520 --> 0:10:35.440 which was just I thought that was so perfect. And 0:10:35.520 --> 0:10:39.559 now twenty years on, math is one out, Michael. I mean, 0:10:39.640 --> 0:10:41.600 the math is here to say it's not going anywhere, 0:10:41.640 --> 0:10:45.120 but that war that you mentioned is still being even 0:10:45.120 --> 0:10:46.959 though it's been fought and one by the people who 0:10:47.000 --> 0:10:50.959 have adopted and embraced the math, there's still that stuck 0:10:51.360 --> 0:10:55.120 dug in recalcitrant faction to think that they can still 0:10:55.120 --> 0:10:57.000 fight and win this war even though the war is over. 0:10:57.280 --> 0:11:00.560 And it's that jocks and nerds culture are line like 0:11:00.600 --> 0:11:02.960 you have the inside the NBA guys right like Shack 0:11:03.160 --> 0:11:05.200 and Charles Barkley, Shacks saying that there needs to be 0:11:05.200 --> 0:11:08.480 more post ops or Charles Barkley saying things like jump 0:11:08.520 --> 0:11:11.120 shooting teams can't win the NBA title back before the 0:11:11.160 --> 0:11:14.240 Golden State Warriors did it, which makes them look like 0:11:14.280 --> 0:11:16.920 what they are like. They haven't paid attention to this movement, 0:11:17.120 --> 0:11:20.480 But I'm wondering what you and also Bill James thinks 0:11:20.480 --> 0:11:23.920 about this that we've got this era of sports now 0:11:23.960 --> 0:11:27.079 that is hyper reliant on the numbers. It's gone very 0:11:27.160 --> 0:11:30.000 much the other way. Yeah, in a way that really 0:11:30.040 --> 0:11:33.760 irritates Bill James, I think, because of course, well partly 0:11:33.800 --> 0:11:36.680 because I mean, it irritated him back in the day. 0:11:37.280 --> 0:11:40.360 He walks away from his self published book after it's 0:11:40.400 --> 0:11:44.080 exploded and become a real published, best selling phenomenon in 0:11:44.120 --> 0:11:47.920 the mid eighties or late eighties, because he said people 0:11:47.960 --> 0:11:50.920 were fetishizing the numbers. The numbers were never the point. 0:11:50.960 --> 0:11:54.200 The point was understanding, and people started throwing around numbers 0:11:54.200 --> 0:11:56.200 without a whole lot of meaning attached. And you see, 0:11:56.280 --> 0:11:58.480 you know you do here now, announcers. It's just like 0:11:58.559 --> 0:12:00.480 a blizzard of numbers. And some of the means something 0:12:00.520 --> 0:12:02.920 and some of them don't. And it's like numbers are 0:12:02.920 --> 0:12:04.760 a smart way to talk about sports, and that's not 0:12:04.800 --> 0:12:09.720 necessarily true. So James himself, he says, it's kind of funny. 0:12:09.760 --> 0:12:13.400 In his last book, his Last Abstract, he writes a 0:12:13.440 --> 0:12:16.240 long letter to the reader that basically says, I hate you. 0:12:16.800 --> 0:12:20.559 I'm stopping writing this book because I found increasingly that 0:12:20.640 --> 0:12:24.200 I don't like my readers and the letters I'm getting 0:12:24.760 --> 0:12:27.120 causing me to dislike you even more, so I don't 0:12:27.160 --> 0:12:29.120 want to write for you anymore. And what he was 0:12:29.160 --> 0:12:33.560 objecting to was people thinking that he had all the 0:12:33.600 --> 0:12:35.880 answers and they had all the answers, when really what 0:12:35.960 --> 0:12:39.520 he had his questions, and he wanted to preserve the 0:12:39.559 --> 0:12:43.400 space of uncertainty of like, you know, let's figure more 0:12:43.520 --> 0:12:47.000 stuff out. And he felt like he was increasingly surrounded 0:12:47.000 --> 0:12:49.600 by kind of smart asses who thought they knew everything, 0:12:50.120 --> 0:12:54.480 and so he's not a really good example of one 0:12:54.559 --> 0:12:56.520 side of this war. And in fact, when he goes 0:12:56.559 --> 0:12:58.240 to work, he ends up being hired by the Boston 0:12:58.240 --> 0:13:02.520 Red Sox after the Boston Socks geekify themselves, and he 0:13:02.600 --> 0:13:05.520 finds the people he gets along with the most naturally 0:13:05.520 --> 0:13:08.640 are the Scouts, the old Scouts, And he took him 0:13:08.640 --> 0:13:11.880 a while to figure out why that was. But part 0:13:11.880 --> 0:13:14.559 of it was that, he says, a lot of those 0:13:14.559 --> 0:13:17.600 Scouts do they didn't know they themselves had a kind 0:13:17.600 --> 0:13:19.720 of humility about them because they made They had so 0:13:19.760 --> 0:13:22.000 many examples of like the betting on a guy and 0:13:22.080 --> 0:13:24.240 he didn't work out, or missing a guy who did 0:13:24.280 --> 0:13:29.520 work out. But the current state of things is curious 0:13:29.600 --> 0:13:32.800 because before when the experts were the people who played 0:13:32.800 --> 0:13:37.400 were insiders. The wall they created between themselves and the 0:13:37.440 --> 0:13:40.520 rest of the world the outsiders was you never played. 0:13:41.720 --> 0:13:46.040 The wall that the insiders create now is you're not smart. 0:13:46.679 --> 0:13:50.640 It's more complicated than you would understand, and the wall 0:13:50.720 --> 0:13:54.160 is sort of offensive. Um, there was a war the 0:13:54.240 --> 0:13:57.880 math people won. There's still these holdouts, but the holdout 0:13:57.920 --> 0:14:00.800 sirt in baseball. They're not a lot holdouts. There's not 0:14:00.800 --> 0:14:02.440 a lot of people will say, oh, yeah, the dad. 0:14:02.559 --> 0:14:05.400 But what people will say that they've made the game boring, 0:14:05.880 --> 0:14:08.160 and that's not a false charge. But there a lot 0:14:08.160 --> 0:14:10.560 of people on TV who go on TV and say 0:14:10.600 --> 0:14:12.679 that teams would be better off if they just got 0:14:12.720 --> 0:14:16.920 rid of all this sophisticated data analysis. Yeah, you're right. 0:14:16.960 --> 0:14:20.240 The holdouts tend to be sort of the older players 0:14:20.240 --> 0:14:23.160 who did play, who still rely on that I played, 0:14:23.200 --> 0:14:26.240 you didn't. I know you don't, which is comical now, 0:14:26.680 --> 0:14:29.520 and you know, I would guess an aging section of 0:14:29.680 --> 0:14:33.640 fans of different sports. I'm wondering when you started writing 0:14:33.640 --> 0:14:35.320 this book if you ever thought we'd get to this 0:14:35.360 --> 0:14:38.280 spot where not only did the math went out, but 0:14:38.320 --> 0:14:41.480 it's so radically altered, not just baseball but basketball. I 0:14:41.480 --> 0:14:44.320 mean basketball now is you're getting to the rim, or 0:14:44.360 --> 0:14:47.760 you're shooting threes, and everything in between is verboten. So 0:14:47.800 --> 0:14:49.840 I'm wondering if you expected it to go to this 0:14:49.960 --> 0:14:53.040 kind of extreme. I thought the book was going to 0:14:53.120 --> 0:14:55.560 have a different effect. I thought the book was going 0:14:55.600 --> 0:14:59.160 to cause people to rethink how they valued people in 0:14:59.200 --> 0:15:01.840 some places that it I wasn't really thinking of, like, oh, 0:15:01.880 --> 0:15:03.960 this is going to have a big effect on baseball. 0:15:04.360 --> 0:15:06.800 I guess I did think that, look, this is so 0:15:06.880 --> 0:15:09.640 obviously a superior way to run a baseball team that 0:15:10.000 --> 0:15:12.240 other people are certainly going to adopt it. But I 0:15:12.240 --> 0:15:15.080 didn't follow through it through to its natural conclusion where 0:15:15.080 --> 0:15:17.960 that would leave the game and then it would slow 0:15:18.000 --> 0:15:20.200 down the game and make it a game of strikeouts, 0:15:20.200 --> 0:15:22.880 walks and home runs. And and it's not necessarily true 0:15:22.880 --> 0:15:28.080 that the geekification, the intellectualization are the smarter playing of 0:15:28.120 --> 0:15:31.280 the games is necessarily more boring. True, and baseball, it 0:15:31.400 --> 0:15:34.440 just turns out the efficient strategy given the game is 0:15:34.480 --> 0:15:37.920 a duller strategy. Basketball, I think is much more exciting 0:15:38.080 --> 0:15:40.680 because people figured out the value of the three porch shot. 0:15:40.760 --> 0:15:42.400 I mean, it's just a much more fun game to watch. 0:15:42.520 --> 0:15:44.360 Mid rain Jumper is a sort of the most boring 0:15:44.480 --> 0:15:48.120 thing on the court and and football. It's led to 0:15:48.160 --> 0:15:49.960 the opening up of the game, you know, the passing 0:15:49.960 --> 0:15:51.720 game over the running game. The passing game is much 0:15:51.760 --> 0:15:54.760 more fun to watch. So it isn't that the intellectuals 0:15:54.880 --> 0:15:57.200 necessarily make the game more boring and based. It's just 0:15:57.280 --> 0:16:00.320 in baseball it so happens, that is true. But I 0:16:00.520 --> 0:16:02.440 know the answer to your question. I did not see 0:16:02.520 --> 0:16:05.480 coming great changes in the way the game was played. 0:16:05.600 --> 0:16:10.040 Especially I didn't find myself wondering what the frontiers were 0:16:10.520 --> 0:16:12.480 because way back then it was also I mean, it 0:16:12.520 --> 0:16:15.280 was pretty rude metry stuff. They were like people thought 0:16:15.360 --> 0:16:17.720 r B I s were a really valuable statists, and 0:16:17.920 --> 0:16:20.440 people weren't paying attention on base percentage and that kind 0:16:20.440 --> 0:16:25.800 of stuff. I did wonder once the inefficiency got beaten 0:16:25.840 --> 0:16:28.560 out of the game by if everybody was kind of 0:16:28.560 --> 0:16:31.360 doing what the Oakland a's were doing, where an Oakland 0:16:31.520 --> 0:16:35.360 is like outfit would get an edge And still find 0:16:35.360 --> 0:16:38.200 myself wondering a bit because I was wondering, I didn't 0:16:38.560 --> 0:16:41.000 the only guilty sensation I felt when I was writing 0:16:41.040 --> 0:16:44.520 the book was after I published this. Billy Bean's done that, 0:16:44.680 --> 0:16:46.240 as I probably says, he's no longer going to have 0:16:46.280 --> 0:16:48.720 an edge, where is he going to find the edge? 0:16:49.200 --> 0:16:51.640 So anyway then answers, I didn't really see the game 0:16:51.720 --> 0:16:54.240 changing the way it's changed. I was also struck in 0:16:54.240 --> 0:16:56.400 your conversation with Bill James, when you guys were talking 0:16:56.400 --> 0:17:00.200 about I mean again, he's one of the godfathers of 0:17:00.320 --> 0:17:04.080 this movement, and yet there are considerable parts of it 0:17:04.119 --> 0:17:06.200 that he does not like. Where you had brought up 0:17:06.240 --> 0:17:09.720 to him different statistics like war wins above replacement, and 0:17:09.840 --> 0:17:13.160 he's not on board with that particular stat And I'm 0:17:13.160 --> 0:17:15.760 wondering if this is, you know, Frankenstein looking at his 0:17:15.840 --> 0:17:18.840 monster and wondering what have I done. I think there 0:17:18.920 --> 0:17:20.399 is a little bit of that. I think there's a 0:17:20.400 --> 0:17:22.320 little bit of that, and there's a little bit of 0:17:22.359 --> 0:17:25.760 another thing. And the other thing is where all this 0:17:25.920 --> 0:17:29.479 comes from. Why you're a college graduate. Why you're not 0:17:29.520 --> 0:17:32.160 getting a job or proper job that you could yet 0:17:32.280 --> 0:17:34.280 pays you a living wage. Why are you guarding pork 0:17:34.320 --> 0:17:36.600 and beans at night and trying to write about baseball. 0:17:37.280 --> 0:17:41.240 He's pretty clear about the psychological origins of his obsession 0:17:41.359 --> 0:17:44.280 with it, and it really is an obsession. His mother 0:17:44.320 --> 0:17:47.320 died when he was four, his father was badly injured 0:17:47.320 --> 0:17:50.520 in an accident. He he was basically kind of orphaned 0:17:50.520 --> 0:17:52.800 and left to defend for himself with an older sister 0:17:52.880 --> 0:17:54.879 who was just a couple of years older. He was 0:17:54.920 --> 0:17:57.359 pretty socially isolated. He felt like he just had this 0:17:57.440 --> 0:18:00.159 sister and they were together all the time, hi and 0:18:00.160 --> 0:18:02.639 there each other's other half. And he felt a need 0:18:02.680 --> 0:18:07.520 to control and understand the world because the world seems 0:18:07.560 --> 0:18:10.960 senseless to him, and he turned to baseball as a 0:18:11.600 --> 0:18:16.240 environment that was simple enough that you could completely understand 0:18:16.320 --> 0:18:19.920 it and makes sense of it. So that's the original 0:18:19.960 --> 0:18:23.400 impulse that gets him into kind of making a new 0:18:23.520 --> 0:18:28.000 kind of sense of this old game. And I think 0:18:28.040 --> 0:18:31.800 what bothers him is not just like the individual statistics 0:18:31.880 --> 0:18:36.840 or the quantification of everything, though those things do bother him. 0:18:36.960 --> 0:18:39.800 I think the real thing that bothers him is the 0:18:39.840 --> 0:18:43.520 sense that the false sense that other people have that 0:18:43.720 --> 0:18:46.680 in this environment has been fully understood and there's nothing 0:18:46.760 --> 0:18:50.320 left there that it's been deforested. Because I think he 0:18:50.359 --> 0:18:54.000 gets a great deal of solace just from the exercise 0:18:54.320 --> 0:18:57.560 of making new sense of the thing, and he's decided. 0:18:57.760 --> 0:19:02.000 You know, it's really a curious predisposition of personality trait 0:19:02.320 --> 0:19:05.040 that up until the age of I don't know, forty, 0:19:05.160 --> 0:19:08.840 he's really interested in almost nothing but baseball. Everything he's 0:19:08.840 --> 0:19:11.800 done in his life is directed towards making more sense 0:19:11.800 --> 0:19:14.679 of baseball. The idea that's sort of like, all right, 0:19:15.040 --> 0:19:20.399 people with spreadsheets of advanced abilities to analyze data have 0:19:20.560 --> 0:19:24.280 come through and completely eliminated the mystery and the the 0:19:24.320 --> 0:19:29.720 ability to order this world. Further, I think leaves him cold. 0:19:29.920 --> 0:19:32.960 He doesn't like it. So you do find he's this 0:19:33.080 --> 0:19:35.760 revolutionary who doesn't really like the revolution he created, which 0:19:35.800 --> 0:19:39.360 is not that unusual little thing. Revolution is often don't 0:19:39.400 --> 0:19:43.679 like it with the revolution creates not unusual. Still fascinating though, 0:19:43.680 --> 0:19:46.200 and that's why I was curious when I had asked 0:19:46.200 --> 0:19:47.840 you about the blowback for him, and we had spent 0:19:47.880 --> 0:19:50.480 some time talking about the culture war and the jocks 0:19:50.600 --> 0:19:54.400 versus nerds component. I'm also interested, though, in any potential 0:19:54.440 --> 0:19:59.560 blowback for you, because you did help literally author this movement, right, 0:19:59.600 --> 0:20:02.720 and so I'm wondering what kind of feedback you've got 0:20:02.960 --> 0:20:04.920 in the last twenty years since you called up Billy 0:20:04.960 --> 0:20:06.920 Being the first time, and he put you onto this 0:20:06.960 --> 0:20:10.280 story that has become this phenomenon. You know, it was 0:20:10.359 --> 0:20:16.800 pretty funny in the beginning because sports people generally don't 0:20:16.840 --> 0:20:21.000 really acknowledge the existence of the author. Their relationship to 0:20:21.240 --> 0:20:27.120 books is usually, oh, that's a Charles Barklay's memoir. That 0:20:27.119 --> 0:20:29.720 that that that they they assumed that the book is 0:20:29.760 --> 0:20:33.200 basically the point of view someone else. If there's someone 0:20:33.240 --> 0:20:35.880 putting the words on the page, they're not significant. It's 0:20:35.920 --> 0:20:38.800 the it's the significant thing is the sports figure who 0:20:38.840 --> 0:20:43.080 it's about. So in the very beginning and for a while, 0:20:43.640 --> 0:20:47.439 I had this lovely situation where all the people in 0:20:47.480 --> 0:20:50.360 baseball who were piste about the book assumed Billy Being 0:20:50.359 --> 0:20:53.280 had basically written it, and so they were pissed at him. 0:20:54.000 --> 0:20:58.359 So Billy got directly. Mostly I wasn't worth attacking. I 0:20:58.480 --> 0:21:01.960 was this gnat from this other world, right, so that 0:21:02.359 --> 0:21:04.560 I was not an obvious target except for from a 0:21:04.600 --> 0:21:07.359 couple of journalists, but from the people in baseball, and 0:21:07.400 --> 0:21:11.040 they were like angry at Billy, and I am eternally 0:21:11.080 --> 0:21:13.399 grateful Libility Being did not throw me under the bus, 0:21:13.480 --> 0:21:15.080 because he really could have. He could have just said 0:21:15.119 --> 0:21:16.880 like I didn't have any control over that. The guy 0:21:16.920 --> 0:21:18.359 didn't know what he was talking about. I didn't say 0:21:18.359 --> 0:21:20.720 any of that. He could said that, he didn't say 0:21:20.760 --> 0:21:23.639 anything like that, and so he took the heat. So 0:21:23.720 --> 0:21:25.919 I didn't get it directly. What I got instead was 0:21:25.960 --> 0:21:31.080 really gratifying. I got essentially a hall pass to wander 0:21:31.119 --> 0:21:34.920 around which I still have to wander around professional sports 0:21:34.960 --> 0:21:38.120 and ask people questions because people who weren't immediately threatened 0:21:38.359 --> 0:21:41.240