Michael Lewis has time to talk, but not much of it.
He calls me on a Saturday afternoon during a break between his teenage son Walker’s summer-league basketball games. Lewis is busy during the week finishing a hotly anticipated book on Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who is accused of fraud. “Going Infinite” is already a bestseller on Amazon. It comes out in October.
But his journey into the mind of the eccentric crypto kingpin is not what I wanted to talk about.
Twenty years ago this week, June 17, 2003, Lewis’ bestseller “Moneyball” was released.
And so when I got him on the phone in between his basketball spectating, the big question I wanted answered was … who came up with the title of the book and popularized a portmanteau that spread not only in baseball but in all of sports?
As it turns out, he did. Don’t ever say writers don’t come up with headlines or book titles. Lewis said he tried to imagine someone saying, “Have you read ‘Moneyball’?” He could, so he felt confident when he emailed his editor to tell him that the magazine article he was working on was going to be a book and he wanted to use that as the title.
“In retrospect, I can tell you that nobody was all that enthusiastic about it,” Lewis said of the name, not the book idea. “And Bill James was actively hostile to it. Like, ‘That’s a s—ty title.’”
Of course, “Moneyball” came to represent more than a book or Oakland’s 2002 strategy to score more runs. “Moneyball” turned into a placeholder for almost any kind of strategy that uses an analytical style of thinking to solve a common problem.
“The whole world outside of sports is looking for a sports analogy for what it does to make what it does seem more interesting,” Lewis said. “So if you give them something from sports that they can take and say, ‘Oh, I’m doing X for, I don’t know, hot dog manufacturing,’ they’ll grab it, because it just makes it feel more exciting. ‘Moneyball’ served that function.”
It’s safe to say this is the most influential sports book ever written, though when I phrased it like that to Lewis, he sloughed it off.
“Sports books tend not to be influential,” he said.
Fair. Jim Bouton’s 1970 “Ball Four” didn’t exactly lead a charge of first-person tell-alls, though it made waves at the time for his uncensored transparency about being an athlete. “Friday Night Lights” is probably the best book in terms of writing, reporting and the truths it told. But “Moneyball” led to real change.
The philosophies Lewis wrote about in the book weren’t novel. Obviously, the A’s had been using them for years. New Red Sox owner John Henry was a Bill James devotee, and Theo Epstein was about to rise in prominence. NFL teams were well ahead of baseball in terms of innovation. “Moneyball” was kind of like Green Day or Nirvana, taking something that existed on the fringes and making it mainstream.
And as pro teams were purchased for hundreds of millions, and then billions, by a new wave of owners (almost half the league has turned over since 2002) who made their fortunes in finance, they began looking for their own Billy Beanes. Sometimes, they found them, other times they did not.
“The financial world grabbed it and instantly recognized what it was,” Lewis said. “Through their lens, it was an investment book. And it was kind of a value investment book. And that had its champions on Wall Street. And those people on Wall Street had friends who owned sports teams. And that was the wave of saying it penetrated sports. It wasn’t like, old-time baseball guy said, ‘Oh, I might learn something from this book,’ read the book and changed their mind. No one changes their mind. But I started to hear those stories. And when I started to hear that I thought, Ah, it’s going to cross boundaries. It’s going to have influence inside of sports, and God knows what’s going to happen.”
Fans loved it too. After it came out, saying you read “Moneyball” meant you were someone who appreciated baseball on a deeper level. Bragging you didn’t read it likely meant you worked in baseball.
“The memory of the book kind of going boom was when the book came out and there being just all these angry people,” he said. “Mainly, scouts and their friends. First, I thought, ‘Man, do I have to really deal with all this hostility?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this hostility is gonna sell a million books.’”
Oakland A’s executive vice president of baseball operations Billy Beane was a trailblazing general manager when “Moneyball” was published in 2003. (D. Ross Cameron / USA Today)
Lewis said he never wearied of hearing the word “Moneyball” after it became ubiquitous, but soon, he started muting baseball games.
“I did get sick of not being able to turn on ESPN without people arguing about it,” he said. “I’m trying to watch a baseball game and get on my exercise machine and Joe Morgan was saying rude things about my life. That was fun for a little while, but like two years in I was just tired of it. Like, can you just get on with it? And so I did actually find myself kind of turning off the sound in games because they were talking about it so often.”
And that was before it became a movie in 2011 starring Brad Pitt, giving it another life cycle in the media.
I reread the book in a day before we talked and was reminded of how crisp it was. The original clocked in at 286 pages. The paperback afterword (which also ran as an excerpt in Sports Illustrated in 2004) and acknowledgments make it 304 pages.
I chuckled at outdated observations like on Page 139: “And so, for surely the first time since the dead ball era, the Harvard Old Boys’ network came to baseball.” Nowadays, it’s hard to get a job in a front office if you didn’t go to Yale or Wesleyan.
And while the A’s hit on some future big leaguers (Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, Mark Teahen) in the 2002 draft that was featured in the book, the breathless praise for others, like for University of Pittsburgh hitter Brant Colamarino, from Beane’s right-hand man Paul DePodesta, sent me to Baseball-Reference. “No one else will agree but Colamarino might be the best hitter in the country,” DePodesta says on Page 116. I think that is, indeed, a fair statement. At least Jeremy Brown, the famed big-bodied catcher from Alabama, made it to the majors for a hot second.
The mocking of the old-school scouts (which came across vividly in the movie) brought out a defense from the sports-media establishment at the time, with the mocking refrain that the real genius was having the underpaid, 20-something trio of starting pitchers in Mark Mulder, Barry Zito and Tim Hudson. Those three are mentioned in the book, but not focused on with the zeal of, say, Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford.
Lewis talked to Hudson and Zito at length throughout the 2002 season, and he thanks them in the acknowledgments, but they didn’t quite fit into the tight story he was telling. Was that the right choice? It was because it worked for Lewis’ narrative.
“I knew they were ending up on the cutting room floor because I needed people who dramatize the point,” he said. “By then, everybody knew these guys were good. Although nobody knew Tim Hudson or Barry Zito would be that good when they drafted them. They kind of prove the point but … it was so much more fun to take players that people just dismissed and didn’t understand why they were good and show it.”
The most common critique from inside baseball was that Beane wrote the book or that he used Lewis as a mouthpiece to feed his ego. In truth, Lewis said, Beane had no idea the book was going to be so focused on the A’s and himself. (He hated that he was quoted using curse words.) Lewis visited other teams during that season to judge the A’s by comparison. Lewis said Beane seemed “amused” by his presence.
“He had the view that this was going to have no effect on his life whatsoever, because no one in baseball would read a book,” Lewis said. “He actually said that to me, ‘You don’t think anybody in baseball is going to read your book?’ And so he had me convinced that this was going to be an outsider thing that some people would read, but wouldn’t be people in the sport. And what happened very quickly is I started to get either firsthand or second-hand word that this front office was looking at this thing, this owner was looking at it and was firing his GM and getting another kind of a stat guy in. I started to see movement in sports.”
The book certainly worked out for Beane, who became a celebrity executive, giving speeches around the world. He and Lewis, who didn’t know each other before 2002, are tight 20 years later.
“Oh, we’re close as hell,” Lewis said. “The publication of the book caused us to become friends. Because I mean, there was a period of two years where we talked every day because some outrage had occurred. And we ended up in a kind of foxhole together, with him taking most of the fire and taking it very bravely.”
Cubs president Jed Hoyer was a young executive working under Epstein in Boston (and a Lewis fan from reading “Liar’s Poker”), when Lewis came poking around the Red Sox offices that year. Hoyer read and liked the book. And he had a front-row seat on how it changed sports.
“It changed everything quickly,” he said. “Eventually, things were going to shift, but I thought it put that in fast-forward. The book comes out, a lot of owners read the book and realized they were doing the things that a handful of teams were doing and it just microwaved the process of change in those years after the book came out. In the next five years, there was so much change because all of a sudden, owners were driving that change.”
Meanwhile, guys like Epstein, who got the Boston job that Beane turned down, made more money and won World Series championships with deeper-pocketed teams. From 2003 until 2020, the A’s made the playoffs eight times — a considerable feat — though they only advanced to the ALCS once.
Beane, who ceded day-to-day control of the club to David Forst years ago, is just an adviser now, more focused on his European soccer interests.
The A’s, as you might’ve read recently, are a total disaster on and off the field, stuck between reality and the bright lights of Las Vegas.
Oakland fans held a wildly successful “reverse boycott” at the Coliseum on Tuesday night to protest owner John Fisher, a night before Nevada lawmakers approved financial aid for a new stadium in the desert. While the baseball world has evolved 50 years in the last 20 years, the A’s never got that new stadium or acted like a big-market team.
So it’s fitting the latest thing named after Lewis’ book is a proposed bill in the House called the “Moneyball Act” that would require baseball teams that move to pay 10 years’ worth of taxes to the state and community it moves away from.
Two decades removed, was the concept of “Moneyball,” however you want to slice it up, good or bad for the sports world? There have certainly been negative effects, from the aesthetics of the sports to the hiring practices in front offices, in the chase for efficiency and perfection. But the pursuit of knowledge is always a positive. This revolution was happening whether or not Lewis wrote a book. He just put a catchy name to it.
When I posed that question to him, Lewis brought up how analytical approaches to football opened up the passing game, and in basketball, the 3-point shot. But in baseball, the focus on perfection and logic eventually turned the game into a more static, more boring sport. Lewis said he’s happy about the changes that baseball has implemented, led by Epstein, to cultivate more action.
As for the book itself, it’s still selling, despite similar new releases every year. Thanks to the movie, it found a new audience.
Lewis, meanwhile, keeps working, trying to tell memorable stories about the complicated way the world works.
“It’s really had a delightful life,” he said. “It’s still alive. It’s still sort of like bubbling around and I hear about it all the time. People pick it up and see how it applies to what they do — that’s all kind of cool, long after anybody remembers who Terrence Long is.”
(Top photo of Michael Lewis: Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
