“Let’s get this out of the way quickly: Moneyball was not a book about nerds and statistics and butterball catchers who do nothing but walk—not really. It was a book about the temporarily misperceived value of nerds and statistics and butterball catchers who do nothing but walk and, above all, about how to profit off that misperception. Which is to say that, at bottom, Moneyball was a book about a charismatic visionary (Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane) who achieved success by exploiting market inefficiencies. This is a conceit known as Every Business Book Ever. The guy sitting next to you on an airplane is reading a book like that. Malcolm Gladwell farts books like that. Moneyball told a simple story and told it wonderfully, but baseball being what it is—a game so thoroughly wrapped in its own bullshit that you’d need a grand jury to find its soul—the book was received as heresy.”
“By the time Moneyball came out in 2003, major-league teams had figured out the value of BP’s writers. In 2002, the Blue Jays hired BP’s Keith Law as a consultant. Keith Woolner, who invented VORP, left in 2007 to join the Indians, James Click and Chaim Bloom joined up with the Rays, and Dan Fox quit to work for the Pirates. Last year, the entire world realized that Nate Silver was an undervalued asset when he started devoting his genius-power to politics. Two months ago, he resigned as BP’s managing partner and announced he’d likely “not be able to write about baseball with the frequency that [he] once did.”
