Baseball Week: Stats Are Fun!

Every baseball player comes packaged with a set of statistics, but are they the right ones? That's the central question of Michael Lewis' MONEYBALL, which follows a season with the Oakland A's as they run a team, well, rather differently than others are currently been run.

Team manager Billy Beane, a former baseball player, read the works of a rogue statistician and baseball fan named Bill James, which intended to find out what stats really reveal how valuable a player is to the team. Those stats drive Beane's approach to buying players on the second-lowest budget in Major League Baseball, on which he was somehow able to improve the team's record substantially even after losing its best known players to free agency. So, it's THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST meets FREAKONOMICS, more or less.

I'm not going to pretend that I understood the statistics in the book well enough to challenge them. Heck, I didn't even know where the word "sabermetrics" came from or what it meant before I read this book. (It's from the Society for American Baseball Research, which James was a major part of and which promoted these new statistics.) I have a feeling that someone better with numbers than I would be able to poke holes in Lewis' explanations, but for me I found them sufficient and easy to understand for the layperson. And like THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST, Lewis clearly spent a lot of time with the team, just hanging out and observing how these management changes -- especially a shift away from traditional scouting methods -- have affected the team.

At the same time, I can see why some people who cover baseball would disparage the book, and not because they are just jealous. Lewis even pinpoints the primary weakness of the sabermetrics approach: It only takes into account past performance, not future potential. In this model a player is no better than he has been earlier, so a slow starter in the pros would probably never get a shot under the James/Beane model. But the team that Beane assembles makes this evident, as players who join the team don't quite perform as they have on paper. One could also argue that sabermetrics reduce players to numbers, but not in a way that the stats don't already do. I don't think that MONEYBALL's numbers will ruin the way I watch baseball; if anything, it will make me more curious about the stats I usually ignore.

Previously
Dugout Jitters
Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?
Filmbook: "The Natural" (1984)
Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

Baseball Week: Dugout Jitters

In his foreword to the book, Buzz Bissinger does what few authors would dare: He reveals that THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST was once a very different book. Specifically, he was approached to write a book with St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, something much more of a straight biography than what emerged as a portrait of a baseball team and a manager in a snapshot of a three-night series against arch-rivals the Chicago Cubs. Well, thank goodness!

My love for Buzz Bissinger was never in doubt since FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, so it's not surprising that I enjoyed this book more than THE BOYS OF SUMMER or THE NATURAL. Like Roger Kahn, Bissinger followed the team all year in order to produce this book, like a photographer who takes pictures every day to train his eye and finger for an action shot, and that research shows. If his adulation of Tony La Russa gets a little much, its delivery in observation -- the evidence through which he builds his case that La Russa is one of the last great baseball managers -- convinces the reader without the author nudging us over that line. This book actually inspired me to go back to the first place I ever read about sports, Sports Illustrated, which sadly has moved away somewhat from the elegiac essays of my youth.

Can't wait to read his next book, which according to this January '08 interview is tentatively titled FATHER'S DAY, a more personal work about his relationship with his twin sons. (In that interview he also mentions tomorrow's topic, MONEYBALL, as "deflat[ing]" his bookstore visits. Find out if it will deflate mine!)

Previously
Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?
Filmbook: "The Natural" (1984)
Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

Filmbook: "The Natural" (1984)

Yesterday I wrote about how I felt underwhelmed by the protagonist of Bernard Malamud's THE NATURAL, who alienated me and didn't really prove his so-called abilities. The Roy Hobbs of the movie "The Natural" has the opposite problem: The film pushes so hard to make Roy a hero that I found myself pushing back, probably because I had just read the book which makes clear that he wasn't a hero.

The plot is virtually identical to the book's: Talented older player with murky past finally gets to the majors, performs great feats. The crowd scenes in this book are very cool, as are the old-timey uniforms and the feeling that this team is really uniting behind Hobbs. Major assistance in this department has to go to the score in creating moments like this (not really a spoiler unless you read the YouTube info):

But as the movie goes on that old alienation came back, only I felt disconnected from the character because he was too good instead of being too bad. And the ending, which is the biggest change from the book, just took the hero worship way over the top for me. It's as if adapters Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry read the book and thought, "Man, this guy's kind of a jerk. Let's make him totally saintly! Much better."

And in that capacity, having Robert Redford playing Roy didn't help matters. I like Robert Redford a lot, but he was 48 when this movie came out, and no amount of soft-focus lighting could disguise that he had a good decade on Malamud's Hobbs. So he goes around with this halo of light on him, which I'm sure was deliberate, but it made me even less inclined to see the movie's take on the player.

Filmbook verdict: Boy. I don't want to recommend the book or the movie. Watch "Field of Dreams" and read THE BOYS OF SUMMER instead.

Previously
Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?
Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

Baseball Week: Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?

One-word review of THE NATURAL: Really?

The natural of the title is Roy Hobbs, a promising young pitcher headed to a tryout with the Cubs who has a little run-in with destiny along the way. 16 years later, he is finally signed to a major league team, the lagging New York Knights, and becomes not only its box-score salvation but the great batting hope for the sad-sack team manager. Not everyone on the team is happy about his success, though, particularly erstwhile star Bump Bailey, who's dating the manager's niece (with whom Roy is also in love). He finally has his chance at the major leagues, but it may be shorter than even he feared.

It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what I didn't like about this book, but I'll start here: We don't see enough of Roy's abilities to really understand why he's such a big deal. Except for one quick burst in the prologue (if you will), the guy acts like a brat in the dugout and keeps proclaiming how good he is. When the turnaround comes and his "powers" (such as they are) are evident, I didn't really want to root for him after all that.

The relationship between Roy and Memo, the manager's niece, I found pretty off-putting overall, mainly because Roy acts like an entitled jerk around her and expects her to give up her other interests and serve him. Yet I don't think Malamud was trying to make the point that talent corrupts; I think we're supposed to understand that Roy has had a long and difficult life and is on the uncomfortable bleeding edge of greatness. But when there comes a time when Roy has to, ah, choose between divergent paths and his conscience comes into play, I didn't really empathize with him. (More on this tomorrow, when I talk about the movie.)

And there's all this Mystical Stuff With Girls. This book was actually mentioned in passing in THE BOYS OF SUMMER because it came out when Kahn was with the Dodgers, and he talked up its sex scenes to one of the players, but they aren't "sex scenes" per se, more like Totally Weird Interludes. Especially the one by the lakeshore -- anyone want to explain that to me?

Despite all this I did want to find out what became of Roy Hobbs, or maybe I was just waiting for something spectacular. In the end, I was underwhelmed.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about the 1984 movie, "The Natural," based on the Malamud book.

Previously:
Baseball Week: Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

NATURAL Notes

• Play By The Book calls THE NATURAL "not your typical sports book." I concur, although this reviewer from the Peabody Institute Library liked it more than I did.


• A current MLB player named Josh Hamilton is compared to The Natural in the book, although I'm not sure the lesson is the same for both. Hamilton was a promising player who got hurt, got addicted, got clean and returned to hit 28 home runs in this year's All-Star Home Run Derby.


• I don't know much about Malamud at all, but apparently he's fallen out of favor; "Malamud's themes, his passions and his style do not come across as old fashioned: on the contrary, they seem fresh and alive," writes the Guardian. Uh, sorry to heap on, sir!


• Listen to the Malamud story "A Summer's Reading" at newyorker.com.

Baseball Week: Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

I didn't realize it when I picked it, but Roger Kahn's THE BOYS OF SUMMER combines a baseball history with one of my favorite genres -- the journalist's memoir. But Kahn didn't dream of being a journalist as a kid growing up in middle-class Brooklyn -- of course, he wanted to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His father claimed to have played in college, his grandfather took him to afternoon games and his sister became a fan during a long convalescence. Only Kahn's mother disapproved of the game and tried to get her son to read biographies of Haydn instead of Christy Mathewson's autobiography.

Kahn planned to study law at NYU before a professor noticed he could write a little and recommended he apply to the New York Herald Tribune, then considered the "writers' newspaper" to the boring, pedestrian New York Times. (That is Kahn's opinion and not endorsed by writers of this blog, who never read the Herald Tribune.) Kahn's first sports piece for the Herald Tribune was about a "walking race" between City Hall and Coney Island on Thanksgiving, which he noticed took twice as long as the new elevated subway but saved the 10-cent fare. He subbed in for a few Dodgers games until, at 24, he was tapped to cover the team full-time. And Kahn would probably agree it was fortuitous that not only were the Dodgers still in Brooklyn (they moved in 1958), but they had Jackie Robinson, who played his first game with them in 1947.

Half of THE BOYS OF SUMMER covers Kahn's two seasons with the team, and the other half a series of interviews he did with the players for the book -- a sort of "Where Are They Now?" of professional baseball. Both sections had their strengths, but I enjoyed the seasonal coverage much more for the camaraderie that Kahn depicts among the traveling team (they still took trains at that point!) and the action. When he finds them, most of the players are doing okay, but professionally they're a shadow of their former selves: Mostly salesmen or public faces on larger corporations, they're reminded every day that they once were great.

But Kahn gets some amazing stories as he travels, from George Shuba's secret to batting practice (pouring lead in the bat you use for practice swings) to the moment when Carl Erskine's father threw a curve that broke all the dishes in the house. If those names mean nothing to you now (as they did to me), you'll learn from this book.

Coming up on Baseball Week: Bernard Malamud's diamond myth, Buzz Bissinger's unblinking eye and more.