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Wikipedia Twisting the Truth - Voros McCracken Entry My Corrections and Additions to “The Numbers Game,” by Alan Schwarz Correcting the Perception of My Role in
the Rockies “Hampton-Neagle” Disaster |
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My problem with “Moneyball”
by Michael Lewis Michael Lewis is a
talented writer and I particularly have enjoyed his books on the investing
community, but he has a reputation of being too much of a story-teller to be
writing what he sells as non-fiction. Or as someone at the Wall Street Journal put it, “he never
lets the facts get in the way of a good story.” In August of 2002 Lewis asked to interview
me in regard to his research for his book eventually titled “Moneyball.” I was reluctant to do it without firm written
conditions being in place. The most important one was: I want to read before publication the sections
that relate to our interview and point out to you any sections I think are
inaccurate or misunderstood. I'm not seeking editorial approval. Whether you
make any changes is up to you. It's your name on it, not mine. Mr. Lewis agreed to honor
my conditions and acknowledged them as “very reasonable.” We did one brief
interview over the phone. He estimated it would take about 45 minutes, and I
doubt it was any longer than that. He suggested he might want to do a follow-up
interview but I never heard from him again, and I assumed there would be
nothing in the book that related to our interview. I was wrong, and he had
denied me the promised right to review and comment. When I called him on this
breach of trust, he wrote: “I'm
sorry. … I suppose what happened
is that I assumed, after our interview, is that you wouldn't appear at all in
the book. In the writing of the section about James you wound up appearing …
in such a way that added nothing new to what had been written about you by Neyer and others and so I didn't think anything of it.” His rationalization is a
poor one. First, that was not the agreement. Second, even if that was exactly
what others were writing – which I don’t see as consistently true – that
would not be the same as saying it was accurate. More important the
perception would be their own, and they would not be
offering it under the appearance of having come from me, of being supported
by me. How Mr. Lewis used our
interview is exactly why I insisted on that condition in the first place. I
felt he manipulated the material from our interview to make it fit the theme
of that chapter and his overall story. My actual experience was an anomaly to
his theme, which I think is why his first thought was to totally leave it out
of the book, and then instead briefly mentioned it while inaccurately
portraying it to fit his storyline.
If Mr. Lewis had honored
our agreement and shared that section related to our interview, he would have
gotten the following feedback from me. If you find this too long, for most
readers the fourth section is the critical one for a clearer picture of what
was left out of the “Moneyball” view about how
things were evolving in baseball:
RE: the quote "I needed to be a GM if I
was going to see my stuff ever used." The lack of
context here gives a decidedly false impression. It is being used as if the
quote applies to my experiences during my 21-year career rather than about the
radical stuff that I wanted to do if I were going to continue my
career. As is, it seems to imply that none of my stuff was ever being used,
which is a zillion miles from the demonstrable truth. Again, that quote was
about my recent decision to leave that career because I felt I had
accomplished all the ground-breaking stuff that the present atmosphere in the
game would allow me to do in an advisory role. I wanted to continue to push
the envelope, and I realized that the stuff left in my bag that I was really
excited about doing was also such radical stuff that I would need to be
a GM if it were to ever see the light of day. It pains me
very deeply to think of all the people I worked so well with during my long
career who might read that and mistakenly think that I am denying the good
work we had done together.
RE: the quote "And I never even got
asked to interview for a single GM job." You use this
without context to further your theme that no one in baseball thought much of
“sabermetrics” until Billy Beane,
that back then no one would envisioned someone from such a background as a GM
candidate. It was of course an extremely radical notion at that time, but you
neatly steer away from why I sought such an interview — leaving it hanging as
to whether it was hubris or that there actually were some people in baseball
who already had developed such respect for this approach that they could see
it being useful to a GM. It would have
been a more accurate and complete picture if it read: "With
encouragement and recommendations from people he had worked with – GMs,
assistant GMs and scouting directors – Wright applied for a handful of GM
jobs as a dark horse candidate during the last eight years of his career, but
he was never given an interview." I realize that
acknowledging that as early as 1994 there were a few GMs who were envisioning
someone of my background being a GM, and recommending exactly that, would not
fit with your theme of this section, which went: “You
could count on one hand the number of ‘sabermetricians’
inside of baseball, and none of them appear to have had much effect. After a
while they seemed more like fans who second-guessed the general manager than
advisors who influenced decisions. They were forever waving printouts to show
how foolish the GM had been not to have taken their advice.” Those are
the exact sentences you used to lead into your brief mention of my career.
Yet I didn’t tell you anything like that, and I’m sure you didn’t get it from
Fred Claire or Tom Grieve or other GMs I worked with. Fred would have quickly
set you straight. Tom probably would have conceded – as he did in another
interview – that while he wished he had listened to me more, he would have
told you my advice was always listened to seriously and there certainly were
times it played a significant role. In the same early 1990s period that you
specifically reference as sabermetrics having no
impact within the game, Tom was very serious about spending huge bucks to
sign free agent pitcher Mike Moore, who had just had back-to-back 17-win
seasons and was already one of the highest paid pitchers in the league. My
report argued strongly against pursuing Moore, making a case that he was not
just past his prime but that he had a very poor aging profile and was already
starting to show signs of the beginning of a serious decline. By his own
account, Tom credits that report with changing his mind and his telling
Moore’s agent we were no longer interested. If you had
been more open to the notion, you could have gotten literally over 100
powerful examples from just my career alone.
All my contracts were 1-year contracts. Do you really think teams are
going to keep shelling out the money year after year just to have you give
advice that they will ignore? All the teams lost huge amounts of money in the
strike of 1994, and when it was over, a lot of teams were reducing their
budget for front office personnel. More than a few folks had their positions
either eliminated or they were let go to bring in someone who would do it
cheaper. I had friends in traditional baseball jobs who started off their
careers at roughly the same time as mine who suddenly found themselves out
looking for jobs. When
RE: your sentence "He eventually quit his profession
altogether." You are
clearly going way out of your way to make it sound like someone who in
mid-career got fed up, couldn't take it anymore, and abruptly quit –
particularly when you follow it with your account of Eddie Epstein’s career
and write, “… he, too, wound up quitting in a huff.” Applying that to me is
absolutely pure invention on your part. I had a very
satisfying career of 21 years and had reached my financial goal for
retirement. When I reached a point where I felt I had made about as much
progress as I could hope for – at least in the context of the near future, I
decided to leave baseball in an orderly manner by letting my contracts run
out and move on to do the kind of work I had always aspired to do in my
retirement years. Was there a
level of dissatisfaction with my opportunities to progress in the near
future? Sure, I had always directed my career along the route I wanted, and I
liked being on the cutting edge. After a couple decades I had advanced to a
point where I was starting to feel boxed in, hitting my head against a
ceiling and feeling like I was marking time. But so what? It is literally no
different than what is felt by a lot of other guys following a more
traditional vein who have spent a long time in assistant GM and advisor
roles. If I had been one of those guys, and it was under these
same circumstances, I’m sure you realize you would not have characterized it
that same way.
RE: General context of that section Bear with me if this section runs a little long as it deals with a
more general thought. Shortly after our interview I read an article by Rob Neyer giving a brief history of "sabermetricians"
and I found myself balking at an assumption running through Rob's column, and
I made a note that if you called again, that we should talk about that, for I
had heard that same assumption in some of your questions. There's this idea,
this story, that the pioneers in doing this type of work were knocking
their heads against a wall and weren't able to accomplish much because the
approach was just too new, too radical. Michael, you basically follow that
storyline and expand it with their getting so frustrated,
they conclude they were wasting their time, and quit. That simply
does not fit my experience, and I feel like you are trying to make me fit
your account of Eddie Epstein’s view of his career. But my career in the
majors was not like that. It started sooner, lasted longer, and compared to
your account of Epstein’s view, I apparently had a
lot more fun and greater satisfaction in my work and accomplishments. I don't blame those who write it that way, for it appears many of
these pioneers actually claim that as having been their experience. But
people are funny in the way they perceive things, and mistaken expectations
can make one man miserable where another is happy, even though their
circumstances are much the same. I can't speak for the experience of others, but I can at least say for my own career that it doesn't
really fit that story. Understand, I'm not saying there wasn't prejudice and unfairness to
deal with. There certainly was, including certain GMs and teams who would
never consider working with me or someone with a similar perspective. And
even with the organizations that were glad to use certain services of mine,
there would often be cases where someone in the organization would feel
threatened and try to make things difficult. But the question is whether this
level of prejudice was sufficient to keep me from being effective? I honestly
think it wasn't much of a factor. How much room does a pioneer need to build his beachhead? You
certainly don't need every team coming after you. You can only do so much.
And in regard to those who tried to interfere with my contributions, they
weren't the ones who hired me, and unless they advanced into a
significant position, they rarely succeeded in diminishing my
effectiveness. In a lot of cases they only served to damage their own
credibility and improve my own. (There is something relentless about the
ability of good work to eventually shine through.) Now this is not to say that I don't understand the sense of
frustration expressed by, say, an Eddie Epstein. I'm just not convinced that
this frustration ties as neatly to an idea that prejudice and resistance to
new ideas was really able to stymie progress as much as they believe – or as
you claim in this chapter. I see two ways that these frustration levels are
simply emotion and perception rather than a reality of their lack of
accomplishment. A certain level of frustration is a common phenomenon among those in
advisor roles regardless of whether their perspective is traditional or not.
There are darn few advisors -- certainly darn few good ones -- who can
honestly say they haven't longed for the role of the decision-maker. And it
seems to me that they often mistakenly weigh their influence against the
measure of the decision-maker rather than the other advisors.
And by that mistaken measure they are of course going to feel frustrated. And really, the level of frustration one feels, whether it is
justified or not, that's just personal drama. Even if you could tie it
to prejudice rather than simply an unfortunate side-effect to the advisor
role – well, so what? It still doesn't have anything to do with
objectively weighing how much you accomplish and how much you are listened
to. Sure, I didn't have the impact on the decision-making that the GM
did, or whoever else was given the real weight of making the final decision.
But such impact is largely defined by the job itself, and it wasn't my job to
be that final decision maker. Comparing my impact to the GM isn't the right
comparison for my judging whether I was being treated fairly enough to
accomplish anything worthwhile. Relative to my position, I believe I managed to accomplish a great
deal in my career. If I honestly weigh my actual net contributions – and not
what I could have contributed – I see that it only took me about a half
dozen years before I started stacking up very well with all but the actual
decision-makers. I came into baseball at a time when barely anyone knew such
incredibly basic stuff as who led the league in on-base average. There were
no significant books of any kind on performance analysis. Bill James had
never published anything that didn't come out of his garage. I knew
absolutely no one in professional baseball. But thirteen years later I ask I reached a point where my work was booming and I had to turn away
work or refer it elsewhere. I was better paid than the best scout, and better
than just about anybody but the GMs and scouting directors. I had fabulous
job security that included leaving the game with two very good offers on the
table and I got offers to return to MLB for many years after. I got to play a
significant role in the development of a non-prospect into one of the
greatest future Hall of Famers. I got to significantly help the careers
of hundreds of individual players, including leveling the playing field for a
lot of sleeper players, making literal multi-millionaires out of players who
had earned that opportunity but for some reason or another were slipping
through the cracks and headed out of the game. I got to play a role in the
birth of a franchise and helped them have the most successful expansion draft
ever. Now how could I suggest with a straight face that I'd only been banging
my head against a wall and never really accomplishing anything? Again, this doesn't deny that there was unfairness at play. I
had to be incredibly good at my job to accomplish what I did, while there were others
guys with the "right background" who were being given equal say on
certain matters even though some of them couldn't reason their way out
of a paper bag. That's not fair. And, yes, it wasn't fair that I didn't
get any kind of a shot to move from the chair of advisor to the chair of
decision when even the weakest traditional candidates were almost guaranteed
to get at least a courtesy interview. But none of that means progress wasn’t
being made. The simple existence of unfairness doesn't make it a winner. It
doesn't mean that we’re stopped, wasting our time, or that we are not
making very real contributions that shape the very landscape of the game.
Geez, I hear pitching coaches like Bryan Price and Rick Peterson talking
about some theories I brought into the game 15 to 20 years ago, and they
speak of them with such acceptance today that you would think it was
something learned it at their grandfather's knee and something that has
always been accepted. But the “unfairness”
that did exist could and did have a mighty impact is on the subjective
perceptions of some of the people involved. It sometimes fueled a frustration
that went beyond
the fact that advisors are often inherently frustrated from the get-go. As a
young teen-ager I was mildly involved in the Civil Rights movement in the
1960s, and while it is not exactly the same analogy, I saw much the
same thing happen back then. The unfairness picks away at folks and comes out
in a form of frustration that blinds them from seeing and appreciating their
very real and significant accomplishments. If you get an Eddie Epstein talking about his years with I know the theme of your story fits with how people already talk
about and write about this period of evolution in baseball history. I can
understand how you might have glossed over the distinctions I was trying to
make in our interview and assumed it was simply more of the same. But if you
had given me the chance you promised me, I could have brought you back to
those distinctions and shown you that my own experience doesn't support that
common view. I could also have shared with you my doubts about the significance
of the frustration that these other pioneers expressed to you. Again, I can’t
speak for them, but I don’t believe their experience was really all that
different from mine, just their perception of it. If so, then
is it right to tell the story from the perspective of how they felt
about what they accomplished, to the exclusion of what they actually did
accomplish? |
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Wikipedia Twisting the Truth - Voros McCracken Entry My Corrections and Additions to “The Numbers Game,” by Alan Schwarz Correcting the Perception of My Role in
the Rockies “Hampton-Neagle” Disaster |
