As we show at length in The Beauty of Short Hops, the basic premise of Moneyball is fallacious.  Oakland, which crashed and burned shortly after publication of Moneyball, succeeded primarily because Beane was fortunate enough to land three terrific starting pitchers.  When those three departed, he apparently became a lot less smart.

For starters, Hirsch has an awfully curious definition of “crashed and burned.” Moneyball covers the 2002 season for Oakland, in which the A’s won 103 games. Over the next four seasons, Oakland won 96, 91, 88, and 93 games, respectively. They won their division and went to the playoffs twice, and made the ALCS once. So right away, we’ve got a completely inaccurate statement of fact framing Hirsch’s premise.

But why do I lump Hirsch into the Joe Morgan camp of Moneyball critics. After all, his point about Oakland’s really good young pitchers is true, isn’t it? Yes, it is true. It also doesn’t in any way contradict anything written in Moneyball. Indeed, here’s what Moneyball had to say about those good young pitchers verbatim:

The Oakland A’s survived by finding cheap labor. The treatment of amateur players is the most glaring of the many violations of free market principles in Major League Baseball. A team that drafts and signs a player holds the rights to his first seven years in the minor leagues and his first six in the majors. It also enjoys the right to pay the player far less than he’s worth. For instance, the Oakland A’s were able to pay their All-Star pitcher Barry Zito $200,000 in 2000, $240,000 in 2001, and $500,000 in 2002 (when he would win the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in the American League) because they had drafted him in 1999.

This is the fundamental point that the critics of Moneyball who refuse to pay attention to what the book actually says, and instead want to use it as a mish-mashed proxy for arguments over modern statistical analysis, will never understand, because they’re arguing with a strawman. The core of Moneyball isn’t about Bill James, or OBP, or DIPS, or fat catchers; it’s about building a successful Major League Baseball team without having a lot of money to do it with. Stockpiling talented young players in their cost controlled periods isn’t a contradiction to moneyball, it’s the most important aspect of it! If Hirsch had any idea whatsoever what Moneyball was arguing, he wouldn’t be embarrassing himself trying to argue that facts the book actually credits for Oakland’s success totally disprove the book’s premise.

On a different note, there were a couple of other parts of the post I got quite a bit of amusement out of. The first:

More importantly, the saber-obsession with numbers occludes a major aspect of baseball’s beauty – its narrative richness and relentless capacity to surprise.  Baseball, thank goodness, transcends and often defies quantitative analysis.  Games are decided by bad hops and bad calls, broken bats, sun and wind, pigeons in the outfield, and fans who obstruct players, among other unforeseeable contingencies  That may seem obvious (apart from the pigeons), but not to the folks who increasingly run the show.

Of course, no one denies that some games turn on these random events, but I’m intrigued by the ramifications of the author’s implication that most, or even all, games are ultimately decided by these events. If that’s true, the composition of a team’s roster is completely irrelevant, as a team of 25 Francisco Cervelli‘s is just as likely to benefit from these breaks as a team of 25 Albert Pujolses. Is Hirsch comfortable with that conclusion?

And then there’s this, which continues to be maddeningly dense:

Lewis reports how Hinkie flipped out because the Lakers’ Trevor Ariza hit an off-balance three-point shot.  “That Ariza shot, that is really painful,” Hinke said, “because it’s a near-random event.”  Every basketball fan understands the frustration when good defense is thwarted by bad luck, but surely such “near-random events” are phenomena to be embraced, not wished away.  Hinkie doesn’t see it that way.  To him, a wild shot is the sort of thing that happens but ought not, and thus undermines rather than enhances the sport.

I look at it very differently.  You can dismiss the desperation three-point heave as unfair and somehow beside the point, or you can celebrate it as a wondrous event lying at the heart of sports.

The problem here is that Hirsch is conflating the perspective of fans with the perspective of the people whose job it is to put together winning teams. To fans, these near-random events are a source of suspense and enjoyment. To the people directly involved in the game, they’re a maddening example of the limits of their ability to make things happen. These sorts of things exist in just about every profession, of course, and I doubt that anyone particularly likes them. It’s just not fun when something completely out of your control foils your plans, or when you do everything right only to be set back by an unfortunate random event.

And I’m sort of curious how far Hirsch is willing to take this sentiment. Would he scold the player Ariza hit the miracle shot over for being upset at losing a big game in such a random fashion rather than appreciating the beauty of it all? How about the fan of that team, whose heart has just been broken by a shot that almost never goes in? Are Red Sox fans supposed to look back at Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone fondly now?

But since I’m really a nice guy at heart, let me conclude by offering Mr. Hirsch some friendly advice, writer to writer: when trying to promote a book you’ve written, it’s a very bad idea to let everyone know it’s not worth spending a dime on.