Interviews

An Interview with Michael Lewis

Barnes & Noble.com: Moneyball concerns Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics and the team's revolutionary general manager, Billy Beane. What made you want to write this book?

Michael Lewis: The realization first that the Oakland A's were working with so much less money than the teams they were beating. That follows on the fact that for players to become an Athletic, the players had to have something wrong with them (because the team could not afford the more expensive players). If there wasn't something wrong with them, they would not have been on the A's. When I realized they were this glorious collection of underdogs, I completely fell in love with this story.

B&N.com: What was the most compelling thing about Billy Beane, the A's GM?

ML: That he had this disastrous experience as a pro player and had set out as a GM to find players who were the opposite of himself.

B&N.com: What did Beane do as GM for the Oakland A's that was so different from what other GMs did?

ML: Well, he embraced a very new idea of baseball knowledge. If you rethought the game, you could find secrets about it and find inefficiencies about the game and the way players were valued. It was his willingness to think like an innovator in what is a very traditional sport that gave him an advantage.

B&N.com: How did he compensate for the team's small payroll -- one of the lowest payrolls in baseball -- to build teams that competed with and could defeat most of the teams that had payrolls over $100 million?

ML: By finding undervalued players and by not paying the market price for superstars. Billy Beane makes his living off the misperceptions of baseball players that other general managers have. He is always selling players at a high price and buying them too cheaply.

B&N.com: How has Beane influenced baseball and the big-spending teams like the Yankees and Red Sox?

ML: The Oakland model has had two obvious consequences: The Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox are now reinventing themselves in the tradition of the A's. When the A's consider a player, they look closely at on-base percentage. So, on-base percentage is becoming something people are paying attention to. Also, they look at the hitter's discipline. Other than that, the Oakland attitude really has not spread to other teams. If you study it, you can find new knowledge, and you can do well. Most other franchises just do what they always used to do.

Baseball is actually a very screwed-up industry. I was a mole inside a front office and clubhouse. The response from other organizations to the Oakland method is outrage. Where else would that happen in any industry? Other industries would welcome the change. In baseball, there is resistance to the idea that someone knows something everybody else does not know. People who evaluate baseball players, the scouts, generally, are motivated by their desire to preserve their good standing within the fraternity. They don't want to make waves.

B&N.com: How did Beane use numbers in a way that was so revolutionary?

ML: The Oakland A's built a model to explain where runs came from. Lots of people outside baseball did this, but people inside baseball didn't do it. In their model, they said walks, singles, doubles, and triples each have a certain effect on run production. They assigned weight to each kind of event. They tested this model. If they have so many of this or that, they have so many runs by the end of the year. These various components have extreme value. Walks are a lot more valuable than people thought. The A's can find players who are otherwise unexceptional, except for walking, and insert them into the lineup. It's analysis, not numbers alone.

B&N.com: What was the most challenging thing about writing this book?

ML: It was breaking down the resistance in the clubhouse and getting to know the players. Hanging around among naked men. I needed to get more than quotes, needed to visit them in the off-season. That was hard to do.

B&N.com: What was it like talking to Beane and the players?

ML: It was exhilarating, because I felt like I was seeing this completely novel approach in building a baseball team from the inside. I did it in a season. The team broke a 50-year-old record for consecutive wins in the American League (20). It was exhilarating. It took a while for them to understand what I was doing. Writing this kind of a book is a bit like dancing. You have to get used to your partner. It was awkward at first, but then it became natural.

B&N.com: What particularly impressed you about baseball culture, so to speak, in the Major Leagues?

ML: Nobody talks with anybody else. Huge amounts of communication are nonverbal. I could tell the front office things that it didn't know about what players were thinking, and vice versa. There is so much information that is not exchanged. This is what happens when muscular men gather. It is not cool to talk.