MONEYBALLHOG: With the Oakland A's losing in the first round of baseball's playoffs for a Kevin Garnett-like fourth consecutive season, the obvious question has been raised of whether or not the team's general manager Billy Beane and his famous "Moneyball" philosophy have all this time been overrated.
Clearly Beane had to have gotten something right, as he has been right more often than not about player evaluation, his team has succeeded in dominating down the stretch in each of the past four seasons, and even the team he lost to in the first round this year, the Boston Red Sox, tried to hire Beane before the season and nevertheless has won this year with a largely Beane-inspired philosophy (by way of his spiritual godfather, Bill James).
But at the same time, the critics were proven right in many ways by Oakland's first-round collapse against Boston. Virtually every weakness of the team that was exposed in that series (lack of speed, lack of smart baserunning, poor relief pitching and next to no "clutch hitting") is a facet of the game that Beane has gone on record as believing is either overrated or, in the case of clutch hitting, nonexistent. Beane is still a baseball genius, in my opinion, and (as he said after the Game 5 loss), give him an unlimited payroll like Boston or the Yankees have, and a lot of those weaknesses may very well disappear.
But then again, there's one other tenet of "Moneyball" which Beane appears to have been ahead of the curve on. Isaac at WKIKYA points us towards a piece in the Cleveland Scene newspaper on "hogging"- a new trend in which men activity seek to hook up with overweight women before quickly dumping them- the idea being that such women are less sought after and thus "easier."
As anyone who's read "Moneyball" can tell you, a favorite tactic of Beane's is to seek out fat players (such as both Giambi brothers, and catcher Jeremy Brown), the idea being that such guys are less coveted by other teams and besides, according to Beane the sorts of skills normally possessed by in-shape ballplayers are all overrated anyway. The Red Sox learned from this, and beat the A's in part due to the heroics of Kevin Millar, David Ortiz, and other players who will never be confused with male models. And the Scene article even quotes longtime major leaguer Mark Grace as saying that hogging is popular among big league ballplayers.
So playoff loss notwithstanding, Billy Beane's got that going for him. When emaciated groupies throw themselves at him, does Beane remind them, "we're not selling jeans here"?