In my review 18 months ago of Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball,” I drew a somewhat facetious analogy between the strategy discussed in that book and a certain other movement that was in vogue at the time:
What the neo-conservatives of the Bush Adminstration are to foreign policy, the sabermetric movement is to major league baseball: a movement that has existed and gradually gained steam for years, and now has finally broken through and more or less been accepted by those in power.Well, you can imagine my surprise to open up last week’s Sports Illustrated, and in a profile of Beane and his latest A’s makeover, to find this passage:The sabermatricians' Weekly Standard is the Baseball Prospectus; their Scoop Jackson Bill James, and their Axis of Evil is baseball's traditional scouting establishment. And their George W. Bush is Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane: a longtime insider who has embraced the movement's long-held ideas and applied them on the main stage.
But whereas A's general manager Billy Beane had usually been content, as in the cases of Giambi and Tejada, to wring the last years of service from his young talent and accept draft picks as compensation, he changed tracks this winter. In essence Beane preempted -- to borrow a term now in vogue in foreign policy circles and favored by several members of the Oakland brain trust -- an imminent financial crisis, surrendering three years' worth of dividends for immediate help. The consensus around baseball has the A's dead and buried, with preemption the cause.Guess this proves Billy Beane reads BlogCritics. Posted by Stephen Silver at March 7, 2005 09:48 PM"Nothing wrong with it if you're a neocon," roars Beane, who showed in Michael Lewis's 2003 best-seller Moneyball that he's equal parts earthy and wonkish.