Moneyball: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

The Oakland A’s approach the 2002 playoffs. In their penultimate game of the regular season, they face the Texas Rangers. Billy Beane and his staff discuss how they’re going to have to lose Ray Durham next year—after a great season with the A’s, he’s become too popular, meaning that Billy won’t be able to save any money by keeping him around. During the 2002 season, Durham’s coaches have forced him to stop trying to steal so many bases—his greatest asset, they recognize, is that he can almost always get on base, not that he can steal bases. In three weeks or so, however, Durham will become a “free agent,” meaning that he’ll be able to command millions of dollars from a much wealthier team.

The regular season ends and the A’s have own their division and made the playoffs. Two important things happen. First, Art Howe holds a meeting with the press in which he criticizes Billy for not giving him a long-term contract. Second, fans, GMs, managers, coaches, and players begin to wonder if Billy’s success has been mostly luck. They criticize the A’s for playing cautiously and not stealing more bases. Such criticisms, Lewis argues, are absurd—the A’s record in 2002 is anything but luck. They’ve gone 103-59, on a payroll of 41 million, ahead of far richer franchises. Baseball celebrities tell the press that Oakland’s success is a fluke. The famous former second baseman, Joe Morgan, claims, illogically, that the A’s hitters need to “manufacture runs” by stealing bases and bunting, instead of waiting for a home run to send them all home. Unbeknownst to Morgan, while he was giving this lecture, the Oakland A’s were “walking and swatting their way to a win” against the Minnesota Twins in the playoffs.

The A’s and Twins each win two of the first four games of their playoff series. Then the Twins win the deciding fifth game, and the A’s are out of the playoffs. Baseball professionals treat their loss as proof that their strategy didn’t work in the long-run. But the A’s didn’t lose because they failed to “manufacture runs.” Indeed, they scored more runs in their playoff games than they did in their regular season games. The problem with the playoff system in baseball, Michael Lewis argues, is that it’s a “crapshoot.” Statistically, in a five-game playoff, the worst team in baseball will defeat the best team about fifteen percent of the time.

Billy said, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs. My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is fucking luck.” In spite of his seeming indifference, Billy was clearly upset by his team’s loss to the obviously inferior Twins. Then, he had the idea to trade Art Howe to another team; in the end, Art signed a two million-dollar contract with the Mets, and Billy promoted his bench coach, Ken Macha, to manage the A’s. Afterwards, Billy realized that, of all the people involved with the A’s, he was the most undervalued. He decided to trade himself.

After the 2002 season, Billy Beane agreed to manage the Red Sox for 12.5 million dollars over five years—the highest sum ever for a GM. Paul DePodesta was set to become the next GM for the A’s. As part of the trade for Billy becoming the new GM of the Red Sox, the A’s would acquire Kevin Youkilis, the same player that Billy had convinced Omar Minaya to acquire early in 2002.

Reporters everywhere talked about how Billy Beane was going to become the highest-paid GM in history. Then, suddenly, Billy called the Red Sox and told them he couldn’t be their GM. He told them that he’d already made one decision based purely on money—signing with the Mets—and he’d never make that mistake again. Billy gives many reasons for turning down the Red Sox, and none are “terribly rational or ‘objective.’” Back with the A’s, working alongside Paul, Billy had a new problem: he wanted to prove to the world of baseball that his sabermetric approach worked, and in order to do so, he had to win a World Series. However, Michael Lewis disagrees—Billy had already changed baseball forever.