[USML Announce] Slate Article: Mitchellball

Sat Dec 15 13:38:32 EST 2007

Brad Lee Bad Finger has sent you an article from Slate Magazine
<http://www.slate.com> .

Time to publish new edition?

 <http://letters.slate.com/W0RH020B9669EDE063B3630DEEC1A0> 

sports nut
 <http://letters.slate.com/W0RH0208EC89FCFB9593E30D20DEA0> 

Mitchellball
How the steroids report changes the Moneyball story.
By Tom Scocca
Posted Friday, Dec. 14, 2007, at 1:35 PM ET

The purpose of a parable is to convey a deeper truth. Consider (or
reconsider) the one at the heart of the most influential book of what's
now officially baseball's Steroids Era. In Chapter 3 of Michael Lewis'
Moneyball
<http://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Art-Winning-Unfair-Game/dp/0393057658>
, the author tells the story of how Oakland A's general manager Billy
Beane became a paradigm-shifting baseball executive. 

Before Beane was a front-office revolutionary, Lewis recounts, he was an
outfield prospect?a baseball Adonis blessed with unimaginable physical
talents but cursed with a mind too tightly wound to handle the pressures
of batting. As he made his way through the Mets farm system, Beane was
struck by the contrast between himself and a fellow outfielder, a
stumpy, unprepossessing player with an unflappable arrogance at the
plate. That other guy, Beane told Lewis, was "perfectly designed,
emotionally, to play the game of baseball." While Beane was a washout,
his teammate went on to be an All-Star and a world champion.

That player, built to thrive in modern baseball, was Lenny Dykstra
<http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2045153> . 

Moneyball, published in 2003, was a rebuttal to one George Mitchell
panel report on the problems of baseball: the 2000 findings of the
Commissioner's Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics
<http://www.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20000701&c
ontent_id=388144&vkey=pr_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb> , which concluded that
low-revenue teams were operating at a hopeless disadvantage against the
top-revenue teams. Oakland gave the lie to that conclusion; it had a
meager budget yet was a perennial contender, thanks to the innovations
of Beane and his predecessor, Sandy Alderson. Moneyball's subtitle was
"The Art of Winning an Unfair Game."

This week's report refers repeatedly to another problem of unfairness.
"We heard from many former players who believed it was grossly unfair
that some players were using performance enhancing substances to gain an
advantage," Mitchell wrote. The Mitchell report makes a mordant appendix
to Moneyball's good news about the state of baseball. What Dykstra
helped teach Beane, Lewis explains, was that "[t]he physical gifts
required to play baseball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than
the mental ones." Particularly, the Mitchell report implies, when the
mental gifts could get an assist from some Dianabol
<http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/phillies/20071214_Phillies_-_Phils_
pleased__No_juice_stains_on_current_roster.html> .

Or, as Beane says elsewhere in the book: "Power is something that can be
acquired. ... Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don't become
good hitters." Oakland, with its limited funds, wouldn't spend payroll
to buy power hitters. Instead, it invested in cheaper, patient hitters.
And those hitters, it seems, bought the power themselves.

Did Beane have steroids deliberately or explicitly in mind? He was
talking about his hopes of drafting someone who could be the next Jason
Giambi. And Jason Giambi, the 2000 American League MVP, was juiced
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/12/02/BALCO.TM
P> . So was his younger brother and Oakland teammate, Jeremy
<http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2005-03-13-giambi-brother-stero
ids_x.htm> . So, according to Mitchell, was the A's other MVP, Miguel
Tejada, who asked for and received steroids and testosterone from
teammate Adam Piatt. And Oakland's veteran pickup David Justice ("an
extraordinary ability to get on base was more likely to stay with a
player to the end of his career than, say, an extraordinary ability to
hit home runs"). The Oakland locker room, the report says, was an
open-air drug market.

Not much of this was news to people who had paid attention to baseball's
drug scandals. The Giambi brothers had been publicly tied to the BALCO
scandal <http://www.usatoday.com/sports/balco-timeline.htm>  a year
after Moneyball came out. Each had made some sort of public apology or
semi-apology; Jason, for good measure, had been sidelined by a tumor
consistent with a ravaged endocrine system. 

But the value of the Mitchell report is not in what it demonstrates
about the pervasiveness of steroids. It is in what it demonstrates about
the pervasiveness of steroids denial. The preview stories about the
report declared that it would include the names of multiple MVPs
<http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/2988722> . This could hardly have
been considered surprising news when Jason Giambi, Jose Canseco, and Ken
Caminiti were already on the record as admitted users. 

For more than a decade, baseball relied on a cycle of collective
forgetfulness. A bad report would surface about someone, the player in
question would deny it or obfuscate, and the news would get filed away
in a dusty cabinet under the presumption of innocence. "Let's keep our
asterisks, innuendo, and, perhaps, even a bit of our conscience in the
closet," the Washington Post's Thomas Boswell wrote in 1998, rooting in
print for Mark McGwire. What Mitchell did was to dump out the whole
cabinet (or at least whole drawers of the cabinet) at once: Roger
Clemens' seven Cy Youngs, Eric Gagne's 84 consecutive saves, Jose
Canseco's 40-40 season, Juan Gonzalez's two MVPs, the startling
longevity of Andy Pettitte and Benito Santiago, the whole slugging
record book rewritten by McGwire and Barry Bonds. 

Where were the steroids in Moneyball? They were out of sight, where the
baseball world wanted them to be. This is not a reflection on Lewis'
reporting, even. The book advanced people's understanding of baseball,
on the terms in which people were willing to think about baseball at the
time. It accurately named and explained the batting approach that
defines this era: power hitting channeled through strict strike-zone
discipline. This is the engine not only of Oakland's budget offense, but
of the bankroll-busting offenses of the Yankees and Red Sox?each of
which has included a Giambi brother on its roster (though not
necessarily fruitfully
<http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS/2003.shtml> ). 

Of Jason Giambi, whose $120 million move from the A's to the Yankees is
a key part of Moneyball, Lewis wrote: "In all of baseball for the past
few years there has been only one batter more useful to an offense:
Barry Bonds." The plucky Athletics, in other words, were playing exactly
the same game as everyone else.

Tom Scocca <mailto:tscocca at observer.com>  is a writer in Beijing.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2180070/

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