[USML Announce] Slate Article: Mitchellball

[rickgam at comcast.net]

Greetings;
     I was just thinking of Mr. Beane.  Here I thought that he was really clever and he goes and trades D. Haren for a crate full of mediocre prospects!  Granted, I don't know a great deal about N.L. beans, but from what I gather, this is a collection of "come agains?" and "who dats?"  I was convinced that Mr. Beane knew that when it comes to baseball trades, quantity does not equal quality.
     Rick "Runner-Up" G.

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: <bljansen at gmail.com>
> 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/
> 
> Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
> 
> 


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