Return of Moneyball
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, has a piece in this week’s Sports Illustrated refuting the many, many “baseball insiders” who dismissed the book without reading it, and then proceeded to applaud ideas that have been shown to not work.
Within the piece, Lewis discusses Joe Morgan’s idiotic quotes claiming that Billy Beane wrote the book–something both Aaron Gleeman and I have bitched about at length. While I’m not going to say Joe Morgan is stupid, being unable to figure out who wrote the book on which you’re commenting certainly undermines any arugments you have against the ideas in said book–especially if you admit to having not read it.
But how did Lewis know about Morgan’s stupidity? Is he a regular chat session participant on ESPN.com? Or did a certain Boston-based blogger alert him to this last June?
That’s right: I’m Lewis’ source for the Morgan quotes. Including my presence in a photo of the famous Kirby Puckett homer (# 11 in the link) in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series (I’m one of a row of little white blobs WAY in the background), I have now (sorta) been in Sports Illustrated twice–and used parenthesis in this sentence three times.
If you haven’t read Moneyball, click on the link on the right, and buy it!