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| Mean mugging. |
This week, Law attended a preview screening of Moneyball, the Brad Pitted adaptation of the Micheal Lewis book we have all read because we enjoy baseball and are on the internet. And, as he outlines on his blog, he did not care for it: "Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out." There are those who have pointed out that this runs counter to most professional reviews of the movie so far, but to that one can only say whatever, and, writing as someone who has himself both reviewed professionally and been professionally reviewed, let me add a second "whatever," because, seriously, whatever. Who could possibly care that? That is a pretty silly thing to point out, I think. Anyway, Christopher Rosen of the site Moviefone, which I knew nothing about until yesterday, got in touch with Michael Lewis, and asked him what he thought of Keith Law's take. The result is an ethering:
"Billy [Beane] called me and said Keith Law had sent him his review. I looked at it and I thought, What's he talking about? It's very weird that he's on this. He's intellectually dishonest, and I don't know to what purpose. I don't understand why he goes from being -- when I interviewed Keith Law, and I did, at length -- he was so nasty about scouts and scouting culture and the stupidity of baseball insiders. He was the reductio ad absurdum of the person who was the smarty pants who had been brought into the game and was smarter than everybody else. He alienated people. And now he's casting himself as someone who sees the value of the old school. I can't see where this is all heading and why. But I learned from experience that the best thing to do is ignore it, because it goes away."
First off, were Michael Lewis ever to denounce me as a smarty pants, I would probably never stop crying. That is absolutely brutal. I might very well be a buffoon in any number of ways, and were Michael Lewis to point that out to me, it would be rough, but I could probably handle it, I think. I could maybe even survive being characterized as intellectually dishonest, maybe, although that's actually pretty rough, but imagine, imagine trying to get through a single day of the rest of your now completely unlivable life after Michael Lewis called you a smarty pants, and, moreover, was right. Keith Law is totally a smarty pants. That is completely true.
Understandably, all of this cut Keith Law to the bone, and he took to the airwaves/internet tubes to respond in a way that tells you way more about the weird Blue Jays front office under J. P. Ricciardi than you probably ever thought you'd know. You can listen to the audio here (about nineteen minutes in, and worth listening to for Law's idiosyncratic pronunciation of the word "caricature" if nothing else), or you can read a transcript of this pretty remarkable and revealing stuff below -- endless, endless internet propers to the mighty Drunk Jays Fans for actually transcribing this, as transcription is agony:
When Michael interviewed me for Moneyball-- there was one long interview in particular in my office in Toronto; I can still picture where he sat, where I sat-- this was 2002. I was 28 or 29, less than a year into my job with the Blue Jays, which was my first job in baseball at all.
Before that I had been a freelance writer, a little for ESPN and a lot for Baseball Prospectus. I was very much a stats guy-- only a stats guy-- I had no scouting experience.
I was hired by JP Ricciardi-- who was the the General Manager, who came out of Oakland, worked for Billy Beane-- who had been a scout, but did not respect scouts or scouting. In fact, one of Ricciardi's favourite things to do, especially the first six months or so I was there, was call me into his office-- or sometimes just call me on the phone, if I was still in Massachusetts-- he'd pull out this binder-- this gives you a sense of how long ago this was-- this binder that had all of our printed scouting reports that amateur and pro scouts had turned in on all of these players that they'd seen, and he would pick a player that he liked. "Hey, let's go see what our genius scout said about Eric Hinske!" And I could still remember-- I know who the scout was, the scout's now a cross-checker with a National League club, and a friend of mine-- "You know what!? This idiot, he thinks Eric Hinske's an org. player!"-- which means a guy with basically with no Major League value, a guy who's good for a Double-A or Triple-A roster but that's about it-- which was a little light, but what is Eric Hinske? He's an extra player in the big leagues. I don't think that's a disastrous report. But this was how Ricciardi viewed scouts, particularly the Blue Jays scouts he inherited. And he ended up firing, or not renewing, more than half of the scouting staff, as I can remember-- many of whom have gone on to senior positions in other scouting departments.
So... I'm not trying to make an excuse here, but just to give you an idea of my mindset at the time. My whole baseball universe was my own work as an analyst, and the guy who brought me into baseball, who was my boss and somebody I admired at the time [oh shit "at the time" -- KS] and was trying to learn from, telling me, "Most scouts are useless," even though he had been a scout himself. And at the time that I sat down with Lewis, I was giving him the party line-- something I believed in, absolutely. That was nine years ago, give or take a few months, and I've only spoken to Michael once or twice since then-- I did talk to him a year or two later; he was planning to do a follow-up book that I think fizzled because the players drafted in the so-called "Moneyball Draft" didn't work out as well as hoped.
About two years, two-and-a-half years after that-- so 2004, 2005-- it became pretty clear to me that we were failing. And this was one of the major reasons I left Toronto. There were a couple-- that's a topic for another day-- but, it wasn't working. The stat-heavy approach was... we were basically two steps behind. What we were trying to do was what Oakland had been doing around 2000 or so, and the Red Sox and the Cardinals and the Padres and one or two other clubs-- Cleveland-- they were pretty clearly adopting some of these same methods. And we were left in the situation-- kind of a similar situation to where we were before we even got there, which was that we weren't innovating fast enough, and the market had become too competitive for the limited type of player we were going for.
It really became apparent to me in the draft room. I remember Tony LaCava-- who is still there, who is Alex Anthopoulos's right-hand man in Toronto-- independently had realized the same thing, which was we were killing ourselves, especially in the draft, because we would only take college players with "acceptable" stats. And that's such a narrow pool, especially when five or six teams are all going for the same type of player. You get to the third or fourth round and you're done. There's nobody on the board you think could even be an average regular in the big leagues.
He and I both spent a lot of time between the '04 and '05 drafts, and again between '05 and '06, trying to convince Ricciardi, "We've got to change this; we've got to incorporate more scouting into our process; we have to be willing to look at high school players; we have to be willing to take some of these higher risk tool players who maybe don't have the perfectly acceptable stat line but give us some upside, some chance to look for hidden value that other clubs aren't identifying." And one of the reasons I left in 2006 was the recognition that this approach-- this so-called "new school" or "Moneyball" approach-- was not going to work. Was never going to work. And they ended up scrapping it after I left.
But while I was there I worked with many scouts-- like I said, some of whom have gone on to success with other clubs, many of whom are friends of mine now, and I have to say, many of whom tried to open my mind in 2002, 2003, when I was not open-minded, when I was 28, 29, and walked in the door and was told, "You're here, you're gonna replace ten scouts with the work you do." And I believed it, which was a terrible mistake on my part.
I recognize that Chris Buckley, now the scouting director with the Reds, and Tim Wilken, who's the scouting director with the Cubs-- these guys were trying to help me. Trying to open my mind. Mike Cadahia-- who is a cross-checker who was just let go from Seattle, but who is, I think, a very good scout and a very good person, and I hope to see him land somewhere soon-- he was trying. These guys were trying to help me realize that there are more ways to do this. And the more inputs you have, the more information you have, the better the decisions you're going to make.
Part of what I came to ESPN with in 2006 was this vision for a different kind of writing that incorporated everything. And so, when Michael Lewis claims that I was nasty about scouts and scouting culture, there's a kernel of truth inside the caricature which he paints-- which is kind of what he did to several people in the book-- Paul DePodesta, I think; there's a kernel of truth to the caricature of DePodesta in the book Moneyball. But to say that I'm "casting" myself "as someone who sees the value of the old school?" No, I see the value of the old school, and have for five or six years now. And I have tried-- I won't sit here and tell you I'm successful-- but I've really tried to incorporate both of those things into my writing.
And, I have to say, a lot of the credit for that goes to LaCava, Buckley, Wilken, Cadahia and Billy Moore, and Jeff Taylor, and Mike Mangan-- these are all people that I worked with in Toronto, and I'm apologizing for forgetting ten other people I should be crediting here. But they worked with me, they opened my mind, they showed me the beginnings of how to evaluate, but at a time when I wasn't receptive to it. They tried to show me the importance of this old school, of scouting players from a traditional perspective. It just all caught up to me-- two, three years after the fact-- that they weretrying to help me, and that I had kind of missed out-- maybe set myself back in the process. And leaving for ESPN kind of gave me the opportunity to start over and make this major change to my philosophy of baseball, which is what I think you've seen over the last couple of years in my writing.
This is all, in my view, bananas. As I have said before, the loathsome J. P. Ricciardi era is completely fascinating to me, since it's the time when I was at the ballpark pretty much every day, following the team as closely as anybody can, really: I was a graduate student at the time and thus completely unencumbered by the duties and responsibilities that come along with being a real person. So, any insight into how any aspect of that disaster (theirs, not mine) took shape, I totally welcome. I think it's also worth noting that it comes across like Law is kind of blaming Michael Lewis for not keeping up with the personal and professional development of Keith Law, as though Lewis should have signed up for an ESPN Insider account and realized the extent to which Keith has grown and changed over the years, when obviously Michael Lewis has no reason to care about that in the least, as he has been plenty busy being Micheal Lewis. That's kind of funny. But more than anything else, I am sympathetic with Law in all of this. Who among us was not a know-nothing-know-it-all in their twenties? Who among us does not regret this -- at least a little; maybe a lot -- now that we're older and least a little less convinced of our own genius, or even competence? We are all of us Keith Law, is what I am trying to say here, at least those of us who were smug jerks in our twenties but have more recently begun to realize that, beneath our smarty pants, we are all of us butts.
KS
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