“The revolution, in a way, has consumed the revolutionary. He cannot escape.”
Billy Beane
Michael Lewis on how his book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game, was received: “The big thing was not baseball's response. It was the response outside of baseball, which was so loud that baseball couldn't ignore it. An awful lot of people who are friends with owners read the book. That was the channel back into baseball. The Wall Street investment banker friend of owner X calling him and saying, 'your team is completely mismanaged.' Baseball is a pretty insulated culture. But it's still porous. If it was perfectly insulated, they would have ignored it.”
He talks about what it was like hanging out with Billy Beane and why Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Eric Chavez were excluded from the bulk of the book. Only Zito was undervalued, but besides, everybody else was writing about them, so why should he?
