Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 68)

LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION So it was a team filled of rejects, and they won more regular season games in the last seven years than anybody but the Yankees. It’s made up often of players who at one stage or their careers or another were rejects, were thought not to be big league baseball players. So for me, this was all of a sudden in this little club house in Oakland, this kind of social experiment. It was a story about how markets value people, basically. If you think about it, and you stop thinking about them as athletes and just thinking about them as employees of the corporation, baseball players have to be the most thoroughly examined employees on the planet. They do what they do in front of 20 million people. They’ve been doing the same thing almost identically for 80 years, playing the game for 150, but the game hasn’t changed very much in a long time. They Three authors, raised on Uptown New Orleans’ State Street, from left, have statistics attached to every move they Nicholas Lemann, Nancy Lemann, and Michael Lewis, 1991. make on a baseball field. I thought, if that person can be so misvalued that this team lots and lots of games. I didn’t understand why. I just has figured out better ways to value them, they can win all thought I could do a little magazine piece. Most of the these games with supposed rejects, then who can’t be books start that way: a little magazine piece to see if I’m misvalued? So I had a story that was about not baseball, it interested in it. The Times said, go try was about the way markets value or fail that, and I went over to see the A’s, to value people, baseball was just an and quickly discovered that there Trying to control the excuse to write that story. So all of a was a massive story that had nothing sudden I’m in sports. Money Ball created effects of the thing you to do with baseball. Baseball was the a firestorm. It made Liar’s Poker look kind write is pointless. People backdrop but it was much more than of quiet. It turned out that the Oakland baseball. The epiphany for me, and read the book they want to A’s were on the cusp of a transformation this is why I think I really became a in professional sports around the world. read. No matter what you sports writer, was I was sitting in the They are the model for a number of NBA say, they bring to the party club house after one of the A’s franchises, NFL franchises, Australian and games, waiting to interview one of what they’re going to get New Zealand rugby and cricket teams, the players, and I was watching the European soccer teams, all these out of whatever they read. players come out of the showers. The enterprises are going through Oakland first time I really looked at them now to find out how they do what they naked, and they really didn’t look good. They were fat, do. But for me, the interest was always how people get there was no muscle definition, they were misshapen in valued. every which way, and I went to the front office and I said, Sartisky: One thing is clear, even when you’re writing “you know, I was just watching your players, and if about finance, is that it wasn’t even about the money, you lined your players up against a wall naked and money was simply how to keep score. It was about asked an ordinary citizen to guess what they did success, power, prestige, it was about the pecking for a living, no one would guess they were order, particularly in the financial world. Your professional athletes. Lawyers maybe but not description of the Oakland A’s baseball players for professional athletes.” And the A’s front office example, and forgive me, I’m a humanities guy, person said, “You just put your finger on but it reminds me of Plato, when Socrates is being something and that is for a player to become put on trial for corrupting the young men of a member of the Oakland A’s, he has to be Athens, and he’s being compared to, among defective in some way. Preferably some others, Alcibiades. Alcibiades is this way really awful on the surface. absolutely beautiful, perfect, articulate, Because a player who’s not defective handsome, athletic young man. Socrates is in some way, who looks like he’s flatulent, old, pot-bellied, and supposed to look, the market value’s bowlegged. Alcibiades, by the way, property and we can’t afford him. proves to be the greatest traitor in But there are all these players who Athenian history. But Socrates says, “I look wrong in one way or another, may be an ugly man, I may be an old who actually have great skills as man, but may I not be a good man?” baseball players that we’re able to That is the fundamental distinction, I get to through statistical analysis. And that’s how we build our team.” LEWIS FAMILY COLLECTION 68 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08 Michael Lewis, 1971nn, Nancy Lemann, and Michael Lewis, 1991.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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