Michael Lewis, Stan Chervin, Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, and Bennett Miller, 2011
#16, 2011 Skandies
I watched Moneyball on the night of 2014, December 14. On that day, the following games were played in the U.S. and Canada:
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Jazz @ Wizards Warriors @ Pelicans Lakers @ Timberwolves Suns @ Thunder Raptors @ Knicks Spurs @ Nuggets |
Buccaneers @ Panthers Dolphins @ Patriots Jaguars @ Ravens Packers @ Bills Raiders @ Chiefs Steelers @ Falcons Texans @ Colts Vikings @ Lions Washington @ Giants Broncos @ Chargers Jets @ Titans 49ers @ Seahawks Cowboys @ Eagles |
Flames @ Blackhawks Rangers @ Oilers |
Those are just professional North American team sports. On the same day, there were also 116 Division I college basketball games played, 71 on the women's side and 45 on the men's. I'm sure that games were held in other college team sports as well. Nearly all of these games were part of the process of determining which team will be declared the champion of its league. But teams are not natural units. They're artificial constructions. Which teams win is largely a function of which teams have the best players, and each league has its own way of determining which players end up on which teams. So, in a sense, Team 1 vs. Team 2 is no more a contest of athletic prowess than chess is a test of whether queens are more powerful than bishops. The real battle is between groups of executives, and the sport is player acquisition.
The rules of this sport differ from league to league. American sports leagues — unlike those in the rest of the world, so far as I can tell — hold to the principle that competitive balance is a good thing. In the short term, this means "parity", the notion that in any given game, both teams should have a realistic chance of winning. In the long term, it means that every team should have a chance to enjoy occasional periods of success, and that therefore the worst teams should be given an advantage in acquiring players. For instance, most young players don't just get to sign with the teams of their choice when they join an American sports league; they're subject to a draft system wherein teams are granted the exclusive rights to sign the players they select, with the worst teams choosing first. Another tool used by a number of leagues is a salary cap. The NFL has a "hard cap", a maximum dollar amount teams can spend on player salaries. Say that you're a skilled NFL general manager and you managed to pick a number of very talented players in the draft. When their contracts are up, you'd like to re-sign all of them — but, having demonstrated their talents, they all want hefty raises. The salary cap will prevent you from being able to give all of them the money they're seeking, so you'll end up losing at least a few. This is deliberate: the people who run the NFL don't want the league dominated by the same strong teams year after year. Other leagues value continuity a bit more, while still seeking some degree of competitive balance. The NBA has a "soft cap" that allows teams to go over the limit to sign their own players, but not to sign players away from other teams. A talented basketball player at the end of his contract therefore generally finds himself with a choice between re-signing with his current team or signing with a poor team with a lot of "cap room"; teams that already have a lot of expensive players on their roster won't be able to offer him a contract in the same range.
Major League Baseball doesn't have a salary cap. In 2013, the Houston Astros spent $22,062,600 on player salaries, and finished in last place. The Boston Red Sox spent $150,655,500, and won the World Series. And they weren't even the top spenders: the New York Yankees spent $228,835,490. Now, imagine that you're the general manager of my local baseball team, the Oakland Athletics. It's 2001, and despite having the second-lowest payroll in the majors, your team has just finished with the second-best record in baseball. Unfortunately, in the first round of the playoffs you get matched up against the top-spending Yankees, and lose the series three games to two. Your season is over, and the contract of your best batter, Jason Giambi — the best position player in the American League, according to a metric called Wins Above Replacement — is up. If this were a sport with a salary cap, the one team you would not have to fear poaching your player would be the Yankees, whose $109,891,893 payroll would have them capped out. But this is baseball. The Yankees sign Jason Giambi for $115 million. They can do this because the owner of the Yankees is willing to pay that much, and your boss, the owner of the Athletics, is not. He does give you a little extra money to assemble a roster for the 2002 season; you now have merely the third-lowest amount to spend, ahead of the Montreal Expos and Tampa Bay Devil Rays, two teams which no longer exist under those names. Moneyball is the story of how A's general manager Billy Beane, operating under these constraints, put together a team that made the playoffs again and rattled off an American League record 20-game winning streak in the process.
The secret, at least as the movie portrays it, was to take all the superannuated baseball scouts choosing players based on factors such as "He's got a real clean stroke!" and "Ugly girlfriend means no confidence!" and replace them with young nerds who had analyzed what factors, statistically, are important to winning baseball games. Since baseball is essentially an individual sport disguised as a team sport, there was no need to worry about chemistry the way a basketball GM might: Beane and his baseball wonks could simply look at spreadsheets, trying to spot players who had the stats they were looking for but who had been undervalued by other teams for reasons the new A's crew didn't care about ("He throws funny!" "He's a little thick about the waist!"). While Moneyball focuses on the 2002 season, here's a rundown of how the A's have done during the entirety of Beane's tenure as general manager; playoff years are marked with a white dot:
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• • • • • • • • |
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 |
25th 25th 25th 29th 28th 23rd 16th 21st 21st 17th 28th 26th 28th 21st 29th 27th 25th |
2nd 1st 1st 8th 15th 25th 2nd 13th 11th 2nd 12th 1st 10th 11th 8th 4th 7th |
Over this span, an average team could theoretically expect to make the postseason 4.7 times. The A's, with a payroll far below average, went eight times. That's remarkable. And yet there are those who would argue that the most successful low-spending team during this period was not the A's but rather the Florida Marlins. They only went to the playoffs once during these seventeen years, but the one time they did go, they won the World Series. I actually had a brief Twitter exchange with some random about this issue. I was doing a search and up popped a tweet from a guy in Michigan complaining about players celebrating having advanced in the playoffs. "You didn't win anything yet!!" he grumbled. "[W]hy do you play any sport? To win a WORLD Championship. You didn't win a ring yet." This sentiment is far from rare; my guess is that the majority of American sports fans believe that the only thing that matters is winning the whole shebang, and anything else constitutes failure and ignominy. "If you ain't first, yer last!" This is a terrible thing to believe, for a number of reasons.
About ten years ago Texas hold 'em poker became a huge fad, and surfing around on Jennifer's television I'd find poker tournaments on channel after channel. Some featured minor celebrities; a lot more featured professional poker players. The reason that there is such a thing as a professional poker player is that poker is not entirely a game of luck. Over the course of many, many hands, skillful players will do slightly better than less skillful ones, and can thereby generate a semi-reliable income. But any single hand basically is a matter of luck. Personally, I find poker infuriating. I've never played for money, because I'm philosophically opposed to gambling, but I did take a look at a free site called Gpokr around the time I wrote my article on Kdice. I recently went back to watch a few hands, and it hasn't changed. All too often I'd see situations like this:
Player 1: A♣ 4♦
Player 2: 2♠ 6♣
On the table: 2♣ 3♥ 5♠ 9♦
Player 1 already has a straight. Since a flush is impossible, the best Player 2 can have right now is top straight with a 4-6, but why would he have bet before the flop if all he had was 4-6? Player 1 therefore has to decide whether to bet really high and scare Player 2 into folding, or bet low enough to trick Player 2 into staying in and losing. One irksome possibility is that Player 2 might have something like a 5-5, which would allow him to win with a full house or four of a kind if any of the numbers on the table came up again on the river. Player 1 therefore decides to go all in and try to scare Player 2 off. But Player 2 calls. This is a stupid decision. All Player 2 has is a pair of twos, and Player 1 is confident enough in his cards that he has staked his continued presence in the tournament on them. Once Player 2 has called, he can see that his decision was stupid: the only way he can win now is for one of the three remaining fours to come up, and with 44 unknown cards in the deck, the chances of that happening are only 6.8%. And, of course, a four does come up. And Player 2 trash talks Player 1, as if lucking into that unlikely outcome somehow reveals him as the superior player. (And, this being Gpokr, it isn't long before they're calling each other "nigger" and "fag", and I stop watching.)
Sports leagues operate along the same lines. In any given baseball season, the best team will generally win about 60% of its games, and the worst team will generally win about 40%. That's why every team plays 162 of the things: it takes that many to even begin to establish which teams are good and which are bad, as opposed to which caught some lucky breaks and which didn't. In Moneyball, there's a point at which the A's are 20-26, and one of the nerds who concocted the Moneyball approach dismisses the team's poor record as a random fluctuation that doesn't reflect the team's true ability. Sure enough, the A's go 83-33 the rest of the way. And, having demonstrated that 46 games is too small a sample size to distinguish a good team from a bad one, the A's are then forced to stake their season on a sample size of five. That is, in crowning its champion, Major League Baseball deliberately changes from a format weighted toward rewarding skill to one weighted toward rewarding luck. Consider the 2001 season with which Moneyball opens. It was a remarkable year. Like I just said, normally the best team in baseball wins 60% of its games; in 2014 the team with the best record was the preposterously named Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, who won 98 games for a winning percentage of 60.5%. But in 2001 the Seattle Mariners managed to win 116 games for a winning percentage of 71.6%, the best record in the 162-game era. The second-place Oakland A's compiled 102 wins, a 63.0% mark that is itself pretty remarkable, and the Mariners still finished fourteen games ahead of them. If the purpose of the playoffs had been to determine which team was the best, they should have just been called off, because there could be no real debate. The Mariners were the best. But that's not the purpose of the playoffs. If it were, we wouldn't see outcomes like these:
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1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 |
Yankees Yankees Yankees Diamondbacks Angels Marlins Red Sox White Sox Cardinals Red Sox Phillies Yankees Giants Cardinals Giants Red Sox Giants |
1st 3rd 9th 6th 4th 7th 3rd 2nd 13th 1st 5th 1st 5th 8th 4th 1st 8th |
You'll notice that the Mariners do not appear on this list. Over the course of a 162-game season, they had won 21 more games than the Yankees, but to be named champion they then had to defeat the Yankees in a seven-game series, a short enough stretch of games that their chances of winning were only 60.1%. And they lost. This is just one of many data points illustrating that the purpose of the playoffs is to offer the audience an outcome that, by design, is fairly random, because that's more entertaining, and sports are a form of entertainment. The playoffs don't determine the best team, because who the best team is doesn't matter. Sports don't matter. That's why we call them "sports". People watch sports in order to feel extremes of emotion — giddy triumph, devastating disappointment, agonizing anticipation — over a rooting interest that is entirely arbitrary. You urgently want the men wearing the green hats to defeat the men wearing the blue hats, not because it changes your life at all, but for tautological reasons: because you've decided that that's what you want. You could just as easily have decided to prefer the men wearing the blue hats. (Actually, as Jerry Seinfeld famously pointed out, often we're rooting more for the hats than for the men wearing them.) You also get to choose how much meaning you want to arbitrarily invest in these meaningless games. If what you want out of sports is casual entertainment — turn on a game, get caught up in it, smile when your team wins or pout when it loses, turn it off, forget about it — then an example of a rewarding team to follow might be my (semi-)local hockey team, the San Jose Sharks, who since I returned to California in the fall of 2005 have made the playoffs every year. No NHL team has won more regular-season games over that span. Sharks fans have certainly gone home happy a lot more often than fans of the Los Angeles Kings, who have won fewer than half their games in the same period. But the Sharks haven't won any championships, while the Kings won two Stanley Cups by going on postseason hot streaks in years they finished 9th and 13th in the regular season. Thus most hardcore sports fans would say that the Kings have been the better team, because only championships matter.
But how much do even championships matter? In 2010, though I drove past the Oakland Coliseum almost every day and frequently found myself in BART trains full of people going to or coming back from an A's game, I actually kept much closer tabs on the San Francisco Giants, just because their games were the ones that always happened to be on the radio as I drove around between tutoring appointments. And that year the Giants ended up winning the World Series! After seven months of obsessive Giants coverage, I wondered how long the radio station would bask in the team's triumph. Answer: the Giants' last game was on a Monday, the victory parade was held that Wednesday, and on Thursday it was as if the Giants didn't exist. It was on to the 49ers and Warriors and Sharks. Baseball season was over. It didn't matter anymore. Because sports don't matter. So, yes, you can buy into the artifice that some meaningless games are more important than other meaningless games, and that what rightfully determines dazzling success vs. mortifying failure is not how often you win over a substantial stretch of games, but the coin flip of a playoff series. But to insist that that's the only way to judge success vs. failure in sports is inane. And while I have tried to keep this article focused on sports, I can't help but conclude by noting that the feeling that those who are lucky deserve acclaim and that those who are unlucky deserve condemnation is also what drives much of our politics.
