Visiting Column #22 -- The Bitter Irony of the Blind Left

Michael Lewis is a leftist who happens to be a writer, or a writer who happens to be a leftist.  I'm not sure which is relevant here, but we're going to discuss him a bit, and it helps to know he is both.

If you have never heard of Michael Lewis, or if his name is simply too common to ring a bell with you, he is the author of, among some books I have not read, the book "Moneyball", which I have.  Now, I have read Moneyball at least four times, which probably makes up for the fact that I've never read any of Lewis's other works, or maybe not, but it is an ironic linkage involving it that is today's topic.

Moneyball, of course, is the 2003 book about the 2002 Oakland Athletics, and a bit more generally about how the regime that ran the Athletics' baseball operations, led by GM Billy Beane, had been able to stay competitive and even win heavily over several years in a league where their revenues and player salary budgets were far smaller than almost all other teams.

Even a bit more generally, the book is about how Beane was able to do that repeatedly, year after year, by the specific tactic of identifying where his competitors, the other teams in the league, had for decades undervalued certain assets (player capabilities) and overvalued others.  By identifying which assets could be gotten cheaper (i.e., affordably by the As), he was able to build teams that scored more runs than their opponents.

As you probably already know, he was able -- actually, his management team was able -- to run lots of numbers, leverage sane analyses done by others, and do the research needed.  They recognized that, while a key to assessing an offensive player was to value his ability to get on base (i.e., not make outs), and to get extra-base hits, his competitors seemed not to value those skills. 

A key to avoid was to get excited over a player's ability to sacrifice, to steal bases, and to do other things that simply didn't add enough value to offset their risk, yet that was highly regarded in the field.  And what we'd call "traditional scouting", that is, looking at a player in the flesh and projecting their abilities, well, that was completely useless to Beane, who recognized that the old scouts' methods of projecting value were simply old and statistically unsupported.

I'm simplifying because I don't want to miss getting you the point, which was that Beane's Athletics were able to succeed because they were forced to analyze true value -- not conventional wisdom, but where conventional wisdom (in this case, traditional scouting) had long pushed their competition into making incorrect assessments of value.  Those subjective assessments were proven incorrect based on objective data, and Beane could no longer afford to give away the edge he gained when he shed subjectivity.

So Lewis.

At the end of the paperback version of Monetball is an epilogue, wherein Lewis discusses some of the fallout from the original publication.  The part I want to mention is where he takes to task certain baseball writers who read the book and completely missed the point.

They seized on this stat, or that one, as being more (or less) important than the Athletics valued it, and then used subjective logic to make their case rather than rational, objective analysis.

They pointed to decades of practice as an excuse for why the old way was best.

They noted that the As under Beane had never won a World Series, as if to ignore the crapshoot nature of the playoffs.  To expand on that, they noted a Beane quote from the book -- "My [stuff] don't [sic] work in the playoffs", and then completely misread it to imply that he was BSing the rest of baseball, when what he was saying is that, for a low-budget team, his approach could get them to the playoffs but not ensure that they would win a given five-game or seven-game series (i.e., luck takes over in a small sample size; nothing can ensure that you win).

They even kept saying that Beane had written the book, which is ludicrous on its face.  Beane had nothing to do with writing the book, except letting Lewis poke around the As' operations mostly unimpeded for a year, pretty much ignoring his presence.  

Lewis took proper offense to all that objection, and he was right to do so.  The objecting sportswriters and commentators were precisely of the same mind as the old scouts Beane fired; they simply refused to look at new ways to assess players that might be accurate.

So imagine this -- Michael Lewis then goes and writes a negative book about Donald Trump, who is the political and presidential epitome of what the Oakland Athletics did in baseball.  And he doesn't even see the irony.

Lewis was right as rain when he noted that breaking the mold and using objective data was a good approach in baseball team management.  So how, we have to ask (and cannot answer), does he not get that Donald Trump is a completely different kind of president, one we have never seen before.  Lewis seems to be, like the old scouts and reporters, all tied up in the traditional paradigm of the presidency.  The one guy who ought to see it properly, well, can't.

Donald Trump, outside of all the contact he would have had with politicians as the owner of a large enterprise, did not live in the political world before 2016.  His promise as president was that he would ''put America first", and the left made the mistake of thinking that was just a slogan.

Trump was not a sloganeer, and that was not just three words.  He went to Washington and went to work undoing what he had always regarded as stupidity and -- let's call it what it was -- market inefficiency.  Things were done in Washington that were not in the best interests of the USA for, like ever, and Trump thought that was stupid.

Billy Beane, as Lewis so painstakingly narrated, drafted a fat catcher from Alabama named Jeremy Brown in the first round, whom none of the scouts, not his or anyone else's, even cared about.  But Brown got on base almost half the time, and while the scouts saw his corpulence and moved on, Beane recognized that he was drafting a hitter, not a jeans model -- and that getting on base, not athleticism -- was the sine qua non of offensive performance.

NATO was President Trump's Jeremy Brown.  Trump looked at NATO, saw that the European partners were letting the USA pay for most of it, saw that previous presidents had simply let it happen without a peep, and that he was not only going to call attention to it, but to declare that the allies would pay the share they had actually committed to (but never did), or they could go defend themselves.  And they did.

Mexico was President Trump's Jeremy Brown.  Our neighbors to the south had been letting people flood our southern border for years, more every year, bringing drugs, being gangs, abusing the females among them, and then taking jobs that poor Americans needed.  They claimed asylum, overwhelmed the system and then never showed for their asylum hearings.  Trump saw that as simply idiotic to let them continue, and vowed to build a wall and, perhaps more importantly, pull out all the legal stops to stem the flow.  It made no sense to let what was happening continue.

China was President Trump's Jeremy Brown.  The Chinese for years had been stealing the intellectual property of American companies without retribution.  They had been importing very little from the USA, while we bought billions from the Chinese and sent dollars over to pay for them.  This had been allowed by every previous president, but President Trump blew the whistle.  It was Americans
who were buying all that stuff from China, and it was China that was dependent on the USA for a market.  OK fine, China, Trump said, you will negotiate a deal that drops barriers to our exports there and address the IP issue, and until you do, you can pay billions in tariffs.  Guess who's winning that battle?

There are dozens of Jeremy Browns in this administration, but Michael Lewis somehow doesn't appreciate the irony.  Donald Trump is the Moneyball president.  He is using objective data, objective logic to deal with adversaries that his predecessors had simply kowtowed to, as if embarrassed by the might -- and the right -- of the USA.

I hope that Michael Lewis will read this piece.  It took me a couple reads of Moneyball to where I really got what was being said.  Maybe it will take two terms of the Trump presidency for Lewis to get what is really going on in Washington.  He can't be that closed-minded.

I hope.

Copyright 2019 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton