{"id":4954,"date":"2011-09-24T09:20:32","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T14:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/?p=4954"},"modified":"2011-09-24T01:54:55","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T06:54:55","slug":"moneyballs-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/archives\/4954","title":{"rendered":"Moneyball’s Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"

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With Moneyball opening this weekend nationwide, I have received several questions from friends and classmates about the movie since the cast is pretty loaded and the reviews so noteworthy.\u00a0 I calmly have explained to them that Moneyball is the most important piece of literature ever created.\u00a0 They quite obviously are skeptical and find such a claim laughable.\u00a0 This is Texas after all and I do live across the highway from SMU.\u00a0 I do firmly believe, though, that no book could have possibly influenced my life more profoundly than Moneyball did and continues to do.<\/p>\n

I purchased Moneyball for my father as a Father\u2019s Day gift shortly after it was released.\u00a0 I saw a book with a baseball on the cover that allegedly was about the economical side of the game.\u00a0 It sounded perfect for my dad who both loves baseball and reads the Wall Street Journal daily.\u00a0 He enjoyed it, but I think he resented it too and continues to do so somewhat today.\u00a0 When he was done with it, I read it.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t put it down.\u00a0 I was in high school and the books we read for school were what most would probably call classics.\u00a0 I thought they were exceedingly boring and for the most part, I just read Cliff\u2019s Notes.\u00a0 Moneyball was quite possibly the first book I ever loved.\u00a0 I think I understood immediately that my father and I would never see the game the same way again, and because of it I\u2019m not sure I really began growing up and being my own person until I read it.<\/p>\n

Moneyball represents in certain ways the game\u2019s steps into adulthood as well.\u00a0 The way the scouting side of the game is represented in the book reminds me of a screaming child who refuses to listen to reason and instead throws a tantrum.\u00a0 This is obviously a dramatized version of the way the situation during the early 2000s actually was, but I did not know any better at the time and I doubt many did.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Moneyball identified that the game had evolved and did so by pinpointing the exact time that outsiders took notice.<\/p>\n

I have read Moneyball several times since then, and Whitney even agreed to read it to me after I graduated from Grinnell while we drove back to New Mexico from Iowa, stopping along the way for a buddy and teammate\u2019s wedding.<\/p>\n

Moneyball showed the baseball community and even those on the fringes of it that baseball players don\u2019t have to look like Griffey or A-Rod.\u00a0 They can look like Pedroia.\u00a0 He won an MVP and might have gone undrafted without smart folks pointing out that \u201cthe good face\u201d is a luxury with no bearing on whether or not someone can ball.\u00a0 Balling is about finding out how to maximize every single attribute each of us has.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the five tools and it for damn sure isn\u2019t about being tall and lean.\u00a0 It\u2019s about barreling up, playing clean, and taking a walk if it\u2019s offered.\u00a0 More than any of that, though, it\u2019s about understanding what makes a real, honest to God winner on the diamond and away from it.<\/p>\n

The book opened the door to front offices and even the dugout to intellectual types who may not have signed a professional contract or even touched the diamond in an NCAA-sanctioned game.\u00a0 Beyond that, though, it encouraged and maybe even forced baseball types to listen to those who had not been educated within baseball culture.\u00a0 The revolution that Moneyball identified and displayed to the masses aided (maybe more so than anything else) us in realizing that there existed valuable and measurable attributes going virtually unnoticed by those who were paid to find them.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not so much that Moneyball defined the revolution.\u00a0 It is more that it provided it with names, faces, and a narrative.\u00a0 It supplied the emotion and passion that were felt by so many as we began to understand what the implications of these new metrics really were.\u00a0 The way we evaluate everything has changed since then.\u00a0 For everyone at The Sombrero, its implications extend far beyond the diamond.\u00a0 Moneyball is about an ideology based in critical and objective evaluation of data used to guide our decisions and our emotions.\u00a0 Yeah, it taught me to take a walk, but it also taught me why I should.\u00a0 It taught us that as baseball players, fans, men, friends, and whatever else we might call ourselves, we have never learned enough.\u00a0 There is always ground to be gained and always a reason to know more than we do today.\u00a0 Moneyball meant that the game had a future to me.\u00a0 I would not be writing any of these words without what Michael Lewis and Billy Beane gave us.
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With Moneyball opening this weekend nationwide, I have received several questions from friends and classmates about the movie since the cast is pretty loaded and the reviews so noteworthy.\u00a0 I calmly have explained to them that Moneyball is the most important piece of literature ever created.\u00a0 They quite obviously are skeptical and find such a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15,1300,6,9,11,13,10,14],"tags":[2758,2778,254,2777,560],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4954"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4957,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4954\/revisions\/4957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thegoldensombrero.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}