Say-It-Ain't-So Joe

Even today, whether in a chat or an interview or during a broadcast, Morgan never misses an opportunity to slag Moneyball (a book Joe Morgan hasn't read) and, by extension, the A's, who haven't made it out of the first round of the playoffs since 1992. "If I'd had Zito, Mulder, and Hudson," he says to me, referring to the A's recently disbanded trio of pitchers, "there's no way I wouldn't have gotten to the World Series. That's what I'm telling you." And in a recent chat, he mused: "That moneyball theory is overrated. No one has ever won with it. PLAYERS win games. Not theories." When it was suggested that the world-champion Boston Red Sox were a Moneyball team -- after all, they had Bill James in their employ -- Morgan snapped back (and you could almost hear his furious jabs at the keyboard): "The Red Sox had the second highest payroll in baseball next to the Yankees!!! The most important play last year was Dave Roberts stealing second base in game four ... that is NOT the moneyball theory. Without the stolen base or just the THREAT of the stolen base Dave Roberts provided, the Red Sox would have been eliminated."

Lewis merely shrugs. He told an interviewer recently: "As the governor of Louisiana once said, the only way Joe Morgan can lose his job is if he got caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Short of that kind of thing, there is no level of stupidity that he could express on ESPN that would get him canned, because he's Joe Morgan. What are you going to do about it?"

Morgan has bloviated to the point that Jon Miller suggests his broadcast partner would be better off avoiding Moneyball altogether. "My advice to Joe is to not even talk about the book at all," he says. "That's why they nailed him in the book, hoping he would talk about it. That's part of what got some buzz going. What Joe's saying is he's not gonna even read the book and say he read the book, which in effect is like endorsing the book. But they created a scenario where one way or the other they got good pub out of it. ... Whatever they did, it worked. The guy sold a lot of books, right?"

Yet Morgan persists, which is why I have come to SBC Park on this clear and warm Sunday in May: I want to understand Joe Morgan's crusade against a book he hasn't read. I want to know why his voice leaps into a plaintive cry at the mere mention of Moneyball. I want to understand his beef with statistics, numbers, computers; and I want to know how history's ultimate Moneyball player became the world's biggest Moneyball critic. This, in sum, is why I'm here: I want to learn at the knee of the greatest second baseman who ever lived, because surely the greatest second baseman who ever lived can't be as wrong, as belligerently wrong, as he seems on TV, which is about as wrong as the Earth is round. Can he?

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Socratic exchange with Joe Morgan No. 2, on the subject of the stolen base and risk:

Joe: The computer says if you get thrown out stealing a base, that's a bad out. But if a guy hits a ground ball into a double play, it's not a bad out.

Me: No, I never said that.

Joe: Oh, yes, you did. You're saying he should've stayed at first base.

Me: Oh, no. I'm saying there's a risk --

Joe: I'm just telling you, if you don't take a risk, you're not gonna get a reward. If you sit there and wait every time with a runner at first base, eventually, there's gonna be some ground-ball double plays -- but that's OK. You say you'd rather have a guy hit into a double play than have a guy thrown out.

Me: No!

Joe: But that's what you're saying.

Me: You're caricaturing that point of view. ... You're turning it into this ridiculous caricature where it looks like a bunch of geeks at their computers.

Joe: Well, that's what it is.

Me: You think so?

Joe: That's what I think it is. Anytime you're trying to make statistics tell you who's gonna win the game, that's a bunch of geeks trying to play video games.