Moneyball vs. Mitchell Report

Revisiting the Michael Lewis opus, which the writer deems “the most influential book of what’s now officially baseball’s Steroids Era,” has become joined at the hip with the recent release of the Mitchell Report.

In this article from Slate.com, Tom Scocca wonders if Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics and the “protagonist” of Lewis’ analysis of front-office management, consider the possibilities of players “using,” when he assembled his teams:

As Beane says elsewhere in the book: “Power is something that can be acquired…. Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don’t become good hitters.” Oakland, with its limited funds, wouldn’t spend payroll to buy power hitters. Instead, it invested in cheaper, patient hitters. And those hitters, it seems, bought the power themselves.

Did Beane have steroids deliberately or explicitly in mind? He was talking about his hopes of drafting someone who could be the next Jason Giambi. And Jason Giambi, the 2000 American League MVP, was juiced. So was his younger brother and Oakland teammate, Jeremy. So, according to Mitchell, was the A’s other MVP, Miguel Tejada, who asked for and received steroids and testosterone from teammate Adam Piatt. And Oakland’s veteran pickup David Justice (“an extraordinary ability to get on base was more likely to stay with a player to the end of his career than, say, an extraordinary ability to hit home runs”). The Oakland locker room, the report says, was an open-air drug market.

But “Where were the steroids in Moneyball,” asks Scocca? “They were out of sight, where the baseball world wanted them to be. This is not a reflection on Lewis’ reporting, even. The book advanced people’s understanding of baseball, on the terms in which people were willing to think about baseball at the time. It accurately named and explained the batting approach that defines this era: power hitting channeled through strict strike-zone discipline.”

The Slate story includes links to other illuminating pieces on the MR, including Bonnie Goldstein’s “Hot Document of the best material in the Mitchell report” and a group of Slate writers and editors who discussed the implications and innuendos of the report.