A new round for Moneyball

September 19, 2011

With the movie about to make its debut this week, look for an increase in sales (especially if they put Brad Pitt on the cover of a new edition).

I’m sorry to miss the premiere tomorrow (the newspaper goes to press on Tuesdays), but I hope to catch it on Friday (looking forward to see if Phillip Seymour-Hoffman(right) can pull off a sporty role). But let’s keep the hyperbole to a reasonable level, shall we?

For example, this piece in The Big Lead features former A’s pitching coach Rick Peterson who makes following comment:

BLS:Who were the players who benefited the most then and why?

RP: There were several. One [who benefited] the most was Kenny Rogers. Here was a guy who was a wreck when he left New York [Yankees], for a number of reasons. Yet he came to Oakland, and led the AL in ERA under Billy’s leadership….

I stopped reading right there. Rogers did not lead the AL in ERA in 1998, his only full year with Oakland. He finished third. This is not a picayune point. Peterson is making a statement in support of a premise and gets it wrong, whether accidentally or on purpose. And frankly, once I see something factually wrong like that — not a typo or a transposed number (goodness knows I’m guilty of my share of those), but something that anyone can easily check —  it colors the rest of the story for me. And someone at TBL should have done some fact checking.

 

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Tagged as: Kenny Rogers, Moneyball, Rick Peterson

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