Check this out. Really.
The State of Play Apropos 'Moneyball'
Having had a hack at the Yankees touring Japan, Stephen Goldman re-discovers his usual form in this article at baseball prospectus. It's worth a read.
Nowhere has the baseball establishment's ostrich-like qualities been more evident than in the continued reaction to the now year-old book Moneyball, Michael Lewis' look at the operations of the Oakland A's front office under the management of Billy Beane. The reception to the book has at times been downright bizarre, including the confused dismissals like those of ESPN's Joe Morgan, who repeatedly insisted that Billy Beane should not have written a book extolling his own genius despite the fact Beane was neither the book's author nor its instigator. Beane cannot be found within its pages cackling like Lex Luthor about how he's smarter than the entire Detroit Tigers organization put together and Dusty Baker too. Yet as recently as this February, a columnist with the Long Beach Press-Telegram perpetuated the myth, writing: "Oakland's Billy Beane has done a terrific job with modest funds with the A's, but he's also a shameless self-promoter who wrote a book about his imagined genius and is despised by scouts around baseball."
The section entitled: ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC should be right up anybody's alley with regards to nature of analysis. It's also a good representation of the state of play between 'stat-heads' and 'traditional scouts'.
- Art Neuro