Thirty-five Years and Counting

There's a scene in Moneyball when Brad Pitt, playing Oakland GM Billy Beane, tells A's players that they should not bunt, and if the other team bunts they should just pick up the ball and throw to second for the out. "If your enemy is making mistakes, don't interrupt him," Beane says.

"I always wondered about that," exclaimed the sweet, blond wife who brings a book to the ballpark, on those rare occasions when she accompanies me to one. "Why do teams purposely make an out?"

And with that, my wife leaped over thousands of professional sportswriters and sports talk show hosts who are still thinking and talking about the game as if it were 1923. Simply by dint of watching this flawed and sometimes apocryphal movie, millions of Americans will know more about baseball than, say Mike Greenberg and Mike Golick, hosts of the most popular national sports radio show, or a Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote an article two years ago for my local paper about the struggles of Jeff Francoeur without ever mentioning walks or on base percentage.

Now that the calendar has flipped, we've moved another year clear of 1977, the year Bill James first published his Baseball Abstract debunking many of the myths that no longer permeate Major League Baseball's backrooms but remain hallmarks of baseball reportage. Writers, announcers and fans who still exalt batting average and RBIs, pitching wins and saves, chemistry and clutch hitting are now 35 years behind the times, and counting.

They are the equivalent of a political reporter who speculates who's going to face President Carter in the next election. (It couldn't have been Sarah Palin; she started junior high school that year.) They are the Catholic Church condemning Copernicus's (and then Galileo's) proof of heliocentrism, before finally acknowledging its truth more than 300 years later. They are my neighbors in South Carolina who still can't bring themselves, 151 years later, to recognize that the Civil War was fought over slavery. The people charged with informing us about baseball know less about the soul of the game than my thoroughly apathetic bride.

I've noted before that the demonizing of scouts and dismissal of defensive value are unforgivably narrow-minded turns in the book and movie. And I've questioned -- just a few posts ago -- Billy Beane's endless rebuilding for a nebulous future. But those who continue to deny the revolution in baseball analysis are on the wrong side of history. Even my wife can tell them that.

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