MICHAEL LEWIS INTERVIEW ON JIM ROME
I just finished listening to the interview with Michael Lewis on The Jim Rome Show. It was pretty interesting. Lewis said a few things I had heard before and a few things that were new. Here are the highlights of the interview...

Michael Lewis thought of the book more about Oakland taking players that nobody wanted (Chad Bradford, Scott Hatteberg) and making them into a winning baseball team as opposed to a story about a different system of thought in a baseball front-office.

Billy Beane was "uncomfortable at first" with the book according to Lewis. He didn't know the book was going to be so focused on himself, but to his credit he never denied any of the quotes attributed to him despite many offers from the media to rescind on his statements.

Lewis didn't expect nearly as many people to be interested in the story as they were. He feels that if the Fortune 500 companies and other business owners who took an interest in the philosophy of Moneyball wouldn't have taken an interest that it would've just been pushed aside by the baseball world.

Lewis describes something he calls "The Women's Auxiliary". He touched on it in his Sports Illustrated article a few weeks ago. Basically it's what he describes as "The hangers on. The sports columnists that hang around the clubhouse, sit with scouts behind homeplate, and write what 'baseball people' tell them to write.

Rome asked Lewis "do you think the A's win because of their different way of thinking, or do they win because they have Mulder, Zito and Hudson?"

Lewis responded with "If they didn't think differently, they probably wouldn't have Mulder, Zito and Hudson." He also mentioned that Rich Harden and Joe Blanton are results of Oakland "thinking differently about amateur pitching."

Rome asked "In any other industry, if the most efficient way is discovered, people are elated. Why in baseball was everybody so pissed?"

Lewis: "The people in baseball feel threatened. You're saying implicitly that 'you haven't been doing
your job efficiently, here's how you can do it better'".

Lewis also talked about how to get into "the club" of baseball people. Basically Lewis says that in order to get into "the club" you have to be a star player or a minor leaguer that toes the line and is 'one of the boys'. The way to get thrown out would be to become "disloyal", not because you're bad at whatever job it is you do.

In my own person experience with baseball it is amazing how dogmatic the thinking is. Playing in college, if you mention to anybody that Derek Jeter isn't an amazing defensive shortstop, or that swinging at the first pitch 95% of the time probably isn't a solid offensive approach people get pissed. It's almost like whenever you question somebody's religion or political affiliation, people will take it that seriously. Whenever somebody believes something and has no evidence to back it up, they become extremely agitated when their belief system is questioned and they have no way of backing it up. People often take questioning of their beliefs as an attack as opposed to just questioning as an attempt to further understand their position.