Other Than That, Spot-On

Mike Klonsky takes issue with my recent baseball / education comparison:

But Carey equates Bloomberg’s N.Y. testing mania with 1990’s Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane’s supposed reliance on statistics (“crunching numbers without prejudice”) to pilot his team to the World Series. What a stretch! No team has better individual player stats than the current Yankee team which can’t quite make it to the top. If statistics decided everything, there would be no need to play the game. Good managers crunch numbers, but often make their most important decisions based on intangibles, gut feelings, and connoisseurship. One more thing—A’s star power hitter Jose Conseco, the first major leaguer ever to hit at least 40 homers and steal at least 40 bases in a season-- was also one of the first admitted steroid users. Steroids may have ultimately done great damage to Conseco’s body as well as to the integrity of MLB. But it sure was good for his stats. Maybe Beane should have been looking past the numbers and Carey looking for a better metaphor.

A few observations:

1) The Oakland A's have not gone to the World Series under Billy Beane, which is the main reason I didn't say that they did.

2) Billy Beane is the general manager of the A's, not the manager, which is not at all the same thing.

3) Yankees players indeed have excellent statistics, which likely one of the reasons that the Yankees have, over the last 12 years, gone to the playoffs 12 times, won the American League East 10 times, won the American League pennant 6 times, and won the World Series 4 times. They haven't won the Series in the last few year because--unlike basketball and football--baseball is a sport where even the greatest teams only win 60-some percent of their games, so the odds of winning three consecutive short series against good opponents are always against you. The Yankees didn't need Moneyball techniques to win all those games, because they have more money than Brunei.

4) Nobody named Jose Conseco has every played major league baseball. Conseco is a large insurance company based in Indianapolis, where I used to live.

5) Jose Canseco did indeed go 40-40, in 1988, nine years before Billy Beane became the general manager of the A's. He left the A's in 1992, returned briefly in '97, and never played for them again, no doubt in part because his on-base percentage for the A's that year was .325, making him exactly the kind of player Billy Beane did not want to hire.

6) There are no equivalents of steroids in teaching--no dangerous illegal substances that boost your classroom performance at the expense of your fellow teachers. So I have no idea what the steroid scandal is supposed to demonstrate here, other than when you give people strong incentives to boost their performance, they try very hard to boost their performance, which is more or less my point.