But this didn’t necessarily tally with the state of competition in the field. Lewis – and all those baseball executives whining about how much they had to pay the players – were correct about the widening gaps between the richest and poorest market teams if they meant the difference in payroll. The Minnesota Twins, despite their modest budget, had two fine seasons, and the New York Mets performed poorly despite spending big. In 20, the Anaheim Angels and the Arizona Diamondbacks, teams from small markets, won the World Series. Stated another way, for the first time, the difference between the best teams in baseball and the worst teams was narrower than it had ever been. For the first time, not a single team finished with a win-loss percentage above. But in fact, in 2000, just two years before Lewis and Beane’s Moneyball season, there had never been, in the history of the major leagues, greater competitive balance. The people with the most money often win.”
“And I was inclined to concede the point. Or so argued the people who ran baseball. A poor team could afford only the maimed and the inept, and was almost certain to fail. The growing disparity meant that only the rich teams could afford the best players.
A decade before, the highest payroll team, the New York Mets, had spent about $44m on baseball players, and the lowest-based payroll team, the Cleveland Indians, a bit more than $8m. “At the opening of the 2002 season the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $140m while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A’s and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls less than a third of that, about $40m. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport and widening rapidly. In his preface, Lewis wrote: “For more than a decade, the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The Moneyball brand has become so pervasive that scarcely anyone questions the premise upon which Lewis’s book was based. The truth, though, is that without the fame that has attached itself to the Moneyball label, no one would be much interested in what became of the A’s 2002 draft class. And I definitely came to meeting through my husband, but after that, in my opinion, it has little to do with that.” Soren told Newsday: “I completely understand why the sports world associates this book with Moneyball.
On 30 March in the New York Daily News, former Oakland executive and current Mets GM Sandy Alderson was referred to as “the Godfather of Moneyball”.ġ April saw the publication of Tabitha Soren’s Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream with then-and-now photographs of members of the Oakland A’s draft class of 2002, who were Moneyball’s primary focus.
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