ScottyBroco

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The Best Team Money Can Buy covers baseball’s most polarizing and entertaining team in recent years without newspaper reporting deadlines.
“How does the [The Best Team Money Can Buy] compare to Moneyball?” The Duluth Public Librarian asked me after I checked out the new book by former ESPN reporter Molly Knight.
I explained my excitement. “Basical, this book is about baseball, but you do not have to be a fan to understand it. From what I have read in some of the reviews, it's extremely behind the scenes of the Los Angeles Dodgers as they transition from a bankrupt owner in the midst of a divorce to a team with a 200 million dollar payroll and 2 billion dollar cable TV contract”
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Knight covered, then Dodger owner Frank McCourt divorce for ESPN and in the first chapter uncovers the nooks and crannies of the Dodger auction. For example, Frank McCourt’s chess moves, including filing for bankruptcy, selling the team within the “Country Club MLB owners” and to the current owners. The Guggenheim Group owns the team today and is faced by Los Angeles Laker Legend Magic Johnson and run by experienced Major League Baseball Executive Stan Kasten. Also, later in the book, Knight uses her sources on the transition from long-time General Manager Ned Colletti to Sabermetric friendly and long-time Tampa Ray’s General Manager Andrew Friedman.
In the Best Team Money Can Buy, Molly Knight was not present for such closed door meetings, but she had the sources , as many writers today do, to get into them. She was also allowed extensive one-on-one interviews with Dodgers players. In Moneyball, Author Michael Lewis was present or recorded every meeting in and outside of the Oakland A’s front Office.
In fact, this book reminds me of Moneyball in several Ways.
Both Writers had experience from other industries that translated well into their current books. Prospective. Molly Knight’s main career objective was not to write this book. She was on the premed track at Stanford University before she realized it was not for her. She moved to the other side of the country to New York, where she bartended in the night and wrote during the day. Michael Lewis earned a degree in Art History from Princeton and worked with a New York Art dealer before completing his MA from the London School of Economics.
With Lewis, I was able to visualize Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane pumping his fist in the air while another MLB team drafts an overvalued high school Pitcher. With Knight, I can see Zach Grienke standing up in a players only meeting and declaring “all players are not flushing after taking a 'number two' in the Men’s Locker Room”.
Both Lewis and Knight explain how and why each person into each organization arrived and how they fit in the strategically into the marathon regular season and crapshoot postseason. Due to the smaller sample size of games, the baseball playoff's explains the regular season triumphs of the Oakland A's and LA Dodgers without a world series title.
Lewis profiles Scott Hateberg as he transitions from washed up back up catcher with the Boston Red Sox to starting first basemen for the Oakland while batting .280/.374/.433.
Knight shows how a struggling player, Zach Grienke, overcomes his social anxiety, finds his personality, and overcomes his whispers to win the American League Cy Young Award.
While Reading this book, readers should feel the excitement as the Dodgers or Athletics win.

I would put The Best Team Money Can Buy up there with other baseball literature classics Moneyball, Luckiest Man: the Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, Lords of the Realm by Jon Helyar and Babe by Robert Creamer. All of these classics are available at your public library. But what most taxpayers are unaware is the public library can order new books for patrons. This helps with updating the collection and of course with circulation. The Duluth Library ordered the book for me and I will proudly return it for the next patron.

I got a text from a fellow Society for American Baseball Research, SABR, member Anthony Bush. He said that there was a little known museum in downtown Duluth, Minnesota that had a baseball exhibit. I was surprised that an old church of Christian Science is now a little museum and located about a 5 min walk from my rental house. The Karpeles Manuscript Museum is named after a Denfeld High School Graduate who made his fortune in real estate. The Karpeles is a too well kept of secret in Duluth, where approximately 3.5 million people visit a year. There is a special place for local history, here in the Zenith City. In fact, Duluth once had the highest millionaires per capita in the United States thanks to the iron ore, shipping and logging industries in the Northland and around the shores of Lake Superior.
The museum director was a woman named Doris and extremely warm and inviting. She was impressed with our baseball knowledge and asked if we were interested in a baseball talk about some the manuscripts at the museum. She said that we could do whatever we wanted. Soon, I found myself in her office scheduling a time for the gallery talk.
The next step was researching some of the items at the museum. This gave me an excuse to watch Ken Burns’ Baseball. About 10 years ago, I had rented and watched every episode from the local library. Baseball, is a 20-hour baseball history documentary, has 9 episodes that are called innings, a must for any baseball fan and a great way to pass the time in the winter and non-baseball months. I bought it for 120 dollars as a special Christmas gift to myself. But now, it’s on Netflix or pirated for free on youtube.com, that is if it’s not taken down. In addition to the documentary, I read the 34-ton Bat by Steve Rushin and interviewed him for Twins Daily. Lastly, I researched almost all the 30 plus items in the museum and I met with my partner twice at a local coffee shop. The event even got a little press at the local paper.
When the night arrived after a long, high volume day at work, I was little nervous. But I remembered that this was supposed to be a fun experience. In the Museum church it was a little musty and warm in contrast from the cool, dry air off Lake Superior. I met my colleague in Doris’s office while 30 people gathered and waited for the talk to begin around 7pm. Once 7pm rolled around, we walked to the center of the old building that has the acoustics of old an old European church from the 15th century. I was introduced as a graduate student from the University of Michigan, although correctly, I am enrolled at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. After Doris completed the introductions, Anthony read his one thousand-word essay and the history of baseball in Duluth. The locals love their local history and this was no exception.
The next 80 minutes went by in a blur as we covered a wide arrange of topics and some of the exhibits manuscripts. We started with the History of Duluth, The birth of Baseball, spread of it in the Civil War, Babe Ruth’s Career, the short rundown of the Black Sox’s scandal, baseball’s worst teams and all the while Anthony made local connections to each national topic. The next thing I knew, the talk was over. The audience thanked me for telling stories that brought some of the old documents to life. Doris couldn't thank us enough. At a local watering hole afterward we meet up with some friends. The beer tasted great and brought out some mellowness from the thrill of public speaking on your passion.

One of my favorite people to follow on twitter for baseball news and analysis is Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated. He used to write for Baseball Prospectus and while there he developed a metric Jaffe War Score System. The baseball fan’s favorite website Baseball Reference explains Jaffe’s metric. “JAWS measures a player’s Hall of Fame worthiness by comparing him to the players at his position who are already enshrined, using advanced metrics to account for the wide variations in offensive levels that have occurred throughout the game’s history”. For Shortstops, The highest WAR (131.0) and a JAWS (98.2) rating goes to Honus Wagner. The second highest WAR is Alex Rodriguez with WAR (117.8) and a JAWS (64.2). Omar Vizquel is ranked 30th with 45.3 WAR and a 36.0 JAWS. Former Twin Christian Guzman is ranked 157th with a WAR of 12.5 and a 16.2 JAWS. For a more advanced breakdown click here.
Jaffe is important because he objectively quantifies a flawed Hall of Fame voting and election system. But he understands how JAWS explains a polarizing topic among Twins Fans, former catcher and current twins first basemen, Joseph Patrick Mauer.
He absolutely nailed the Hall of Fame analysis this year.
I was lucky enough to pick his brain for a couple Questions and Answers.
 
Q. From what you told me previously it was not a straight career path from graphic design work, how did you get your start as a writer?
A. Long before I wrote about baseball, I wrote about music - the local scene and cool indie stuff - for good clean fun, the weekly entertainment magazine of the Brown Daily Herald. An internship at a music magazine called Boston Rock led me to the revelation that I could make far more money learning to use the page layout software (Pagemaker) than writing, and that sent me down a decade-and-a-half long road into graphic design.
Most of the design work that I did was centered around textbooks and children's books; the pinnacle of my career was as the Creative Director on the World Almanac For Kids from 2002-2004. All of that work was for print, I didn't have any experience doing web design. At some point in early 2001, I decided I wanted to start a baseball blog and learn a bit of design to fancy it up. That experiment became FutilityInfielder.com, which survives in some half-neglected form today, because the paying gigs take up my time and I'm no longer current with my HTML/web design knowledge.
 
Q. Was there a certain moment that you caught the writing bug?
A. I can't really pinpoint what started me to writing about music but what got me into writing about baseball was arguments with my friends over the state of the Yankees in the late '90s, and then discussions on Baseball Primer (now Baseball Think Factory) and Baseball Prospectus, as well as the columns of Rob Neyer at ESPN. I was an early convert to Bill James back when his Baseball Abstracts were hits in the early 1980s, and it was very cool to see his concepts being updated and applied - I previously had little idea of where to find other baseball nerds.
 
Q. What is one thing that most do not know about you professionally?
A. That I not only had a previous career in graphic design but that I have a biology degree (see http://www.asbmb.org/asbmbtoday/201505/Features/AnalyzeThis/). Also that my wife's yellow laborador, Pearl, writes some of my columns (try to guess which ones!)
 
Q. What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
A. Writing is a muscle and needs to be strengthened via regular repetition. Write every day, even if it's not for publication. That's the only way you're ever going to find your voice.
 
Q. How did you become involved with Baseball Prospectus?
A. At Futility Infielder I had done two annual reviews of the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot (2002 and 2003) that got a lot of traffic. BP asked me if I'd like to write something for them on the 2004 ballot - what came out of it were my first two contributions and a forerunner to the system that became JAWS.
 
Q.Why do you think writers for Baseball Prospectus and other online websites are hired by Major League front offices? What exactly are they looking for in these writers and or sabermatricians?
A. They're not looking for great stylists of prose, they want people with skills in quantitative analysis and the ability to manage large sets of data. They want the ones with the ability to pick out the signal from the noise when it comes to pitching or defensive data or college stats, stuff like that.
 
Q. Currently, Mauer is tied for 3rd with Albert Pujols with a career batting average of .3156, among active players.
1. Miguel Cabrera (13,32) .3213 R
2. Ichiro Suzuki (15,41) .3165 L
3. Joe Mauer (12,32) .3156 L
4. Albert Pujols (15,35) .3156 R
After starting off his career with 3 batting titles as a catcher, Joe Mauer’s Hall Fame stock seems to have fallen. Mauer moved to first base because of the concussions he suffered, the need to keep his bat in the lineup daily, and the need to increase his career longevity.
How did that position change affect his chances of getting into the Hall of Fame?
A. Mauer had already established himself as one of the best-hitting catchers in history, had done so much that his place in Cooperstown is justified. Via my JAWS system, he already surpasses the peak value (best seven seasons) of the average Hall of Fame catcher by a substantial margin. Even if he winds up playing more games at first base than catcher, he's never going to be identified as a first baseman — a similar situation as Ernie Banks.
The problem for him is that it appears he's headed towards a long dénouement, 3 1/2 more seasons of being a light-hitting first baseman who's nowhere near worth what he's being paid. Voters tend to hold that stuff against candidates, sometimes to an unreasonable degree.
 
Q. But what does he need to accomplish statistically to increase his chances of getting into Cooperstown?
Having already surpassed the 10 years needed for eligibility, the one thing that he really needs to do is get to 2,000 hits. No position player whose MLB career crossed into the post-1960 expansion era has gotten in with fewer than that. Otherwise worthy candidates like Dick Allen and Bobby Grich can't get in despite strong resumes and stellar advanced metrics, and the same will be true for Jim Edmonds when he becomes eligible this winter.
Mauer's at 1,622 at this writing, so he should be able to surpass that by the time his contract ends following the 2018 season. He'll be just 35 then; it remains to be seen if he's got anything that keeps him around.
 
Q. Do you have book coming out soon? What is in the works besides Sports Illustrated?
A I'm working on a book called The Cooperstown Casebook, to be published by Thomas Dunne, a division of St. Martin's Press. It's about my work with JAWS and the role of sabermetrics in choosing who goes into the Hall of Fame. It's tentatively due for Fall 2016, and when I say tentatively...
Other than that, I do the occasional TV appearance on MLB Network's MLB Now and ESPN's The Olbermannn Show, and once in a while I write at Futility Infielder, though it's usually about beer, not baseball.