Moneyball | Michael Lewis | Talks at Google

Please join me in welcoming Michael Lewis to Google. I'd like to get started by asking you to read a brief passage from the book that's on page 134. And the reason for that is I think it displays a number of characteristics both about the book and Michael's story itself. The humor in the story, also his raw physical ability and innocence. And it kind of brings all these things together.

Why don't I set it up? I was just looking because it took me 133 pages to get to this in the book. Give me two minutes to explain what it is the book is about. It's ostensibly a football book, but as with the baseball book I wrote, which is ostensibly a baseball book, it's about something else. And it's really about the social transformation of a boy who happened to be a sensational football player. His name is Michael Orr and he'd grown up in the most destitute circumstances on the streets, literally on the streets of Memphis. He was one of 13 children birthed by a woman, addicted to crack and abandoned. He was 15 years old. When he was 15 years old, he had been to 12 different schools. He'd shown up at 12 different schools but never actually stayed around very long at any of them. He was illiterate, living on the streets, a hand to mouth existence, and headed for a very bad end. And he collides with. It'll take too long to explain how this happens, but rich, white, evangelical Christian Memphis, and he ends up very bizarrely in a school called the Briarcrest Christian School, which was part of Memphis. I don't know if you know, Memphis has the largest private school network in the country. And it was created out of the Baptist church directly in response to the attempt to integrate the schools. When busing happened, white Christian Memphis fled and created this vast network of private schools. And the Broadcast Christian school is one of them. So the point of the Broadcast Christian School in the beginning was to get away from black kids like Michael Oher. Michael Orr ends up at this school and he's at the age of 15, 6, 5 and a half, 348 pounds. And the football coach sees him and says, as he said to me, he said, I didn't know if he could play football, but I knew we didn't have anyone on campus who looked like him. So they put him on the football team after he kind of gets up to speed in the classroom. And the question everybody had because he looked a little lost when they put him on a football field was, did he have the requisite aggressiveness and kind of ability to focus on the opponent, all that stuff that he needed to play. And so this is the first scrimmage of Michael's senior year. He played his junior year, but they kind of benched him because he didn't look like he knew what he was doing or didn't look like he even wanted to be there. And Briarcrest is playing a school called Mumford. The Mumford scouting report hadn't picked up Michael size and hadn't picked up Michael's size and speed. The Mumford defensive end who lined up across from Michael Ora obviously took one look at him and saw a high school football cliche. The fat kid they stuck on the offensive line because there was no place else to put him except the tuba section of the band. Hey, fat ass, I'm going to put your fat ass in the dirt. The more he went on, the angrier Michael became. And yet no one noticed, possibly because no one was prepared to imagine the rage inside Michael Oher. Hugh Freeze, who was the coach of the Briarcrest team, ordered up plays that called for Michael to block a linebacker or to pull and sweep around the right end and leave the defensive end across from him alone. The first quarter and a half of the scrimmage was uneventful until Hugh Freeze called a different sort of play. Leanne. Leanne is Leanne Tuohy, who is the white mother of the family that ends up adopting Michael Orr. Leanne could always tell when something angered Michael. I can tell by his body language, she said. You pissed Michael off, and he looks more like a bull in his stands. Early in the scrimmage, he had a bull like demeanor, but he hadn't done anything out of anger. Leanne rose from her seat to beat the crowd to the concession stand, and so had her back to the action when the people in the stands around her began to laugh. Where is he taking him? She heard someone say. He's not letting go of that kid, shouted someone else. She turned around in time to see 20 football players running down one side of the field after the Briarcrest running back with the ball. On the other side of the field, briar crest, number 74. That would be Michael Orr. The hero of the story, was racing at speed in the opposite direction with the defensive end in his arms. From his place on the sideline, Shawn is Sean Tuohy, who is the white father of the family that adopts Michael. Shawn watched in amazement. Hugh had called a running play around the right end Away from Michael's side. Michael's job was simply to take the kid who had been jabbering at him and wall him off. Just keep him away from the ball carrier. You're just going to have to figure it out. There's always someone like that, right? You guys have to come in late and figure it out. Instead, he'd fire off the line of scrimmage and gotten fit. Once he had his hands inside the Mumford player's shoulder pads, he lifted him off the ground. It was a perfectly legal block with unusual consequences. He drove the Mumford player straight down the field for 15 yards, then took a hard left towards the Mumford sidelines. The Mumford kid's feet were hitting the ground every four steps like a cartoon character, said Sean as the kid strained to get his feet back on the ground. Michael ran in the next 25 or so yards to the Mumford bench. When he got there, he didn't stop, but piled right through it, knocking over the bench, several more Mumford players and scattering the team. He didn't skip a beat. Encircling the football field was a cinder track. He blocked the kid across the 10 yard wide track and then across the grass on the other side of the cinder track. That's where Shawn lost sight of him. What appeared to be the entire Mumford football team leaped on top of Michael, and the officials raced over to peel them off. All Sean could make out was the huge pile of bodies. Then Michael gets up, says Sean, and it's like watching Gulliver. Bodies flying everywhere, flags flying everywhere. And then the referee comes over to scream at us all. The officials knew Sean Tohy, both as the former star point guard at Ole Miss and as the current radio color man for the Memphis Grizzlies. They read the Memphis sports pages, and so they also knew of Michael Lohr, newly heralded as the hottest football recruit to come out of Memphis in some time, who for some strange reason was now living with Shawn. Tuohy, looking for a grown up to complain to an official, sprinted back across the field. He made straight for Sean. Coach Tuohy. He hollered. Shawn stepped out onto the field. What's going on, Coach Tuohy? He can't do that. He just can't do that. Did the whistle blow? Asked Sean, who could have made a good living as a tort lawyer. The whistle had not blown. The Briarcrest running back had kept his feet for a conveniently long time. No, said the referee, but he's got to let go of him. When he gets him to the sidelines. He can't just keep on running with him. Come on, said Shawn. The play wasn't over, Shawn, said the ref. He took that boy across the track. Okay, said Sean. I'll talk to him. Beyond the Mumford bench, the cinder track and the stretch of grass was a chain link fence. So what's the penalty? Someone else asked. Excessive blocking. That's actually not a penalty. He made that up. As the referee walked off the 15 yard penalty, Sean hollered at Michael to get his ass to the bench. And Michael trotted over with an air of perfect detachment. He couldn't have seemed less interested in the ruckus. Everybody's freaking out, says Sean. The refs are screaming, their whole team is wanting to fight. And he's totally calm, like he's out for a Sunday stroll. Technically, it was Hugh Freeze's job to talk to Michael, as since Michael's apotheosis, Hugh had taken a special interest in the offensive line. But in Hughes view, Michael was merely doing what he taught him to do. Block until the whistle blows. Upon reflection, thought Hugh, you tell Michael I want you to block until the whistle blows. Well, he takes that real literal. Sean and Tim Long. Tim Long is a former NFL player who's a coach. On the broadcast sidelines took Michael off to one side. You can't do that, Michael, said Long, struggling to keep a straight face. These guys are after you and now you've made a scene. Long had never heard of a lineman penalized for excessive blocking. But then he'd never seen a block quite so dramatic as this one. For his first time as a volunteer football coach, Tim was having difficulty swallowing his desire to giggle. Never seen that before, he said. The lineman takes his man 15 yards down the middle of the field, and then he decides to turn to the bench and take him all the way to his sidelines and through the bench. Sean wasn't laughing. Shawn had his stern face on. This incident fell into the ever expanding category of things Michael Orr needed to understand if he was going to succeed. When Long was finished, Sean explained to Michael that he was now a famous football recruit and bigger than anyone on just about any football field on earth. Even if he was an offensive lineman, he had to play as if everyone in the stadium was watching his every move. No matter how rude or dirty the opposing player might be, Michael had to swallow his desire for such obvious revenge. He could win, he could dominate, he could even humiliate. He just shouldn't attract the attention of the legal authorities. Michael listened to Sean's little speech without responding except to grunt. Okay. He was still eerily calm, as if this whole fuss didn't really concern him. Finishing his lecture, Shawn looked over at the Mufford bench. Michael had picked up a 220 pound defensive end and moved him at least 60 yards in seconds. Michael, said Sean. Where were you taking him anyway? I was going to put him on the bus, said Michael. Parked on the other side of the chain link fence was in fact the Mumford team bus. The bus? Asked Shawn. I got tired of him talking, said Michael. It was time for him to go home. Sean thought he must be joking. He he wasn't. Michael had thought it all through in advance. He'd been waiting nearly a half a football game to do exactly what he had very nearly done. To pick up this trash talking defensive end and take him not to the chain link fence, but through the chain link fence to the bus and then put him on the bus. Sean began to laugh. How far did you get? Asked Shawn. I got him up against the fence, said Michael. Now Michael began to chuckle. What did that guy say while you were taking him to the bus? Asked Shawn. Nothing, said Michael. He was just hanging on for dear life. As the laughter rose up in him, Sean thought there might be a fire in this belly after all. He didn't worry much about what might happen if that fire was misdirected off the football field. He figured football could channel it usefully. Thank you for reading that. Sure. You know, it's funny. I wrote this book. I finished writing it a year ago basically today, and I forget what's in my books before I go on book tours. I really. I'm about to start a little tour for the paperback. I've got to go reread it, but that's a good story.

Definitely one of the most memorable, funniest things I've read recently. So you gave a little background on Michael's story. I wanted to ask you about the other storyline in the book, which is the evolution of the left tackle in the NFL and subsequently in college football, from this really neglected position on the football field to what becomes the second highest paid position behind quarterbacks in the NFL. And you cite a number of reasons for this happening, one of them being the emergence of Bill Walsh's west coast offense and this new breed of very fast, dangerous linebackers exemplified by Lawrence Taylor. Can you talk about which one of these stories, Michaels or the left tackle came to you first and at what point during your research for the book they intersected?

Sure. This was the order of events. After Moneyball came out, I became briefly fashionable in NFL front offices because my fashion hasn't. I'm not entirely out of fashion, but I was hot for a little bit. And so these NFL people and a lot of pro sports people were very interested in the idea of finding better ways to value players. And they thought baseball and the Oakland A's might be providing a model. And so they wanted me to talk to me about that. And I was in the front office of the 49ers and there's a really interesting guy there who, if you want to have someone who doesn't have a book out, but is just interesting, he'd be great for this crowd. His name is Parag Merate, and Parag is the brains of the 49ers. He's a Stanford Business School graduate and a McKinsey consultant who somehow has worked his way basically in the football side of things there. And Parag and I. I was asking him. I mean, it seemed to me that one of the differences between baseball and football is that football has these fixed payrolls. Baseball has, in theory, you could spend as much money as you want on your baseball team. So I was curious how, given that money was a scarce source in a different way, I wondered how the money was allocated across positions on a football field. And he said he pulled out some. He gave me all their data. And it was riveting because not only was I shocked to find out that the left tackle on the offensive line, nobody knows who he is, he's just this obscure lump that nobody pays any attention to, was the second highest paid position on the field, cornerback is third, quarterback is first, that you could see that this was a product of market forces, that if you go back to the day when, days before free agency, when there wasn't really as much of an open market, there wasn't a free market for football players. The left tackle was the lowest paid in the field, along with the other. He was paid the same as the other offensive linemen. They were all regarded as the same. So something had happened, and I just kind of tucked that away. I thought, something's happening. This caused football. And obviously football wasn't that aware of how valuable left tackle was, because you never heard anybody talk about it. You never heard the announcers talk about the left tackle. So I was curious what had happened there. And then I was in Memphis on other business and I was going to write. I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine about my high school baseball coach. It ended up being A little book called Coach. And I thought if I would write this book, I ought to call a kid I played baseball with because he was really close to the coach. He was also a really talented athlete. And it was Sean Tuohy. And I hadn't seen him since high school. And Sean had been a poor boy in New Orleans. He'd been the coach's son. And he made himself into a millionaire and become an evangelical Christian and was living in the Memphis white suburbs. And when I got to his house, there was this giant black kid in his living room who unnervingly did not say a word. No matter what you said to him, he just sat and stared at you. And I naturally asked Shawn, what's he doing here? And he said, it's funny. She asked. At Leanne's. Leanne's basically trying to fix him. His wife, he said, this kid wandered into our school. He's in my daughter's class. He can't read or write. My wife's gotten very involved with trying to get him comfortable in the school. And he's now basically living here. He's sleeping on the sofa. But he wasn't playing football. And I started. I was now back in touch with Sean. And he. Sean has a chain of fast food restaurants, and that's how he made his money. But he's also, because he's a basketball legend in that part of the country. He's the announcer for the Memphis Grizzlies. And he came out to do a game against the Golden State Warriors. And he called and we went to dinner. It was just me and Sean, my wife. And he started telling my wife the story about this kid. Now, it had evolved a bit, and he was now in the process of being adopted by them. And he said that he was going to turn him into a basketball player. Even though he was shaped the way he was shaped, he said he was going to make him into. Because he was really good on a basketball court. And he thought that while he was never going to be a big, he would never make a living doing it, never be a big D. One college. He thought he could get him into a school, kind of a Division 2 school. Well, a few weeks after that, Michael is discovered as God's gift to the left tackle position. And the book explains how this happens. But he is, it turns out that he's got this collection of physical traits that's extremely rare in a human being that exactly fits the left tackle in the NFL and serious people. Basically every college football coach in the country takes an Interest in him. And they all say the same thing. This kid is going to be a first round draft choice in the NFL at the left tackle position. And so I had these two things. I thought up to that moment, it had never really occurred to me that I would write a book about this kid. But then I thought, my God. And I thought, this is a way to write about what's happened in football. But as I got into it, the truth was what happened to Michael Oher was more interesting than what happened to the left tackle position. What happened to the left tackle position was interesting, but it fed into the Michael Oher story. And the book is really about all the forces in the world that change the value or the perceived value of this, of Michael Oher. Because he goes from being the least valued human being in America basically to being the most exalted 18 year old. And it requires not only that he be identified as this very valuable position, a player in this very valuable position, but he also requires this social transformation that he undergoes. So that was the sequence of events. And to me, as I say, the football stuff, it was riveting as far as it went. And the bonus, the real bonus, the football stuff was I spent a lot of time with Bill Walsh before he died. And he was, he was a great person to talk to. He had a lot to say. But it really was an excuse to write a story about. It was kind of a My Fair lady story, the effects of social class in America kind of thing.

One of the things that you do in Moneyball is show how the A's exploit these market inefficiencies for players that no one else really wanted. And what you seem to suggest in the Blind side and also in your Times Magazine piece on Mike Leach, the Texas Tech coach, is that it's almost the coach and the offensive system that matter more than the players and the quarterback.

That's an interesting point. I hope I've made it myself. But it is true that football is a much more strategic game. Baseball managers, I think anyone in this room, if he or she was made the manager of the Oakland A's, could do the job perfectly well. In fact, if you could pass physically and people weren't offended by the fact that you came from Google and that you'd never seen a baseball game or that kind of thing, if people were not offended by the idea of it, you might be better than anybody who's actually doing the job. You'd figure it out. It's not that complicated. If anyone in this room was put in the job of being an NFL head coach, it would be a disaster. The Oakland A's would do just as well or as badly as they do without you with you. The San Francisco 49ers would not. And the, you know, a corollary to this is it's basically impossible, I think, to be too stupid to play baseball. It is not possible to be too stupid to play football. Football is a much more complicated sport. The thing that when I started to write about football and I really did start to write about it, in part because I had access, because Moneyball got me into all these frontal offices and I realized I could ask the right people questions. I just had to figure out what the right questions were. I was really attracted to the role of the strategist because it was clear that strategy had such a powerful. In baseball, the smart guy was the guy who found a better way to value the players. It was the general manager's role was the place where intellectual and innovation had the most potential. In football, it was on field strategy. That was really the kind of the critical point. And so Walsh was interesting to me. But yes, I wrote a cover story for the Times Magazine about Mike Leach, who's the head coach of Texas Tech. And if you've never seen a Texas Tech football game, next time it's on, TiVo it because it is bizarre. I mean, it's less bizarre because more and more people are imitating their style. But it's possible, and he shows this, to take inferior, less talented players and organize them on a football field so that they can beat more talented players. It's very hard to take less talented baseball players and put them on a field so that they can beat more talented baseball players. The equalizing factor in baseball is there's a lot more luck in baseball. So the bad guys might actually end up. The worst guys might end up getting lucky for a game or two. But over a long haul, very hard. In football, you can out think your opponent and out strategize your opponent. So this was us all feeds back into this book in a way because the fact that the left tackle, its value had changed so much suggested minds at work thinking about how to use this person and why this person was important. And I suspected that through one example of a change in value of a position or how a player is used or how a player is thought of, I get more general truths about football strategy.

While studying the NFL, did you come across anything that led you to believe that there was going to be some sort of correction in the market value.

Of any given football players changes. I think it changes with the strategy. I mean, in this case, the great forces that were driving the value of the left tackle position were. Walsh was so important because what's happened in football is the passing game has gotten ever more important. And there's a reason for this. If you go. It's kind of interesting if you go. If you look at the numbers.

If.

You think about a football offense as two businesses, a running game and a passing game, the running game looks like the steel industry. It's got. Every year teams run. They actually run less and less every year. And yet their returns in terms of yards per carry has stayed basically the same or gone down slightly. The passing game every year has gotten more and more efficient. Every year teams do it more and more. And yet yards per attempt go up, interception rates go down, completion rates go up. So it's gotten. The passing even gets more and more and more valuable relative to the running game. So all those people who are most closely associated with the passing game have gotten more and more valuable. The most valuable person is the quarterback. And then turns out the second most valuable person is the person who stops the quarterback from getting killed. And that's the guy who's protecting the side he can't see.

I want to go back to Moneyball for a bit. One of the things I remember thinking when I finished reading that book when it came out was, oh no, the secret's out. Everyone's going to go and imitate the A's. And a lot of teams, they did have tried to. They've hired away people from the A's run office, they've hired analytical consultants, and yet no one's really been able to do it. What do you think that failure can be attributed to?

Well, the A's now are not any good either. This is what's happened. The market's got more efficient right after Moneyball came out. Not right after. Well, right after Moneyball came out, Billy Beane noticed that the market for on base percentage, the single most valuable trait in offensive player, changed. And he sent this to me and I no way to. I mean, he was just telling me what he kind of was perceiving, but he didn't have any proof for me. But a couple of economists in the. I think it's. The Journal of Econometrics published a study about six months ago where they studied the value of the price of on base percentage before Moneyball. And after Moneyball, it changed dramatically. It was undervalued before and it was actually overvalued afterwards, the market for players became more efficient. So there's less opportunity for someone who's searching for inefficiencies to profit from them. What's happened is teams with lots of money, like the Boston Red Sox, I mean, the Boston Red Sox have been emulating the A's in all but one respect. They are using the higher analytics to value the players and make all their decisions. A's are their model, except they're doing it with money. So if a player is appealing to them and to the A's, they get him because they can pay him more or they can give up more for him. And one of the little games that they play in the A's con office now is, is to imagine all the players who would have been on their team were it not for this change that took place in baseball. And I don't think Moneyball is actually completely responsible for this. It's just part of something. It was changed. I think it would have changed anyway, but that's what's going on. So I don't think anybody could replicate the A's success From the past 10 years going forward because it just isn't with a small payroll because there isn't the same opportunity.

How responsible do you think Billy Beane was for that success, given the fact that many of the key players during the time you cover in Moneyball were already on the team when Beane ascended to being general manager? I'm thinking of Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, Jason Giombi.

No, he became General Manager in 97. He remade the team pretty dramatically. I think that the A story is a two part story. There was a kind of intellectual revolution inside the front office that took place before Billy became the general manager. They bought all this stuff that Bill James was writing. They bought the idea that statistical analysis was a much better guide to valuing baseball players and strategies than scouts judgment, that kind of thing. They instituted in their minor league system a rule that you couldn't advance in the minor leagues unless you drew at least one walk for every 10 at bat. So they forced the players to be more selective in the way they approach hitting, all that stuff. But they had not actually imposed the methods on the big league clubhouse because they were. I don't know how to put this. They were intimidated. They didn't feel it was their place because they weren't former baseball players. And Billy being imposed it on the big league team in this much more zealous way. And I think without him, Oakland doesn't have the run of success that it had. He's absolutely necessary. I mean, that story, the story of what happened in Oakland is a very curious story because what it really is was the imposition of reason with violence. The reason that that happened in Oakland was Billy Bean was bigger than everybody in the clubhouse, and they were all afraid he was going to beat him up if he didn't say they didn't do what he said they were going to do. And so he sort of said, you're going to be reasonable or I'm going to kick the shit out of you. And that's what happened. And they all. And they kind of went, okay. And so it's a. He was a critical part of the success. He was necessary but insufficient. He needed intellectual help. But without him, it wouldn't have happened.

I want to talk about writing for a minute. How do you decide whether something makes it from being a magazine piece to becoming a book? It seems like your books tend to chart these really big paradigm shifts. So Billy Beane with the A's, Lawrence.

Taylor and Jim Clark in Silicon Valley.

Jim Clark in the new New Thing, Solvent Brothers with the creation of the market for mortgage bonds, and also the time that you devote in Liar's Poker to Michael Milken and Drexel. How do you make that decision or leap from turning something into a magazine piece to making it a book?

It's a good question, because there's no good answer. I feel if.

I mean, I guess I think of.

Like, this is sort of what has happened. It's happened several times now. It happened with the new. New thing, happened with Moneyball and happened with the Blind side, in each case, didn't have with Liars Poker. With Liars Poker. I set out to write. I wanted to write a book, and it was going to be about Wall Street. And then when I started writing it, it ended up being more about me because I was more interested in me than Wall Street. But the. With those three books in each case, I thought this might make a really good magazine piece. I got into it and I was so excited by the literary potential that I thought. I started to think, and it's a sneaky feeling, that magazine editor who I promised this to does not deserve this. It's too good for him. And exactly at that point, I pulled the plug on the magazine pieces and just started to work on a book. And it's just scope. It's just, how big a subject is this, how big a story is this? How much can I make it swing on the page? It requires a confluence of things, characters. I want to try to make swing on the page ideas that I think are worthy of making swing on the page. The material, I mean, it just requires. But it's done more by feel than anything else. And I'm very hesitant to get involved in books because they're such a pain in the ass and they really are a pain. And there's always a time when you're working on it where you think, oh no, either I'm going to blow this or this is going to blow me. This is not. I shouldn't be doing it. So you know that there are going to be crises of faith when you're working on it because they're very hard work. So I'm a little slow to make the leap. Doing little things is the way you find out whether they're big things. You got to kind of get into it for a bit before you. I have a mayor call. I have a confession to make. I really wanted to say this publicly. Probably the new New Thing hasn't been read since the Internet bubble went poosh. But the end of the new New Thing, Jim Clark, the hero of that book, says, and I think I quote him saying that he basically knows that this whole Internet thing is completely finished and he's got to get out of here and he moves to Florida. When these venture capitalists in Silicon Valley do this crazy thing and give $25 million to these guys who want to start a company called Google. And this is such a preposterous thing. It was a sign that was all getting too toppish even for him, and he was going to get out of the business. So it's very funny that in retrospect that that is how that book ended. And I keep hoping that nobody discovers that how it ended. But if they do, I've confessed it. So I'm all.

I remember hearing a few years ago that you were planning a follow up to Moneyball about the draft class that you talk about in that book. Is that something that you still plan to do someday?

Yes, I've been working on it for four years now. In fact, I have an email I sent my publisher when I decided Moneyball was a book and I wasn't going to write a magazine piece. This is how it happened, I thought. I live in Berkeley and I was just curious how a team that didn't have any money was winning as many games as the A's. It just didn't make any sense to me. I thought in terms of markets, I thought, this is a baseball market for Baseball players is kind of efficient. The rich teams should just win. And they were so far out of kilter, their success was so out of kilter with their payroll that I just thought, funny little magazine piece. Go see them and write a piece, cover piece for the Times Magazine about how this poor team wins. I went and saw them. Now, this will astonish you, but it's true. No one had asked them the question. No one. And none of the reporters had brought up the subject that, oh, isn't it interesting that you're functioning at this high level with your payroll? Are you thinking about the way you distribute your resources differently? No one had asked the question. So they were eager. Billy B. Was actually very interested to talk to me. And I thought, oh, my God, this is incredible. There's all this stuff here. There's actually a body of knowledge that they are accessing and that is kind of arcane and most baseball fans aren't aware of it. And I kind of nursed that along for a couple of months. And then I sat in the room when they imposed their way of thinking about baseball on the scouts when they drafted the players in 2002. And I thought, they're drafting these kids who are getting drafted by the A's. Were shocked to find out the valuation that the A's were placing on them because in some cases they thought they. When there's this fat catcher in Alabama who thinks because he's too fat that he's going to be a 10th round draft choice. And when the A's call him to tell him they're going to make him a first round draft choice, he thinks it's a crank call. And so I just thought, then I thought, I want to write a book about these kids and that they're kind of lab rats in this experiment. I want to follow them through the monoliths and see what happens to the experiment. This is the beginning of this grand experiment in drafting baseball players. So I wrote an email to my editor and I said, I said, I've got. I've been working on this magazine piece. It's not a magazine piece, it's a book. It's going to be called Moneyball. And I'm going to write this book, but I'm only going to write it because I want to write the second book, which is going to be called Underdogs. Because I want to write this book about these kids. And so Moneyball was just. I just had to write it so I could write the book about the kids. And so I did a two book deal with my publisher, Moneyball, and Underdogs. And the understanding was that it may be a long time before I write Underdogs, because Underdogs is going to be. We got to know what happens to the kids before I write that. And it may be another five years before I publish the book. But every year I go out and I spend time with them, and I've watched their fates kind of unfold, but it's still not clear what's going to happen to a bunch of them. So I'm awake to pull the trigger. And my guess is probably five years from now, I'll publish it. I'll do other things. Until then, I wanted to return briefly.

To the Blind side before we open it up to questions. I think I. And everyone who reads this book comes away from it wondering what happens to Michael. One of the first things I did after I read it was go on Google and look him up. Can you give us an update on how he's doing academically?

Google him now. Google him now. He's on the Dean's List at Ole Miss, which says a lot about the Dean's List at Ole Miss. But you know what? In fairness to Michael, you know, Bear Bryant had that funny line. The former coach of Alabama Crimson, Todd, he once said to a reporter, we want to have a school that makes the football team proud or that the football team can be proud of. And a lot of these schools sort of have inverted their purpose in life, that there are schools like Ole Miss, but Ole Miss is not even the best example that seem to exist mainly so that they can sustain a football team. And they then take these kids, many of whom are from the underclass, poor black kids from ghettos around America, and let them into the school, get them in however they can get them in, and then they create a track for them inside the school. And the track is not designed for them to get an education or even to actually engage with the school outside of the football team in any way. It's designed to keep their grade point average to the level where they can continue to play football. And if you watch the serious football schools, Florida State's probably the best on tv, they're always selling you the idea, of course, the ncaa, they're always selling the idea that this is actually a school behind this football team. And so they show you pictures of the school on tv, and sometimes they'll flash up the players, they'll even what their majors are. They shouldn't do this because it's too much of a clue. But when they do this and it's criminal justice or sociology or sometimes it makes you shatter journalism. Each school has its major for the football team. They're all Virginia Tech, they're all sociology majors. In Florida State, they're all criminal justice majors. They fell on the track. And it's one program and Ole Miss it is indeed criminal justice. And all the poor black football players are majoring in criminal justice. And. The great tribute to Michael is that he has actually got engaged with his studies and he quit the criminal justice program six months ago and announced that he, because he was such a good writer, he was going to embark on a journalism career after he finished playing in the NFL. So he went into what is actually a fairly legitimate journalism program there, which is far more taxing than the criminal justice program. So he's actually taking courses alongside ordinary students, which is more than be said for most of the football players. As a player he is an awesome spectacle. He, they play, he's on a crappy football team or a mediocre football team. So it's hard unless you see the tapes to appreciate how good he is. But he's a junior, he's projected to be. He's a probable first round NFL draft choice after his junior year. That almost never happens with lineman. It's very rare. His main problem is he tends to get bored because he doesn't find anything opposing him to keep his interest. They played last week against Missouri, Ole Miss did. They got beat 38 to 25, but they had a running back who ran for 230 yards behind Michael and they had a Missouri. I was talking to Sean actually on the way over here. I said, have you seen the tapes? He said, well, I was at the game and that was. People were coming up and hoping that the guy, the poor kid who had to line up across from Michael's parents weren't there to see what was happening to him. And then one guy came and said he's never going to want to play football again. But they had the Missouri, it's a serious football school. They had a 260 pound defensive end across from Michael. And the first play of the game was a bit like that Mumford scene. He tried to speed rush around Michael and Michael's faster than anybody on the other side of him. And he's now six foot six and a lean. It is hard to believe. A lean £325. He doesn't fit through that doorway. He's just huge. But he took him and he just threw him like 15 yards. And the kids Land on the ground and he just goes. And body slams and the. So he's very, very talented. I mean, he's so talented that when you describe him. I spent a lot of time in NFL locker rooms. I'm working on something on the NFL right now. And I start talking to the lineman or defensive lineman or I talk to Dwight Freey at the Indianapolis Colts, and yeah, yeah, another college player. They don't know who anybody is in college. Do they say, tell me about him. Say, well, he's 6' 6, 3, 25, and he runs a 4, 9 40, and he's the best basketball player on the Ole Miss football team and the Ole Miss basketball team now, say. And they would like to hear him. And they start listening to this and they kind of go, oh, my God. Because, you know, the NFL's got all these guys that say they weigh 300 pounds, but the ones who actually do generally have the big old boilers, you know, they're just fat guys. And you wash their bodies without their clothes on, and it's not generally a pretty sight.

And.

Michael's just physically superior to basically anybody in the NFL. There's one little story that I just. One of my favorite stories in the book, that when he was 16 years old, Leanne Tuohy, they take him in and she realizes that she starts to kind of just take care of his needs, and she realizes in the end, they're bottomless. So he ends up sleeping at their house, and they bring in tutors to teach him how to read and write and so on and so for. But in the beginning, the real problem is finding clothes for him because he's showing up. He's walking around in the snow in shorts and a T shirt, and she takes him out to buy him clothes, and she can't find clothes in Memphis that fit him. And because of Shawn, they know the quarterback of the Washington Redskins. His name is Patrick Ramsey at the time. And so she emails Pat, and she's an interior decorator. She was actually decorating Patrick Ramsey's house. She emails Patrick with Michael's measurements and says, go into your locker room, find your biggest lineman and just get some hand me downs from them, because we can't find anything here that fits him. And I want him to have some nice clothes. And Patrick Ramsey calls her back in a couple of days, and he says, you gave me the wrong measurements. And they go through the measurements, they're all right. And he says, leanne, there's no one on the Washington Redskins as big as he is. And he Was still growing. He was still growing and he is an athlete. So it's just a very odd combination. It's a little different from baseball because this is one way football is different. With baseball, the baseball players are so hard to predict. If you see a kid who's 16 years old who throws 100 mile an hour fastball, there's no guessing. You have no telling what's going to happen to that kid. In football, there's some just physical specimens who are, unless they get hurt, are very easy to predict and project. And he's one of them.

Anyway, thank you so much, Michael. We're going to open it up to questions from the audience now. Microphone's over here. If you could wait for it to come to you.

Hi, I had a quick question. I know that a lot of talk about, you know, your book Moneyball and things like that, that, you know, people like Joe Morgan and things say that they miss attribute you to Billy Beane and he thinks Billy Bean was the book. And I just had a silly question, just whether if you had a choice between being you or being Billy Bean, which would you choose? There's really no way to answer that without embarrassing myself. How could I want to be me kind of thing. But I'd much rather be me. I get to describe Billy Beane and invent him. I mean, I like what I do and. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I don't. Billy, let's all change the subject. It is a very funny thing that when Moneyball came out, an awful lot of people in pro baseball thought Billy. They didn't understand that there was such a thing as an author. And that was because when they think of books, these people, which they seldom do, but when they think of books, they think, oh, this famous person had this person write his book. It's that great line of Charles Barclays. He was. How he was going to. He was going to. He was pissed off because he'd been misquoted in his autobiography, right? And he was pissed off because he'd been misquoted in his autobiography. So they just assumed this was a kind of as told to thing. The truth was that they. They're very bright. They're very bright in the Oakland front office, but they had no idea what I was up to. They thought there were all these other teams that were going to be in the book. They didn't. I didn't think. I did not tell them a word. The first time they knew what had happened was when they got the galleys, which is too late to Change anything. It's going after reviewers. And Billy Beane, he was shocked. I mean, absolutely shocked and upset. So it was not only not an act of ventriloquism, it was. It was upsetting to the puppet. And so when then the book hits and baseball is saying, oh, Billy Beane wrote this book, and it's really just him tooting his own horn thing, it was perplexing to me, but in a way, wonderful, because baseball was very upset about the book. And it seemed to me for about a year that everybody who loved the book seemed to understand that I wrote it, and everybody who hated it blamed Billy for it. And so it was sort of the perfect thing. I didn't want to disabuse them of their perception because it was kind of convenient. I didn't take very much heat for a while, but then they sort of figured it out. Oh, he's this other guy and there's this thing called an author, and he wrote it. But I wouldn't mind if I couldn't be me. Billy wouldn't be a bad thing to be. But I like being me, so, Thanks. Hi, Michael.

Thanks for coming.

I'm a big fan. Curious to see if you have any insights into basketball, since that's what I.

Enjoy more than, I guess, football or baseball.

I don't know. I mean, I haven't. I haven't got any ambitions to write about it, except, well, take that back. The thing that interests me about basketball, if you said, michael, you have to go write a book about basketball, the job that interests me there, it's more of almost a modern management book. Running a basketball team must be a bit like running Google, because you've got all these completely unreliable employees who leave at any moment that you kind of work for them rather than they work for you. And a lot like running, say, a university that all the guys on the bench have tenure and they're bigger than you and they might beat you up. And how you manage that, how a head coach in the NBA who's usually a short little white guy, you know, kind of thing manages. That situation interests me, and oddly, through Sean, because when I go to Memphis sometimes to see him, I go to the Grizzlies game, and he was friends with the head coach. And so I go spend a little. And the head coach had read some of my books, and so I spent some time with him. It was Mike Fratello at the time. And I watched the dynamic between him and the players, and it's completely screwed up. It's completely screwed up. That it is in some weird way the coach works for the players. How you manage in that situation, which you still need to do, I thought might have some educational value for managers of Google or managers of a university. And so that interested me. But Moneyball opened up lots of sports kind of worlds to me. And it wasn't that football was really interested in basketball, been really interested in it. And so I have had a couple of conversations with front offices in basketball in particular. Houston Rockets have a new GM who's in the money ball mode called Darrell Morey. And he did say to me that, look, basketball has the same. It's worse in basketball and football than it is in baseball. This problem of how you value people because baseball is such a clean sport, it's so easy to assign credit and blame on a baseball field and it's so hard to do it in a flow sport like basketball. And he says we don't have any of the right statistics to value players. And he told me, I mean, this is kind of mildly. And he said that the first thing he did when he got to the Rockets was he did a trade with the. With the Memphis Grizzlies. And it was a bunch of players involved. But the player that was really central to the thing that they wanted to get was Shane Battier, who the Grizzlies actually didn't think that much of. And the reason they wanted him was because they had a new statistic that they thought was more indicative of a player's value than the conventional points, rebounds. Shane Batty didn't score a lot of points a game. He doesn't get a lot of rebounds a game, doesn't steal, have a lot of steals, doesn't have a lot of assists. He does kind of okay. But they ground out numbers to determine which players in the NBA had the biggest effect on team scoring and team rebounding when they were on the court and Shane Battier was near the top. He had an extraordinary effect on everybody else's and so that's why they went after him. So the same sort of thing is happening in basketball as is happening in baseball and in Dulesa and football, but I haven't followed it that closely. Hi, thanks again for coming. I just want to get your thoughts on, you know, with all the revenues that college football brings in, this is huge business. Is there room or is it reasonable to think about paying players? This is a great. I'm writing a piece right now proposing that players be paid for the times. But you know, the way it's. So it's funny when you sit down and write that. I haven't done it yet, but I realize that it's kind of boring to have the argument all over again because people are having such entrenched views about it. You know, college is sacred. These are amateur athletics sacred. And these people, in fact, it's horribly exploitative. What goes on these poor. I mean, just generalized. There are lots of exceptions. Poor black kids hauled into these schools to play football for the most of whom won't vast majority won't have any kind of career in football. They are not really given an education. They spend most of their time as essentially professional football players in unpaid employ of the school. The school then from them generates huge revenues. Hard revenues in the form of TV income and fans in the seats, but a lot of soft revenue in forms of alumni dollars. And top it all off, the NCAA erects this wall between the rich white people who go to watch them play football and cheer for them, and the poor black players so they can't even offer them a job in the summer so that there's never even the hope of assimilation because there are rules against it. So it's outrageous. I think it's outrageous. But once you get into. You can already hear me. I'm already boring. I mean, half people are nodding their head, are saying, yeah, that's right, and half people are saying, no, that's wrong, and you're not getting anywhere with it. So how do you kind of get that across? So what I'm doing, I hope I'm getting some numbers out of the University of Alabama about how much money their football program makes, and then trying to figure out what the players would earn, what the payroll should be given the numbers, and using the NFL as kind of a template, what percentage of your revenues go to. But it's a little different with college because you got alumni contributions. But you got to figure. And so once you start seeing the numbers of what a quarterback would be paid to go to college if he was really good, about half a million dollars a year, I think, then you start realizing that not only should this probably happen, but as the numbers get bigger, there's enormous pressure on it. I mean, at some point someone says, I'm being robbed. I mean, when it was just 50 grand a year, well, you live with that. But if it's all of a sudden 10 years from now, $2 million a year, and the coach is getting paid $5 million a year, then people start making more noise about it, I think. So I'm going to do a payroll analysis for one of the big football teams and just see if that helps matters. But I do think. I do think the way the system is structured now, it's almost. It's as bad as it could be for the poor black kid who can play football. And it's a huge missed opportunity because you have this moment. I mean, one of the problems is the Balkanization of the poor black young male in the ghettoization. And he just. There's no way for him to connect with the larger society. And here you have this period in his life when the larger society is very interested in having lots to do with him. And we erect these rules to prevent the social interaction from happening and the financial interaction from happening. And I think it should happen. I think it would be much better if it happened. But anyway, sorry you hit a nerve there.

We have time for one more question.

I remember from Moneyball you talked about the example of the fat catcher who was shocked when he got drafted. And I remember reading that and wondering at the time whether it was to the advantage of the Billy Beans of the world that the players are in on the secret.

That's a funny question.

And thinking about it also in the context here of to what extent are the people who are strategizing and figuring out these inefficiencies, where is it to their advantage for the players to understand those inefficiencies? Or should they just be going where the coach tells them and doing with the coach and assume that there's a smarter power at work?

Well, I'll tell you first what Billy Beane would say. Don't confuse them. And you screw up the lab experiment if you tell the lab rats about it. And one of the reasons Moneyball was so easy for me to report and get my material and why I could get to know all. I got to get to know all the players in the clubhouse and have whatever relationship I wanted to, short of sleeping with them, was that no one had told them anything. They had no idea, no idea that the front office had quixotic views about how to value baseball players or quixotic ideas about strategy. They just thought things were a little strange around here, but they didn't know quite why. That was the kind of thing. It was kind of hot around here. But since baseball players don't really talk very much about anything, they didn't really talk about it, but it was a little strange. So when I started walking in and saying, hey, you know why they got you? It was because of this. Really couldn't believe it was like really, they noticed that. That's incredible, you know, and so they. So they wanted to talk, they wanted to know, and then I could find out things about the baseball players and tell the front office about them. So there was a kind of a bridge hand going on. I was roughing those two against each other. But it was a. The view of the front office was better off that they. Better that they not know because it just confuse them. They don't need to know why, just tell them what to do. I'm not sure that's really true. I don't know. They were certainly, when you got them one on one, the baseball players, intensely curious as a group, they pretend we're just professional baseball players, they're too cool for school kind of thing, but individually riveted by it. So it's my own view is that especially with things like plate discipline, not swinging at bad pitches. One of the curious things about baseball finances is you can't actually incentivize a baseball player to draw walks. You can't pay him in his contract for the walks. It's against the rules. And so. And technically, there's a scene in the book in Moneyball where Billy Beane is running down the hallway after a player saying he'd give him 20 bucks every time he did, you know, went the other way or every time, which against the rules, you can't do that. So it would seem to me that it would really help getting them to do what you would like them to do if they knew that they were going to be paid ultimately for that. And I, you know, Jack Cust, he followed Jack Cusp. Jack Custrange connection. Our best friends in Berkeley are his godparents and grew up with him. And when Moneyball came out, Claire said to me, this sounds like Jackie hits lots of home runs. He's kind of fat. He walks. He walks all the time. And he's languishing in the minor league system somewhere. And Custis actually said that when he read the book, he was thinking about quitting. And then he read the book and he realized that these people, there's someone out there who values what I do. So you can't help but. And so it kept him going. And they got him once and then he got hurt. He was actually hurt when they had him. Then he went away and now they got him again. So you would think that it would send out the signal, if you walk, we will pay you. And people would walk, but they didn't think that way for whatever reason.

Michael, thank you so much.