Baseball season

The Major League Baseball season is set to open this week amidst steroid controversies, and quite serendipitously I read a couple of books about the baseball over the last month.

I am somewhat familiar with the game, especially back in college. I remember during my senior year, I would spend most of my mornings watching an MLB match on TV while I had a breakfast of leftovers and ice cream (those were the days). Then one semester, I even played baseball for PE (mostly because the class fit my schedule). My instructor was this weird Korean dude who spoke pretty fluent Tagalog, and my classmates were pretty good. I was terrible at it, but I got a good grade after writing a term paper about Ichiro (he was a rookie then) and other East Asians making it big in the Majors.

The first baseball book I read last month was Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer-prize winning work The Natural. Like most other people, I was more familiar with the Robert Redford movie about Roy Hobbs, the New York Knights' rookie sensation who dominates the majors at age 35.

In the book just like in the movie, Hobbs was a mythic baseball player, shattering records left and right (although, I must point out that Barry Bonds, the player in the middle of the steroids controversy, might have had seasons that were statistically as impressive).

However, the difference between the movie and the book becomes apparent early in the novel. While Redford's Hobbs was a superhero right out of the comic books, Malamud's was as flawed as he was powerful; he was a Herculean hero, following unbelievably great deeds with ones as unbelievably stupid.

That Malamud was able to transfer his hero's locale from the heights of Olympus to the diamonds of America is the book's true genius. His narrative of the season was nothing short of brilliant. For example, his descriptions of the rag-tag personalities in the clubhouse and the team's winning streaks were the literary equivalents of those funny montages in baseball films like Major League. It shows not only how good Malamud is, but also how little the game has changed. The book was originally published in 1952.

Hobbs's fate in the book is much more cruel than that in the film, and I wouldn't fault anyone for preferring the nice Hollywood ending. But anyone who is a fan of baseball and literature should at least give The Natural a read.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis was just as fascinating a read for me. Published in 2003, the book chronicles the success of the Oakland Athletics led by GM Billy Beane, who have found success in the American League despite much lower budgets than their competitors.

Beane achieved success by eschewing traditional baseball methods for evaluating talent, instead relying on statistical tools. Early in the book, he was discussing a prospect with his scouts, who weren't very high on the player because of his body type. Beane replied, succinctly, "We're not selling jeans here."

The book goes on to profile Beane, who was, as a young player, a prospect with whom scouts fell in love for his body type and athleticism, but who never quite panned out in the big leagues. Aside from Beane, the book also devotes some time to Oakland players, gems in the rough who were uncovered with the A's system.

The book also details the history of sabermetrics, the analysis of baseball using objective statistics, as well as the opposition to these methods that still exists among traditionalists in baseball today.

While I myself have my reservations about the analytical tool, I love the fact that some sort of tool is being employed by baseball, with its wealth of statistics to draw from. The revolution has started, and spread to other sports such as basketball as well. In fact, I am a fan of the basketball statistical analysis site 82games.com.

However, at the heart of the book is the biggest problem in baseball: the economic disparity between MLB teams. Oakland has a payroll around $40 million, while the Yankees have a budget of a little less than $200 million. While the A's have been successful this past decade, it is only a matter of time before the big boys beat up on the little kids again.