Monday, March 15, 2004

Every (Shaggy) Dog Has Her (Lazy Sun)Day (Times Piece) 

Selena Roberts has a tiresome Sunday piece in the New York Times that, had it been written a year ago, would have placed her on the cutting edge of old-school writers gawking at the newfound popularity of Oakland A's GM Billy Beane. Her usage of hackneyed terms such as "nerd," geek," "smarty pants," and "whiz kid" (all present and accounted for here) would have anticipated the growing chorus of anti-intellectuals who spent their summer and fall hurling inane epithets at Beane and Moneyball author Michael Lewis. Today, Roberts' profile of Beane just smacks of a writer desperately trying to mount a bandwagon that left the station a long time ago. Go get a late pass, Selena.

Writes Roberts:

As a burned-out ex-player, Beane is the stat rat who number-crunched the underprivileged A's into an annual contender, displaying little use for the clairvoyance of scouts or myth-making batting averages.

In the afterglow of his unsolicited glorification, Beane has been alternately courted by Goldman Sachs types who are enamored of his emotionally detached approach to romance (as in baseball) and flayed by the game's purists for the flaws in his progressive thinking (as in the act of booting a computer).

He accepts both speaking engagements and engagements with his enemies.The latter group has been prone to incredulous guffaws over the past year. On-base percentage is the holy grail? Stolen bases are fool's gold? High school phenoms are the hobgoblins of wasteful thinking?

It's all baseball blasphemy to some traditionalists, providing He Hate Me with a new friend in Beane. Go ahead and poke at the general manager's whiz-kid image or mock him as the nerd who landed a glamour date with fame. But as a testament to the elasticity of his hubris, Billy Beane Envy hasn't been the least bit suppressing to his vast sense of self.

I'll stop, since if you're reading this you've doubtless heard this one before. If it were a joke, it would have whiskers. If it were a horse, it would have been flogged to death. And to shift metaphors, if you're a blogger, you've probably slain this dragon yourself.

Roberts manages a few slick turns-of-phrase in her effort -- "coloring outside the basepaths" wowed a couple pals of mine. But she's done in by her own hyperbole, trying way too hard to hang the geek mantle on Beane, who "didn't invent sabermetrics, a sci-fi word formed from S.A.B.R., the Society of American Baseball Research (a k a The No-Life Institute)..." Groan. I think there's supposed to be a rim-shot there, but it didn't make the online edition. Instead, Roberts writes that Beane "applies the tenets of numeric efficiency found in the stapled baseball abstracts of the 70's fringe writer Bill James."

Now, James may have been on the fringe in the '70s, but by the early '80s he was selling hundreds of thousands of copies of those Baseball Abstracts annually and gracing the New York Times Bestseller lists in the process. His thoughts may not have been accepted into the mainstream baseball establishment, but he wasn't exactly a nobody back then. And he's anything but a nobody now.

I honestly don't understand why this piece is wasting space in the Sunday Times. It isn't like they haven't covered Beane before -- after all, they excerpted Moneyball to tantalizing effect last March. And they've already shown that the can cover the story on both sides of the gender divide, with Janet Maslin reviewing the book; clearly, she got it in a way that clearly eluded Roberts. So why are they publishing this? Why is Roberts trying so hard to keep up with the Ringolsbys of the writing world? And just what the hell is Billy Beane's dog doing at the end of the story?

Beane's dog roams and sheds freely around the Oakland offices. Tag is a black-and-white border collie -- a breed known as one of the smartest and most precise. No, Tag is not replacing a scout, but what else would Beane own but a geek's best friend -- in character, as always.

Why? Because this is the epitome of a shaggy dog story -- that's why. Ba-dum-bum!

--posted by Jay at 2:28 PM LINK