I’ve been a fan of Michael Lewis’s writing for a long time — back even before “Moneyball” was published in 2003. I’ve read his books and taught his writing in my courses.
When the Colorado Rockies announced they were bringing in Paul DePodesta to be their president of baseball operations, my thought were less “You mean the guy with the Cleveland Browns?” than “You mean the Harvard guy Michael Lewis made famous?”
And because we’re all friends here and you all know that I am an English major, I can say that my initial interests were less about baseball than what it was like for a very young Paul DePodesta to find himself transformed into a character by one of our best living non-fiction writers.
So I asked him about it, and he was good enough to answer questions about a part of his life long in the rearview mirror.
(And, yes, I did ask about OBP.)
Here are some highlights from that conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
Renee Dechert: What was it like for you as a young man to be made into a character by one of the great non-fiction writers in “Moneyball?”
Paul DePodesta: It’s hard to describe. It’s such an unusual circumstance. Michael is such a brilliant writer. He’s also very, very engaging. So it was great to hang out with Mike and just have conversations with him about the game, the industry, the team, things that we were doing because, again, he was just both insightful and funny and everything else.
At the time when we were spending time with him, he actually wasn’t writing a book. He was on assignment to write an article for “The New York Times Magazine.” And it wasn’t until he sort of went deeper and deeper that he decided at one point that it was rich enough to be a book.
I think at that point, Billy [Beane] and I probably got a little frightened in terms of what might be in there, but I never went into any of my conversations with Michael thinking that this was going to be a book. It was just a national writer asking us questions. What was unusual was that it was Michael Lewis.
RD: Was that overwhelming for you when the book comes out and suddenly everybody in baseball knows who you are?
PDP: I probably felt pretty vulnerable. When Michael gave us the galleys in spring training the next year, I think Billy and I went into our offices and closed the door and just didn’t come out until we finished. Or at times, we would jump into each other’s offices and say, “Have you gotten to this part yet? Like, have you seen this and what was different?”
To put ourselves back in that time, it was mostly newspapers and magazines. There were some things on the internet, but that wasn’t the main medium for news. So in our roles, we’re accustomed to articles coming out that could be critical or what have you, but two days later, another article would come out, and it was sort of gone.
This was a book. It wasn’t going to go away, especially because it was a book written by Michael Lewis.
But Billy, I think, was very insightful. He said, “I just hope that when people read this, they see it as more than just a baseball story, and that there’s more there for them.” And that has happened so far beyond our wildest expectations. And that part of it, I think, has been really gratifying.
And now you look back and think — at least I do — how lucky was I to be a part of all that, not just in Oakland, but even a part of the whole, I don’t know, movement that Michael helped create.
RD: You opted out of the movie. Are you willing to talk about why you made that decision?
PDP: Sure. I mean, it was very clear that they were making a movie, not a documentary, right?
And it’s very hard to sort of turn yourself over to someone and say, “Okay, you go play me. Yeah, go be me.”
And then whatever it is you say or you do, then for the rest of my life, 99.9% of people I meet will just assume that I said or did those things, and that’s hard to get comfortable with. And that was really the only reason.
The people were great to me. The actors were great to me, the director, I mean, everybody. I thought, Jonah [Hill] ended up doing a fantastic job, and I had nothing to be worried about. But before they actually shot it, there was a lot of uncertainty about how this was all going to turn out.
So that was really the reason. I was just nervous how it would be. But it turns out I had nothing to be nervous about.
RD: So what did Billy do when he discovered Brad Pitt was going to play him?
PDP: Oh, I think Billy took it in stride. I think it was probably pretty appropriate. I mean, look, Billy’s got incredible charisma, incredible presence. So I think Brad captured that pretty well.
RD: How have your feelings about OBP changed?
PDP: It’s funny. There were a lot of things we were doing at that point that went beyond on-base, but it was in our conversations with Michael is probably the best way to express, at least directionally, what it is that we really were doing. We were trying to find value in the game. And at that point in the game, on-base was something that was probably a little undervalued. Now, in the last 20 years, there have been times where it’s been overvalued, and sort of gone through cycles.
You still need to get on base more than the other guy if you want to win. So that’s still sort of fundamentally true. But there are a lot of other things we were looking at then, and certainly that we look at today, that are that are important levers to winning,
RD: The fact that Lewis did not really focus at all on pitching, does that strike you as a problem?
PDP: No. I mean, Michael’s such a compelling storyteller, right? And I think there were some things even about our pitching that would have fit his storyline. And certainly he talked about Chad Bradford, but in terms of the big three starters, there were certain things about those guys that absolutely would have fit the narrative.
You know, Barry Zito didn’t throw particularly hard. Tim Hudson was thought of as being too small to be a high-inning starting pitcher, and things like that. So again, it would have fit the story.
But I think at some point, to talk about every player on our roster probably diluted the message, what the book was really about. It wasn’t necessarily about every sort of individual player or their characteristics. It was really about how is this team with so little resources, how are they putting together a competitive team?
So it was really probably more of a David-and-Goliath story than it was about any of the individuals.
RD: You’ve said you’re still interested in irrationality.
RD: How does that come to play at Coors Field and this job?
PDP: Are you suggesting I was irrational for taking this job? [Laughs]
RD: Not at all, but was that in your thoughts?
PDP: I think this is a particularly compelling challenge, and I think there are a lot of things that are different here than anywhere else, and how that impacts our decision making, our evaluations. I think all of that fits together in terms of how we we have to be very, very careful about how we do things. We can’t do things the way everybody else has done it, or how we’ve done it in other places again, how exactly, how we break down pitchers or how we think about hitting, we need to really approach this with a fresh set of eyes, and I find that to be really interesting and really fun.
Because at the end of the day, I really am a book nerd who is interested in how different people perceive the same situation, I wanted to close this by looking at the “Afterword” Lewis wrote following the book’s publication and an unanticipated reaction.
Here’s Lewis on the process of writing the book:
[Billy Beane] and the other critical character in the Oakland front office, assistant GM Paul DePodesta, were never actually rude to me, but they made it pretty clear that they had more interesting things to do than talk to me. The only power they ever had over my project was to throw me out of their office or clubhouse – which they did, on occasion. But the sad truth is that I was a matter of some indifference to them. As far as they knew, I wasn’t even writing a book about the Oakland A’s. I was writing a book about the collision of reason in baseball. (They weren’t the only ones whose eyes glazed over when I try to explain what I was up to.)
And here he is on Billy Beane:
Until they saw it, the Oakland front office had only the faintest notion of what my book would be like. Oakland staff read the book when reviewers read it, about a month before the hardcover hit the stores. Each member of that staff had a slightly different reaction to it. Beane’s was something like horror. He was surprised that so much of the thing was about him and disturbed that I’d portrayed him as a maniac. I probably should’ve felt more guilt about that than I did. I assumed most readers understood that this wasn’t the whole man, and that I had my own agenda. I wanted to capture Beane doing what he did so well and interestingly: value, acquire, and manage baseball players. And when he did this, in his most intense moments, he was a bit of a maniac.
I wrote to Michael Lewis’ publisher to see if I could send him a few questions about a young Paul DePodesta, but I never heard back.
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