Moneyball | Michael Lewis | Talks at Google

please join me in welcoming Michael Lewis tuneable 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 and the story also has raw physical ability and innocence and it kind of brings all these things together when I set it up I was just looking because it took me 133 pages to get through this in the book give me two minutes - sure explain what is the book is about it's ostensibly a football book but as with the baseball book I wrote which is ostensibly 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 I his name is Michael Oher 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 woman addicted to crack and abandoned he was 15 years old when he was 15 years old he had been to 12 different schools it showed up at 12 different schools but intact 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 in too long explain how this happens but rich white evangelical Christian Memphis and he ends up and very bizarrely in a school called the Briarcrest Christian school which was part of Memphis under 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 enter to integrate the schools when busing happened white Christian Memphis fled and created this vast network of private schools in the Brier rest Christian school is one of them so the point of the Brock rest Christian school in the beginning was to get away from black kids like Michael or Michael or ends up at this school and he's at the age of fifteen six five and a half 348 pounds and the football coach season Minh 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 that he needed to play and so this is the first scrimmage of of Michael's senior year he played his junior but they kind of benched him because he didn't lovely he didn't look like he knew what he was doing or it didn't look like he even wanted to be there and broadcasters playing a school called Mumford the Mumford scouting report hadn't picked up Michael size and hadn't picked up Michael size and speed the Mumford defensive end who lined up a cross from Michael Laura 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 gonna 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 or Hugh Freeze who was the coach of the Briarcrest team ordered up plays the call from Michael to block a linebacker to pull and sweep around the right end and lead 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 LeAnn LeAnn is Leigh Anne Tuohy who is the the white mother of the family adopting michael war leanne could always tell with something angered michael i can tell by his body language she said you pissed michael off and he looks more like a bull and it stands early in the scrimmage he had a bull like demeanor but he hadn't done anything out of anger LeAnn rose from her seat to beat the crowd to the concession stand and so had sought 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 with 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 Briarcrest number 74 that would be Michael Laura hero the story was racing its speed in the opposite direction with a defensive end in his arms from his place on the sidelines Sean Sean a Sean tewi who is the white father of the family that bounced Michael Sean watched in amazement he would call it a running play around the right end away from Michael 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 gonna have to figure it out there's always someone like that right you've got to come in later figure out instead he fired off a line of scrimmage and gotten fit once he had his hands inside the mumford players shoulder pads he lifted him off the ground it was a perfectly legal block with unusual consequences he drove the Munford player straight down the field for 15 yards then took a hard left towards the Mumford sidelines the morphers kid the Mumford the Mumford kids 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 the pile right through it knocking over the bench several more Morford 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 it what appeared to be the entire Munford football team leapt on top of Michael and the officials raced over to peel them off all Shawn could make out was the huge pile of bodies then Michael gets up says Shawn and it's like watching Gulliver bodies flying everywhere flags flying everywhere and then the referee comes over to screaming us all the officials knew showin to e both of the both is a 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 knew also knew of Michael or 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 2e looking for a grown-up to complain to an official sprinted back across the field he made straight for Shawn coach - he he hollered Shawn stepped out onto the field what's going on coach - he he can't do that he just can't do that did the whistle blow asked Shawn who could have made a good living as a tort lawyer the whistle had not beloved the broad press running back had kept his feet for a conveniently long time no said the referee but he's gotta let go of him when he gets him to the sidelines he can't just keep on running with him come on us and Shawn the plight wasn't over Shawn said the ref he took that boy across the track okay sit Shawn I'll talk to him beyond the Rumford Brent benched 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 15-yard penalty Shawn 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 raucous everybody's freaking out says Shawn the refs to scream and their whole team is wanting to fight he's totally calmed like he's out for a Sunday stroll technically it was Hugh Freeze his job to talk to Michael as since Michael's apotheosis Hugh had taken a special interest in the and wine button whose of you Michael was merely doing what he taught me to block until the whistle blows upon reflection thought you you tell Michael I want you to block it till the whistle blows well he takes that real literal sure Sean and Tim long Tim along as a former NFL players a coach of Brock wrestling's 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 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 is 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 with the bench and take him all the way to his sidelines and through the bench Sean wasn't laughing Sean had his stern face on this incident fell into the ever-expanding category of things Michael Oher 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 Wayne went on just about any football field on earth even if he was an offensive Lund and 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 for such obvious revenge he could win he could dominate he could even humiliate he just couldn't attract it shouldn't attract the attention of the legal authorities Michael listen to Sean's little speech without responding except a grunt okay he was still eerily calm as if this whole fuss didn't really concern him finishing his lecture Sean looked over at them offered bench Michael had picked up a 220 pound 20 pound defensive end and moved him at least 60 yards in seconds Michael said Shawn where are you taking him anyway I was going to put him on the boss said Michael parked on the other side of the chain-link fence was in fact the Mulford team bus with a bus - Shawn I got tired of him talking said Michael it was time for him to go home Shawn thought he must be joking 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 Marilyn it very nearly done - pick up this trash-talking defensive end and take him not to the channel chain-link fence but through the chain-link fence to the bus and then put him on the bus Shawn began to laugh how far did you get - Shawn I got him up against the fence said Michael no now Michael began to chuckle what did that guy say while you were taking him to the bus as Shawn nothing said Michael he was just hanging on for dear life as the laughter rose up the name Shawn thought there might be a fire in this belly after all he didn't worry much about what might happen if that fire was mr. rocket off the football field he figured football could channel it usefully thank you for reading well sure yeah I wrote this book I finished writing it a year ago basically today and I think I forget what's in my books before I go and look towards I'm really I'm about to start a little talk with favor back I've got to go reread it but that's a good story so you give a little background on Michael so I want 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 said 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 the left tackle came to you first and at what point during her research fruit for the book they they intercepted sure this was the order of events after Moneyball came out I became briefly fashionable in NFL front offices because and my fashion hasn't I'm not concurrently out of fashion but I was hot for a little bit and so these these these NFL people were 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 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 help you someone who doesn't have a book out but it's just interesting he'd be great to describe him his Parag virante and Parag is the brains of the 49ers he's a Stanford Business School graduate McKinsey consultant who somehow has worked his way basically the football side of things there and Parag and I would I was asking him I mean it seemed to me that one of the differences between baseball football is that football has these fixed payrolls baseball has you know in theory on mobile you could spend as much money as you want on your baseball team ah and so I was curious how given that that money was a scarce source in a different way I wondered how money was allocated across positions and you know on a football field and he said he pulled out something he gave me all their data and it was it was riveting because not only was I shocked to find out that the left tackle on the offensive line and nobody knows who he is he's just a subscrube is any attention to was the second highest paid position on the field quarterback at quarterback his third quarterback is first that you could see that this was a product market forces that if you go back to the day when days before free see when there wasn't really as much of an open market but there wasn't a free market 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 regard it's the same so something had happened and I just kind of tuck that away manat this something is happening this cause football weather and they obviously football wasn't that aware of how valuable left a girls can you ever heard anybody talk about it you never the announcers talked about the left tackle I mean it was so I was curious what it happened there and then I was in Memphis on other business and I was gonna write a I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine about my high school baseball coach and then end up being a little book called coach and I thought if I write this book gotta call a kid I played baseball with because he was really close to the coach he was also a really talented athlete it was Sean to it and I hadn't seen him since high school and Sean had been a poor boy in New Orleans he'd been a 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 in staring at you and and I naturally has Sean what's he prepare he said it's fun chested lands lands basically trying to fix him his wife he settled 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 and somebody who wasn't playing football uh and I started I was now back in country Sean and he he has a Sean as a chain of fast-food restaurants and that's how he made his money but he's also because he's a basketball legend that part of countries the announcer for the Memphis Grizzlies and he came out to to do a game with against the Golden State Warriors and he called and we went to dinner it was me and Shawn my wife and he started telling my wife the story about this kid now it had evolved a bit and he was now on the process of being adopted by them and he said that that he was going to turn him into a basketball player I even though he was shaped the way he was shaking so he was gonna make him in it because he was really good on a basketball court he thought that the wall he was never going to be a big you never make a living do and never be a big deal in college he thought he could get him into a school but kind of a division to 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 and 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 gonna be a first-round draft choice in the NFL at the left tackle position and so these two thousands two things you know there I thought I mean if that up to that moment it never really occurred to me that I would write a book about this kid but then I thought by god this I got 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 oil was more interesting than what happened the left tackle position left and what happened 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 changed the value or the perceived value of this of Michael or because he goes from being the least value 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 guy but very valuable position but he also requires this social transformation in that that he undergoes so that was that that was the sequence of events and the to me the foot by as I say the football stuff it was riveting as far as it went and 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 or he was a great person to talk to he was his Jesus he would he had a lot to say but but then but it really was an excuse to write a story about I was kind of a My Fair Lady story the effects of social class in America kind of thing one of the things that 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 do you seem to suggest in the blindside and also in your times magazine piece on Mike Leach the other Texas Tech coaches that it's almost the coach in the offensive system that mattered more than the players in the quarterback that's an interesting point I hope I've made it myself but the but it is 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 who aren't offended by the fact that you came from Google and that you never seen a baseball game and that or that kind of thing if people were not offended by the idea that you might be better than anybody who's actually doing a job you'd figure it out it's not that complicated if anyone in this room was putting the job of being an NFL head coach it would take 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 they it's it's uh it is not possible to be too stupid play football footballs a cup it is a much more complicated sport the thing that when I started to write about football and I still really did start to write about it in part because I had access because Moneyball got me into all these frontal offices and I started 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 the strategy had had such a power in baseball the smart guy was the guy who found the better way to value the players it was the the general managers role was the was the place where intellect and innovation had the most potential in football it was on field strategy that was really the kind of the critical point and and so Walsh was interesting to me but yes that I wrote a cover story for The Times Magazine about Mike Leach is 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 normal people are imitating their style but it's possible and he shows this to take inferior or less talented players and organize them all on a football field so that they can beat more talented players very hard to take less talented baseball players and and put them on a field so that they can beat more talented baseball players the equalizing factor in baseball is is a lot more luck in baseball so but the bad guys might actually end up the worst guys might not get lucky for a game or two but over a long haul very hard in football you can now think your opponent and I'll strategize your opponent so this was us all fees back into this book in a way because the fact that the left tackle its value it changed so much suggested minds at work thinking about how to use this person why this person was important and I suspected that through one example of the change of a change in value of a position or how our players use or our players thought of I get more general truths about football strategy well studying the NFL did you come across anything that led you to believe that there's going to be some sort of correction in the the market value of any given football players changes I think it changes with the strategy and in this case the great forces that we're driving the value of the left tackle position were Wolf's is so important because what's happened 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've got if you look at the numbers the if you if you think about football offense as two businesses a running game in a passing game the running game looks like a steel industry it's got every year teams run they actually run less and less every year and yet their returns on in terms of yards per carry has has stayed basically the same or going down slightly the the passing game every year has gotten more and more efficient it's like and they're that 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 get more and more and more valuable relatively running game so all those people who are most closely associated with a passing game have got more and more valuable most valuable persons a quarterback and then carries out the second most valuable person is the person who stops the quarterback from getting killed and and that's the the guy who's protecting the side he can't see I want to go back to to Moneyball for a bit one of the things I remember thinking when I finished reading that book when it came out was you know oh no the secret's out everyone's gonna go and imitate the A's and a lot of Jays have tried to they've hired people from the in front office they have hired no analytical consultants and yet no one's really been able to do it what do you think that failure can be attributed to well it is now are not any good either no this is what this is what's happened the markets got more efficient right after Moneyball came out not right after well right after my ball came out Billy Beane noticed that the market for on-base percentage the single most valuable trade and offensive player changed and he said this to me and I had no way to I mean it was just telling me what he kind of was perceiving but he didn't have any proof for me but a couple of a economist in the in the I think it's the the Journal of econometrics published a study about six months ago where they studied the what the value of the price of on-base percentage before Moneyball anafranil a ball it changed dramatically it was undervalued before 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 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 and they are using the higher analytics to value the players and make all the decisions they are either their model except they're doing it with money so if a player is appealing to them and to the A's they get it because they can pay a more or they can they can give up more for him and one of the little games that they play in the AFL office now is to imagine all the players who would have been on their team were not for this change that took place in baseball and I don't think Moneyball is actually completely responsible for this that's just part of something it was change I think have changed anyway but but that that's that's what's going on so yeah I don't think anybody could wrap yeas success from the past ten years going forward because it just isn't with with 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 being ascended to being general manager I'm thinking of Eric Chavez with a hot-ass Jason Giambi you know he he became general manager in 97 he remade the team pretty dramatically I think that that 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 running they bought the idea that that statistical analysis was a much better guy to value in baseball players than and strategies then scouts judgment that that kind of thing they instituted in their minor-league system a rule that you couldn't advance in the minor leagues unless you grew at least one walk for every 10 at-bats so they forced the players to be more selective in the way they approached hitting all that stuff but they had not actually imposed the methods on the big-league club house because they were I don't want to put that they were intimidated they didn't feel it was their place because there weren't they weren't former baseball players and they were 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 this 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 that the reason that that happened in Oakland was Billy Beane was bigger than everybody in the clubhouse and they were all afraid he was gonna beat him up if he didn't say they didn't do what he said they were going to do and and so that he sort of said you're going to be reasonable or I'm gonna kick the out of you and and that's what happened and they all met and they kind of okay and so and so it's a it's a he was a critical part of the success wasn't he was necessary but insufficient he need the intellectual help but but without it it wouldn't have it 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 being with the A's Lawrence Taylor and Jim Clark Jim Clark and the new native thing there's solvent brothers with the accretion of the market for mortgage bonds and also the the time that you devote in liars poker to Michael Milken and drunks all 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 this is all it is but there's no good answer it by feel if I mean I guess I think this is okay I think this is this is sort of what has happened it's happened several times that happened with the new new thing have won Moneyball and half of with a blindside in each case did NAB with liars poker wives poker I set out to write I wanted to write a book and it was gonna be about Wall Street and then when I start writing and up being more about me that was more interested in me than Walter but the with those 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 you and and it was exacting 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 is just how how big a subject is how big a story is how much can I make it swing on the page it requires a confluence of things characters I want to I want to try to make swing on the page ideas and I think of worthy of making swing on the page the material I mean this required you know it's but it's done more by field than anything else and and I'm very hesitant to get involvement books because they're such a pain in the ass and they really are pain and there's always a time when you're working on it where you think oh no either I'm gonna blow this or this is gonna blow me then this is not I shouldn't be doing it so you know that they're gonna be crises of faith when you're working like because it there and they're very hard work so I'm a little slow to make the leap but the magazine that doing little thing is the way you find out whether they're big things you got to gonna get into it for a bit before you I have a confirm a a cup I have a confession to make I really wanted to say this publicly if you probably the new new thing hasn't been read since the internet bubble when Boosh but but the end of 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 he moves to Florida when this venture capitalists in Silicon Valley do this crazy thing and give twenty five million dollars these guys who want to start I start a company called Google and it this is such a preposterous thing it was a sign that was all getting to tapash 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 hearing a few years ago that you were planning a follow-up to Moneyball I hang out the draft class that that you talk about in that book is that something that you still want to do someday or 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 gonna writing in peace this is not like I thought I was living in Berlin 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 I thought in terms of markets I thought this is a baseball market the baseball players is kind of efficient the rich teams should just win and this was they were so far out of kilter for 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 of The Times magazine about how this poor team wins my witness saw now this is well a stylish shoe but it's true no one had asked them the question no and none of the reporters had it 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 Beane was actually very interested to talk to me and and I thought oh my god that this is incredible that there's all this stuff here there's actually a body a body of knowledge that they are accessing that is their clamor came and most baseball fans are aware of it and I kind of nursed that long for a couple of months and then I sat in the room when they opposed impose their lot their way of doing their way of thinking about baseball on the scouts when they drafted the players in 2002 and I thought their drafting these kids who were 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 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 they is calling to tell him they're gonna make him a first-round draft choice he thinks it's a crank call and and so 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 I want to follow them for insta mono leagues and see to see what 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 a nice I said I got I've got the word on this magazine piece it's not a magazine piece it's a book it's gonna call money ball but it's and i'ma write this book but I really want I'm only gonna write it because I want to write the second book which is gonna be called underdog said I want to write this book about these kids and so money ball was just Nick 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 my ball in 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 their fates kind of unfold but it's still not clear what's gonna happen to a bunch of them so I'm a wait to pull the trigger and I'm I guess it's probably five years from now I'll publish it do I'll do other things until then I want to return briefly to the blindside 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 I one of the first things I did after I read it was going google and look him up can you give us an update on how he's doing I really like Google and now he's on the Dean's List at all this which is says a lot about the dean's list at Ole Miss but you know what in fairness to Michael you know there Brian had that funny in Atlantic they won't the former coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide once let he once said to a reporter we want to have a school that makes the football team proud sergeant the football team that 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 it seemed to exist mainly so that they can sustain a football team and they didn't take these kids many of whom are from the underclass poor black kids from ghettos or 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 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 NC don't they there are selling any that this is actually a school behind this football team is let me show you show you pictures in the school on TV itself as the flash of the players they'll even list what their majors are they shouldn't do this because it's too much of a clue but if they do when they do this and it's it's a criminal-justice of sociology or sometimes it makes you shudder journalism each school has its major for the football team they're all for this Virginia Tech they're all sociology majors in Florida State they're all criminal justice majors then they fall on the track and it's one program and all this it is indeed criminal justice and all football all the poor black football players are majoring in criminal justice and the the 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 rider he was going to block on a journalism career after you can finish 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 can 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 the mediocre football team so it's hard it's it's hard less you see the tapes to appreciate how he is but he is purged as 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 linemen it's very rare his main problem is he tends to get bored because the piece doesn't find anything opposing him that to keep his interest they played last week against um Missouri Ole Miss tip they got beat 38:25 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 wow that the game and that was in the people 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 and then one guy Kevin said he's never gonna want to play football again but they had the Missouri's a serious football school they had a two hundred and sixty pound defensive end across from Michael and the first play of the game was a bit like that Mumford seen he tried the speed rush around Michael and Michael's faster than anybody on the other side of the Moon he's now six foot six and a lead it is hard to believe a lean 325 pounds he doesn't fit through that doorway he's just huge but he took him and he just ruined like 15 yards and the kids lay on the bed and think this goes in body slam and the so he he's very very talented I mean he's so talented that when you when you describe him I've spent a lot of time in NFL locker rooms I'm working on something when the NFL write down and I start talking to the linemen they're defensive linemen or well I started white Freeney at the Indianapolis Colts and yeah yeah another college plan you know they don't know who-who anybody's in college do they see tell me about it say well he's 6 6 325 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 that you know 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 two big old boilers you know they're just fat guys and you watch their bodies and with their cloak without their clothes on it's not generally a pretty sight Michael's just physically superior to basically anybody in the NFL that's one little story that that I this one might be spliced from one of my favorite stories in the book that he's winning of 16 years old LeAnn Chui 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 they ends up sleeping in the house they bring in tutors to teach him how to read write and so on and so forth but in the beginning when the real problem is finding clothes for him cuz he's showing up he's walking around in the snow and shorts and a t-shirt and she takes him out to buy him clothes and she can't find clothes and Memphis that fitting and because of Sean 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 lime and just get some hand-me-downs from them because we can't find him here that fits to have some nice clothes and Patrick Ramsay calls her back in a couple of days he says you gave me the wrong measurements and they go through the measurements and they're all right and he says lien is no.1 on the Washington Redskins as big as he is he was still growing he was still growing and so you did and he is an athlete so it's just a very odd combination it's a little different for baseball because this is one way football zimmer 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 yes and you knew no telling what's gonna happen to that kid when you 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 gonna open it up to questions from the audience now microphones over here if you could wait for depend things like that that you know people like Joe Morgan and things say that you know they miss contribute to its ability Nino's so the question is whether if you had a choice between you or being Billy Beane which which would you choose there's really no way to answer that without Barisan myself but how could I want to be me kind of thing but uh but I'd much rather be me I get to describe Billy Beane and invent him yeah I mean I like what I do I and yeah I don't Billy Saul change the subject it is a very funny thing that when Moneyball came out an awful lot of people in Pro spaceball 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 they think oh this famous person had this person write his book it's that the great line of Charles Barkley's he was how he was gonna he was gonna he was pissed off because he'd been misquoted in his autobiography and he was pissed off because I mean this court in his autobiography so they just assume this is a kind of a stole two things the truth was that they as they're very bright they're very bright neon for the front office but they had no idea what I was up to they they thought there were all these other teams are gonna be in the book they didn't I didn't I did not tell them a word the first thing the time they knew what was what had happened was when they got the galleys which is it's too late to change anything that'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 to the to the puppet and and so when they when then the book hits and baseball is - saying Oh Billy being wrote this book and it's really just him you know Tooting his own horn I think it's it was flexing to me but in a way wonderful because baseball is 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 and so so it was sort of the perfect fit I didn't want to disabuse them of their you know 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 is this thing called an author and he wrote but I would I wouldn't mind if you if I couldn't be me Billy wouldn't be a bad thing to be but I like being me so Oh Michael thanks for coming I'm a big fat curious to see if 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 there's that 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 me it's more of them almost a manager a modern management book it's like it's a 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 it a lot like running say a university that they call the guys on the bench have tenure and and they're bigger than you and they might beat you up and how you manage that how a head coach the NBA who's usually a short little white guy you know coming manages that situation interests me and fruit oddly through Sean because when I go to Memphis sometimes to see him I go to the Grizzlies game and he was friends with their head coach and so I go spend a look and head coach had read some of my books and so I spent some time with it was Mike fratello at the time and I watched the dynamic between him and the players and I and it's completely screwed up it's good completely screwed up the that that it is they're 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 or me and so that that interested me but Moneyball opened up lots of sports kind of worlds to me and it wasn't that ball was really interesting basketballs been really interested in it and so I have had a couple of conversations with front office's in basketball in particular Houston Rockets have a new GM who's in the money ball mill mode called daryl 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 is 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 and this kind of mildly and he said that the first thing he did when he got to the Rockets he was he did a trade with the withing 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 and 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 Shea value didn't have score a lot of points a game he doesn't get a lot of rebounds a game doesn't steal they have a lot of steals don't have a lot of cysts kind of okay but they had grand out numbers to determine which players 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 they said it was he had an extraordinary effect on everybody else's abilities and so they that's why they went after him so this is the sort of same sort of things happening in basketball is is happening in baseball and then the less that in football but I haven't followed it that closely hi thanks again for coming I just want to get your thoughts on a you know with all the revenues of college football brings in is just huge business is there room or is it reasonable to think about paying players great good I'm writing I'm writing a piece right now proposing that player players be paid for the times but you know they wait it's so poor it's funny when you sit down to write that I haven't done it yet but I realized that it's kind of worrying to have the argument all over again because they're all people are having such entrenched views about it you know college is sacred these are amateur athletics of sacred and these people in fact it's horribly exploited tickets code what goes on these poor I mean just generalize there lots of exceptions poor black kids hauled into these schools to play football for them most of them will vast majority won't have any kind of career in football they are not really given an education they spend most of their time is essentially professional football players in the in unpaid employee of the school the school then from them generates huge revenues hard revenues informed TV in coming on and fans in the seats but lots off revenue for the Alumni dollars and nobody and then everybody and top it all off the NCAA wrecks 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 him a job in the summer so that they now there's never in the hope of assimilation because their rules against it so it's outrageous I think it's outrageous but once you get into the you know right here alright boring I mean I already have people in I in the head are saying yeah that's right half people say no that's wrong I'm not getting anywhere with it so what do you how do you how do you kind of get that across so what I'm doing I hope I'm getting some numbers out of the university Alabama about how much money their football program makes and then try to figure out what the players were with the payroll should be given the given the numbers and using the NFL's kind of a template what percentage of your revenues go to pay but it's a little different with college because you got my contributions but you gotta 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 the debt I mean at some point someone says I'm being robbed I mean when it was just fifty grand a year well you live with that but if it's all sudden you know ten years from now two million dollars a year and the coach is getting paid five million dollars either then someone people start making more noise about it I think so I'm gonna do a payroll analysis of them for one of the big football teams and just see if that helps matters but I do think I do think it's the way the system is structured now it's almost it's as bad as it could be for 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 of the poor black young male in the gathered ghettoization and he does - 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 it the social interaction from happening and the financial interaction from happening and I think it should happen I think it'd be much better if it happened but anyway sorry he hit a nerve there hi 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 Beane's of the world that the players are in on the secret I said that's you know any question and and thinking about it also in the context here of you know to what extent are the people who are strategizing and figuring out these inefficiencies where is it 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 coach and assume that there's a smarter power at work well I think for us with Billy Beane would say don't confuse them and and it just you 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 knows all again I got to be able to know all the players in the clubhouse and have whatever relationship I wanted to short of sleeping with them but was that no one had told them anything they had no idea no idea that the front office had had quixotic views about how to value baseball players or quixotic ideas about strategy they had no they just thought things were a little strange around here but they didn't know quite why not were the kind of thing it was cut around here but since baseball players don't really talk very much about anything they didn't really talk about it but is 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 bully who was like in critic really they noticed that that's incredible you know and so they something 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 him so there was a kind of a bridge hand going on I was roughing the 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 I don't know the they were certainly when you got them one on one the baseball players intensely curious as a group it was professional baseball players they're too cool for school kind of thing but individually really did bias and so it's um I my own view is it especially with things like plate discipline not swinging at bad pitches you wanta curious things about baseball finances is you can't actually incentivize a baseball player to draw walks you can't pay him in his conch for the walks you it's um it's rules and so and technically there's a scene in them in the book in Moneyball where Billy Beane is running down the pat in the hallway after a player saying hit him 20 bucks every time he did you know went the other way every time he and which he gets the rules 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 gonna be paid ultimately for that and I you know Jack cussed you follow Jack cussed Jack cussed strange connection our best friends in Berkeley are his godparents and grew up with him and when Moneyball came out Claire Gamla said to me this sounds like Jackie hits lots of home runs he's kind of fat he walks he walks on time he says and he's you know languishing in the minor-league system somewhere and and Kostas 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 so and they got him once and then they 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 you know if you walk we will tell you and and people would walk but I'm a they didn't think that way for whatever reason Michael thank you so much

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 26,132

Rating: 4.8865247 out of 5

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, Moneyball, Michael Lewis, The Blind Side, football structure, baseball finances, author talks

Id: 7F-_HHriWSQ

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 17 2007