I don't know how I missed this, but Robert Birnbaum recently did a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with Michael Lewis.
Some excerpts from Lewis:

This guy Billy Beane is a born Wall Street trader. I have seen this. I worked at Salomon Brothers; I worked on Wall Street. If Billy Beane has been at Salomon Brothers he would be a managing partner. He is excellent at walking into a jungle, seeing the opportunities and seeing the threats, and adapting accordingly. He has wonderful antennae. He knows what you want and he is going to give it to you.
...I've had two interesting institutional responses outside of baseball. One is from the NFL. I gave speech in New York a week before last and someone from the Commissioner's office came and he said this thing is spreading in the NFL. Bill Parcells is giving it out to the Dallas Cowboy's organization. Some guy I never heard of who is the GM of the New York Giants is handing it out to his scouts. I thought, "That's extraordinary." Because the NFL is actually well run. The guy was saying, "The descriptions that you have in the book of the discussions between the scouts and the GM, that was something that died in the NFL thirty years ago. We have become more rigorous the way we think about amateur players and baseball is way behind. The spirit of enterprise is clearly alive in the NFL. People are still looking for a way to get an edge.” The other interesting institutional response has been from Wall Street. The lead investment strategist for Credit Suisse/First Boston, the investment bank, devoted his whole research report a week or two ago to this book. The gist of it was if you want to know how to manage money the Oakland A's are a good example—if you want to look at allocation of resources and how you think about it.
UPDATE: Here is a radio interview with Michael Lewis from NPR. (Hat tip to Mindles H. Dreck.)
MORE UPDATES: The New Yorker has finally put its profile of Bill James online. It describes, among other things, the desire of Theo Epstein and John Henry
to assemble a front office staffed by people who “get it” (shorthand, essentially, for those who can remember the moment they first read a Baseball Abstract).

The literature about Bill James often describes how the narrator or subject describes how he opened the book and was forever transformed - just like a medieval conversion narrative.
Finally (I think), sometime sabermetric ally Thomas Boswell has a decent summary of Moneyball. More to come.

Yes, another Moneyball post.
Rob Neyer's most recent column focuses on Larry Dierker's new book. The book, and Neyer's interview with Dierker, contain some fascinating - and distressing - revelations:

In his book, Dierker writes about the usefulness of OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), and he even includes a matrix listing the various run-scoring probabilities, depending on the number of baserunners and outs.
Where did Dierker come by this information?
"When I was broadcasting," Dierker remembers, "there was a guy named Steve Mann who came down here to work in our baseball operations department, and he was deeply involved in what the club was doing. I made friends with Steve, and we spent many a night having a beer and talking about the game -- about which strategies were antiquated, and which ones were still applicable. I also read a lot of the Bill James stuff, and so I learned what people who didn't have a personal investment in the game had to say about it."
This is, for most baseball players, revolutionary stuff. And Dierker knew it.
"When I became the manager, I kind of knew what were the smart things to do. But I also knew that if I did all of them, it would be at the expense of my credibility with the players. With that in mind, I just had to use my instincts to both win the game and keep the whole team in the spirit of pulling together. I didn't want to come off as an egghead guy who was just looking at numbers and ignoring people, and sometimes those considerations ran into each other."
"For example, Brad Ausmus felt like we should walk the eighth hitter most of the time, with the pitcher coming up next. As an ex-pitcher, I'd rather have the pitcher leading off the next inning. So Brad and I had different opinions a lot of the time. The eighth hitter would come up, he'd look into the dugout for the sign, I wouldn't do anything, and I could see that he wasn't real happy about it. I remember once, we retired the eighth hitter 10 or 15 times in a row. And then Kelly Stinnett reached out and slapped an outside pitch for an RBI single, and Ausmus was really mad."
That sort of thing has to wear on a manager -- especially on a team that's run by veterans like Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio -- and so it did. Fans often think that a manager shouldn't care what the players think, but managing's just not that simple.
"Whenever I was in a flip-a-coin sort of situation," Dierker says, "I'd usually make the move that I thought the players wanted me to make, because it really doesn't make that much difference, one way or the other. And you have to consider what the players are going to think."

These factors help explain why, as part of Billy Beane's quest to impose reason on his organization, the Athletcs' front office felt that it had to concentrate as much power as possible in the general manager's office, including over matters of game management that had traditionally been within the manager's purview. According to Beane's predecessor, Sandy Alderson (quoted on p.61 of Moneyball), the hapless Art Howe was hired specifically because he would be a figurehead.
But it stands to reason that Beane wouldn't mind having a manager like Dierker, who would commit to the sabermetric program out of intellectual conviction rather than career preservation. So who would be the best candidate?
As readers of Moneyball know:

Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball. He used many unreasonable means - anger, passion, even physical intimidation - to do it.

Not to mention liberal uses of each variation of the word "f$%#."
The perfect managerial match for Billy Beane would share his intellect and volatility. He would not be afraid to cause controversy in his commitment to doing what he felt was the right move (in baseball terms: to tell his detractors and the media to go f$#% themselves). And a connection to the Mets wouldn't hurt.
Bobby Valentine, would you like to move to Oakland?
Think of it like Chazz Palmienteri berating Kevin Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects: A man who could run Todd Hundley (and other unproductive veterans) out of town! A man who can use the word "sabermetrics" on national television! A man who can tell the New York media that batting order really doesn't matter!
At the very least, the sequel to Moneyball would virtually write itself.
Seriously, I think that Valentine's intellect and fearlessness would be an ideal combination for an organization committed to analytical principles. And I think that Billy Beane would respect the viewpoints of someone like Valentine even in disagreements, which would not be the case for an establishment cipher like Art Howe.
It could happen. Right?

I've been very remiss in not pointing out the many excellent pieces on Moneyball published over the last couple of months. For a good reference, go to Mariners Musings and scroll down to the appropriate right-hand list of links. The lucky Mariners fan has also transcribed interviews with Michael Lewis and Billy Beane conducted by Will Carroll on Baseball Prospectus Radio.
Also check out this interview with Michael Lewis on Baseball Primer, which contains some nuggets I hadn't seen elsewhere. Slate had a fabulous discussion between Rob Neyer and James Suroweicki about the book; the three parts are here, here and here. They also featured a great interview of Bill James by Suroweicki. Finally, check out this article by Matt Welch.
UPDATE: I forgot a few things - most notably, this recent review in the Weekly Standard:

[Lewis'] most recent book, "Moneyball," is the best business book Lewis has written. It may be the best business book anyone has written.
(Emphasis in original.)

And I had meant to discuss this excerpt from the book about fact-checkers, but Matt Welch beat me to it. Daniel Okrent, a writer for Sports Illustrated, had read the first Bill James Baseball Abstract:

“I was absolutely dumbstruck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that a) this guy existed and b) that he hadn’t been discovered.”
Okrent flew to Lawrence [Kansas] to make sure James indeed existed, then wrote a piece about him for Sports Illustrated. It was killed: James’ arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after the Sports Illustrated fact-checker spiked the piece. “She went through it line by line,” recalled Okrent, “saying ‘everyone knows this isn’t true. Everyone knows that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowd when he pitched, that Gene Tenace was a bad hitter, that…’” Conventional opinions about baseball players and baseball strategies had acquired the authority of fact, and the Sports Illustrated fact-checking department was not going to let evidence to the contrary see print. The following year an editor who had been unable to shake Okrent’s piece from his mind, asked Okrent to retry again. He did, and the piece was published, and Bill James was introduced to a wider audience. The year after that, 1982, a New York publisher, Ballantine Books, brought out the Baseball Abstract, and made it a national best-seller.
This story has additional resonance in light of the Jayson Blair scandals.

Thanks in part to the Pedro-induced hand injuries to Soriano and Jeter, the first two hitters in the Yankees' lineup tonight are Enrique Wilson and Todd Zeile, neither of whom has any business being in the first nine batters to come to the plate in a baseball game. I know the importance of the batting order is very overrated, but this is a bit much.

People … operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence –as if it’s inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.

- E-mail from Red Sox owner John Henry, quoted in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (pp. 90-91)

Growing up Orthodox in America almost invariably involves living in a cocoon. Absorbing the knowledge and folkways of an Orthodox-based lifestyle requires constant immersion and reinforcement, which results in a degree of separation from the rest of the world. To take the most obvious example, most self-professed Orthodox Jews would not dream of sending their children to anything other than 12+ years of Orthodox day school. And the necessity of living in the vicinity of such a school, along with synagogues, kosher food supplies, etc. creates an environment where kids grow up primarily (though rarely solely) associating with other Orthodox Jews.
For all but the most fanatically oriented segment of Jewry, the cocoon must be left at some point; few people can or wish to earn a living wholly within the cocoon. When is the “right” time to do so? For many Orthodox Jews graduating high school and considering where to attend college, this question is paramount. And there typically is no shortage of people volunteering for the conservative role of conscience, whispering messages of fear and caution.
21st century America, where a self-professed Orthodox Jew can come within a few hanging chads of the Vice-Presidency, has in many respects never been an easier place to be Orthodox. Yet as the larger society has grown more accepting of difference, Orthodoxy-style, the sense of fear over the prospects of preserving an Orthodox way of life (on both the individual and communal levels) has only grown for many people.
(Of course, the two factors are linked, and the link deserves its own discussion. And that discussion - for which the term “magisterial” should have been invented - has already been written by Dr. Haym Soloveitchik. Go and study. End of digression.)
With regard to the question of college and cocoons, some segments of American Orthodoxy have been discussing a pamphlet that has been widely circulated via the Internet. It is a well-written, well-reasoned journal of fear. It comes down squarely on the side of maintaining the cocoon through college. The piece is a worthy contribution to the discussion, though not nearly as important as its authors believe.
As an aside, the authors are imprecise in their initial definitions. While the pamphlet refers to “secular college,” the authors clearly don’t mean that term literally, as they approve of commuting to colleges other than parochial ones and living at home; the piece isn’t solely a brief for Yeshiva University. Thinking of the question as “cocoon v. non-cocoon” rather than “secular v. parochial college” makes the pamphlet more comprehensible, and the authors clearly assume that their readers will understand the distinction. But I thought I’d explain it for my readers who aren’t already familiar with the discussion.
I’m not going to further discuss the larger theological issues raised by the pamphlet or how certain details glossed lightly (at best) in the pamphlet can make all the difference in the Orthodox student’s college experience, nor will I base a critique on my own anecdotal experiences, for reasons that will be clear by the end of this post. (Full disclosure: I graduated Columbia College in 1995, and as for how it affected my religiosity, literally only God knows - though I’m sure that hasn’t stopped people’s speculations, to which they are welcome.) Rather, I’m going to focus on a few specific aspects of the authors’ arguments.
Despite an explicit disavowal of scientific rigor, the pamphlet’s authors clearly make several empirical assumptions. First, they assume that the experience they describe is paradigmatic and reflects the experience of at least a substantial number of Orthodox students on such campuses. Second, they assume that the intellectual and social temptations they describe accurately describes the causation of the deteriorating observance of such students. Third, they assume that those temptations are either unique in fact or effect.
The third assumption is most notably reflected when the authors argue that “The challenges facing Orthodox students in secular universities are wide–ranging, complex, and far more ominous than anything they might later encounter in the professional or business world.”
I will refrain from making a cheap comment about how that assessment of the professional or business world was made by two Ph.D students who (by their count) have spent a total of 22 semesters on campus. It is actually a very serious point, which contributes to the other two assumptions as well.
The authors know the stories of the students who succumb in the fashion they describe. It is very likely that the following students’ experiences don’t make the same impact:
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy and observance was tenuous at best before college attendance, and who violates most of the 613 mitzvot before the end of freshman orientation;
- the student who attends YU or commuter college and rebels or otherwise becomes disillusioned, which may be held in abeyance during college but not for long afterwards;
- the student who samples the forbidden fruits during college but returns to a full-fledged identification with Orthodoxy afterwards (whether for social or other reasons), and most importantly;
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy does not suffer in college (regardless of the choice) but does suffer attrition afterwards, due to the pressures of the “professional or business world.”
It is natural for those whose lives are spent in the context of campus to focus on college as the most formative experience of a student’s life. It is the focus of their own experiences, and it makes up the sample of their observed students’ experiences. (It also makes sense that high school teachers would have an exaggerated sense of the impact of college; they may be acutely aware of what happens to their alumni immediately after graduation, but how often is that leavened by a longer-term context? And it is also natural for high school teachers to attribute a sharp, sudden deterioration in a student’s observance to the outside temptations of college, rather than a pre-existing weakness of commitment.) And it is natural to over-generalize from one’s own experience. (If “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God,” as set forth in Proverbs 9:10, the second part of wisdom is not giving excessive credence to what you see.) The result is that the authors’ perspective is very limited; the lack of context creates an exaggerated assessment of the relative risks. Even if the authors’ description of the risks to Orthodox students is 100% valid, the relevant question is “Compared to what?” This is a purely subjective statement, but I think many Orthodox-raised people in the “professional or business world” (including ones who left the cocoon for college) would disagree that the risks in that world are easier to handle than the ones on the college campus.
And despite the disavowal of scientific rigor noted above, the authors clearly assume that the experience they describe is widespread. Yet without further context, it is impossible to know if that assumption is correct – all we have are dueling anecdotal, subjective experiences, formed in a limited context and prone to distortion.
A good study will be far more valuable to the discussion than a thousand screeds. It shouldn’t be impossible to do. Without that kind of evidence, though, discussions such as the pamphlet are of limited utility at best.