Revisiting “Moneyball” with Paul DePodesta
In 2002, when the Oakland A’s replaced their MVP first baseman Jason Giambi with 32-year-old Scott Hatteberg, a washed-up catcher with a bum arm, longtime baseball scouts figured the unpredictable A’s had finally gone completely around the bend. As journalist Michael Lewis recounted in his book, Moneyball, even “Hatteberg hadn’t the slightest idea why the Oakland A’s were so interested in him.”
As everybody who read Lewis’ celebrated 2003 book knows, the A’s signed Hatteberg with the encouragement of the team’s bright young assistant general manager, Paul DePodesta. Schooled in economics at Harvard, DePodesta was developing a new way to interpret player statistics, finding value where nobody else was looking. With players like Hatteberg, the A’s, led by general manager Billy Beane, took an operating budget that was a fraction of that of the Yankees or Red Sox, and assembled teams that didn’t cost a fortune but won games like baseball royalty.
As we were planning this chapter of Nautilus, about new ways to interpret unlikely events and situations, we knew we had to talk to DePodesta, who was with the A’s from 1999 to 2003. (Also, we are baseball fans.) He gladly agreed to an interview.
Today DePodesta, 40, is vice president of scouting and player development for the New York Mets. He joined the Mets in 2010. Since the publication of Moneyball, his star has dimmed, notably after he was fired after two years as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, where some of his trades were razzed like a bad movie. Moneyball, the Hollywood version, where he was portrayed by Jonah Hill, put him back in the spotlight. However, DePodesta didn’t want his name used in the movie. Although he liked the book and screenplay, he felt both amounted to a caricature of him. “I just didn’t feel comfortable that however I was going to be portrayed in the movie was going to be how 99.9 percent of the public imagined me to be, and would assume that whatever was in the movie was absolutely true, which it wasn’t,” he said. “The other problem was I wasn’t all that interested in the attention. It had already happened from the book. And I didn’t necessarily need to relive it.”
DePodesta was energetic and engaging in his interview with Nautilus. He talked
