Did MLB's Free Agents Get Screwed, Or Are Owners Finally Wishing Up?

Why was there so much less free-agent activity this year? Moneyball. 

- Will Leitch

Kenny Williams had a fruitful six-year Major League Baseball playing career as a journeyman before, at the age of 27, starting as a scout for the Chicago White Sox, the team that had drafted him in 1982. Over the next 25 years, he worked his way up to general manager and constructed a team, the 2005 White Sox, that won the World Series—ending one of the longest curses in baseball, almost as long as the one the Cubs would break in 2016.

But to a large number of baseball fans and connoisseurs of literary nonfiction best sellers, not to mention (and this is key) hundreds of people who currently work in baseball front offices, Williams isn’t any of those things. In their eyes, Kenny Williams is a chump. Specifically, the chump whom writer Michael Lewis, in his still massively influential 2003 book, Moneyball, portrayed as a useful idiot being duped by Oakland A’s Master Strategist Billy Beane into making what Lewis called a “fucking A” trade. (The trade was complicated, but Lewis basically paints second baseman Ray Durham as one of the most vital assets in the game, and Williams as the idiot who didn’t appreciate him.) The movie’s irresistible narrative of underdog disruption of a flabby, lazy system cast Beane as the insurgent and Williams as the Establishment, the new guard taking advantage of the clueless old one. Never mind that, 15 years out, it sort of looks like Williams won the trades Lewis wrote about. The message was clear: Moneyball was the vanguard, the future.

That future is here, though. For two decades, there have been old-school baseball guys to serve as foils for the math nerds and Harvard Business kids bum-rushing the sport. But all general managers are smart now, and they’re all smart in the same way. The nerds have taken over. Which means there are no more marks for them to exploit.