Michael Lewis wasn’t the first writer to gain extensive access to the general manager of a Major League Baseball team, but he’s proved to be the most influential. Moneyball, his book about Oakland A’s exec Billy Beane, was published 12 years ago, and ever since, reporters looking to replicate its success have been cozying up to posterity-minded professional sports GMs, chronicling their purported genius in a series of fitfully insightful and often fawning books. The most recent title in this field is by a longtime baseball writer named Steve Kettmann, and it’s a conspicuous example of the genre’s many perils. Simultaneously convinced of his subject’s eminence and desperate to be ahead of the curve, Kettmann has manufactured a storyline that simply doesn’t exist, at least not yet.
