One the most unlikely trios ever assembled — Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich and Sen. John Kerry, and no, this is not a lead-in to a Manny Ortez joke — published this morning an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the need for evidence-based health care.
The argument: certain baseball teams have parted ways with the game’s hidebound reliance on outmoded stats and profligate spending, so why can’t our overspending, underperforming health care system do the same? In other words, we want more preventive medicine, less Barry Zito.
I’m not sure what Billy Beane’s co-byline means here. Is he simply lending the gloss of his name and the baseball angle because it’s World Series time and it’ll get people’s attention? Is he seriously looking to put his mind and philosophy to work in health care? That would be fascinating, perhaps the biggest baseball-related story of the decade. No mention of this yet on Athletics Nation or the Chron’s A’s blog.
Whatever Beane’s role in this op-ed, it’s the second example I’ve seen recently of sabermetrically-inspired thinkers spilling into new areas. My current favorite political blog, fivethirtyeight.com, is run by Baseball Prospectus’s Nate Silver, the father of PECOTA. (Pecota Silver? Wasn’t she in my 10th grade English class?)
Cut to Joe Morgan opening the paper at the breakfast table: “I don’t care what some computer tells me, I’m not taking the PSA test. I feel my prostate every day, and it knows how to win!”
