ESPN MLB

Last night (as you might recall), I linked to Steve Kettmann's piece about the aborted "Moneyball" movie, and excerpted (among other things) these passages:

"Moneyball" famously made Howe out to be both a rube and a clown, a kind of latter-day Dudley Do-Right with a jutting jaw and a "philosophical expression" permanently plastered on his face. It's actually funny to go back and reread some of these sections now, armed with the following crucial piece of information: Lewis talked often with Beane and calls the book the fruit of a "year-long open-ended conversation" with Beane and two deputies, but Lewis never once talked to Howe. He was perfectly happy to take Beane's version of a given conversation and run with it, to the point of ludicrousness.

--snip--

"Michael Lewis never interviewed me one time," Howe told me recently, reached by phone at home in Texas. "He had a slant. That was the unfairness of the book. That was my disappointment. Soderbergh wanted to tell the truth. He just wanted to have a true baseball story. I thought this might give me a chance to have my side of the story out there."

I suppose I'm a bit too gullible, and took Howe's quote at face value. I probably shouldn't have. This morning I received an e-mail message from Michael Lewis that simply said, "I interviewed him, at length!"

Naturally and somewhat blushingly, I asked Lewis -- who, I should mention, has served me pancakes in his kitchen -- if he might expound a bit, as I'd like to set the record straight.

He did:

It's no big deal, and I'm sure Howe told him that. The funny thing is Kettman didn't think to call me to ask if it was true. In other words, he did what Art Howe -- and he -- is accusing me of. Accusations of journalistic bias are the last refuge of the scoundrel. When I interviewed Howe I was genuinely trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and what role he actually played. He helped to convince me, with his total absence of anything interesting to say, that he was, from the point of view of the A's front office, a trivial part of their success.

You can believe who you want. I'm going to believe the guy who feeds me pancakes.