Colby Cosh talks to three Expos minor leaguers, and finds that Moneyball is a favorite book of theirs.

I had meant to ask them if they'd heard of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, the hot book about the sabermetric revolution, after I completed the businessy part of the interview. I didn't even have to wait that long. I was asking them to name their favourite books, as part of a list of questions my editor provided for some back-page filler, and Sledge immediately chose Moneyball. I was blown away. If there was a natural Moneyball guy at the table, I would have expected it to be Pascucci, with his .434 on-base percentage. Sledge is a classic "tools" guy, a traditional scout's darling, or at least that's the rep he came to the organization with. But when we started talking about Moneyball he showed he'd absorbed at least part of the rationalist message, even mentioning OPS and Bill James. Man, that's how you know times have changed--you interview a ballplayer and he mentions Bill James to you.

There's a famous book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. In it (if I remember correctly), he argues that paradigm shifts in thinking don't come all of a sudden, but happen as an idea introduced by a young person gains acceptance as the old guard dies out. You're seeing that in baseball now. Twenty years ago, Bill was the young upstart. A few people in the business, like Sandy Alderson, got it. More importantly, young people got it, and as my generation comes to take charge of the game, those ideas are starting to push out the old guard. In another 20 years, the old guard will be retired or dead, and we'll all think how silly it was to judge players on batting average, RBI and wins.