On her second read through of Moneyball, Batgirl tried to focus on the separation between Michael Lewis and Billy Beane. Now, Batgirl found the book an absolutely fascinating read, a page-turner. There's nothing like sitting in that office on draft day. Lewis is a fluid, intelligent, and witty writer, and he did a fine job delineating the history of the sabermetric school of thought, and of explicating some rather obscure concepts in an accessible and entertaining way. No easy trick.

That said, Batgirl feels the book and the approach are harmed by an almost over-the-top enthusiasm Lewis has for "Moneyball" and for Beane. Stats are in for Beane, scouts are out—scouts in fact are portrayed as a group of pea-brained chaw-snarfing has-beens, and G.M.s, well, they're former scouts. Need I say more?

Lewis seems to fall victim to the very thing he accuses the scouts of: "There was," he says, "the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn't." Well, Michael Lewis seems to generalize from Billy Beane's experience: It was scouts that fell in love with Beane's potential and scouts that needed to be replaced by Paul DePodesta's computer.

If any organization shows the benefits of good scouting, it's the Minnesota Twins. Our G.M. is a former scout, and our scouts are the people who have plucked Johan Santana, Lew Ford, Jason Bartlett, and Dave Gassner from the dregs of other people's minor league systems, who perhaps saw them one day and found something to dream on.

In the afterword, Lewis writes of Toronto, "Ricciardi, the new GM had done what every enlightened GM will eventually do; fire a lot of scouts, hire someone comfortable with statistical analysis…" But isn't it possible, just possible, to be an "enlightened" GM and keep your scouts?

Lewis's afterword to Moneyball is a sort of sabermetric De Profundis, with perhaps only slightly more drama. Baseball is a social club, where "there really is no level of incompetence that won't be tolerated." There is no doubt that the chattering and nattering in response to the book by those who hadn't read it is absurd and just stooped as heck, but just as one writer accuses Lewis of a "total infatuation with Billy Beane" (by which he means nonsexual man-crush) Beane calls him and the rest of the press corps the "Women's Auxiliary." Surely there are ways to have this discussion on both sides without sissy-baiting?

What do you think? How does Moneyball work as a book? How well does it make its argument?

Tomorrow: "Moneyball" the process.