Moneyball

[The Monster is my Mom]

So I read Moneyball for the first time just a couple months ago, and was wondering if people agree with that thought process or not.

 

Things I liked:

 

• Taking college players in the draft, not high schoolers
  
• Not overpaying (though the A's seem to have not followed this this offseason with Loazia
  
• Using a large set of statistical data (from college/minor ranks, which is a better indication than high school numbers) to figure out who would be a good player
  
• Looking for guys that get on base alot (lots of walks)
  

 

Things I didn't like:

 

• Taking fat, unathletic guys just because they have good numbers
  
• Not caring about defense. Yes it is tough to measure accurately, but neglecting it completely seems dumb
  
• Never doing hits and runs or stealing
  

 

I know Theo subscribes to some of these theories, but he breaks them some because the Sox have a big budget, unlike the A's.

[example1]

I think that book--and the philosophy behind it--is pretty revolutionary. That's not to say its the first time it has been used, but it is the first time that it has been specifically crafted to address the atmosphere of today's game financially and developmentally.

 

A number of parts of the book are genius, particularly the description of Beane's utilization and discovery of Bill James and sabermetrics.

 

The fact is that sabermetrics are a better way of looking at baseball than the traditional statistics. Hands down. That is not to say that scouting players is obsolete, it still has its place. That place has yet to be well defined, but it is there. The description of the undervaluation of OBP and SLG was great and describes perfectly what some teams are doing and what other teams are not (but they will be soon enough).

 

The red sox have some tremendous players, guys who are talented beyond anything that they could have found or acquired in a Moneyball way. Manny is the perfect example, Pedro was another. Having and affording guys like that is something worth paying for.

 

From my perspective (and the Sox may not believe this) it is sometimes worth it to overpay for a player, if that player fits exactly what you're looking for. You can pay with money or you can pay with talent. It is, therefore, very important to be both rich and to have a great farm system. Ironically, it is easier to be rich if you have a great farm system too; the Sox aren't there quite yet but I think that is Theo's vision (and I'm sure John Henry's as well).

 

Things I didn't like:

Not much. I think that defense is undervalued, but not because people don't think it is important but because it is VERY difficult to quantify. I believe that at some point in the next 10 years a statistic or measure will be found that effectively describes defensive value, perhaps in terms or runs produced or wins produced, or perhaps in a completely different way than has been done before.

 

I understand the philosophy of "never doing hit and runs or stealing" overall. They are just generally low percentage moves over the course of a season. You got Rickey Henderson? Carl Crawford? Okay. But nobody should regret that the Sox haven't been sending Ortiz and Manny and Trot more often. It just wouldn't work.

 

Finally, I think the main thing in moneyball philosophy that I grabbed on to was the nuance involved in building a team. There is one team that is able to spend as much money as they want and that is the Yankees. For everyone else, including the Red Sox, there is going to be a limit. With unlimited funds a team can purchase guys who are strong in many, many categories. Manny is one of those guys. So is Jeter, or A-Rod, or Sheffield.

We all know who those guys are: they are guys that NO team would say no to having, all things being equal.

 

I think the Red Sox ownership has a long term plan, and has had a long term plan since buying the team. I think it is why Theo was brought in, and why Lucchino is still there. Here it is: Henry bought the team when it was a money spending Bohemoth. Enormous contracts, enormous attempts to sign aging "name" guys who used to be good. Henry's goal was and is undoubtedly to build the most successful team possible with a "reasonable" amount of money. Reasonable for Henry is probably between 100-120 million dollars. If it can be done for less then great, Theo gets a bonus. Most people just don't buy teams for hundreds of millions of dollars and then spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, year in and year out to make them a servicable product; especially not John Henry; especially not when they just won; especially not when 80% of teams that are within games of the World Series manage to do so with less than 50% of the payroll. There IS a better way, and I think Moneyball describes (partly) a specific application of that way.

 

Sorry for the long post.

[The Monster is my Mom]

Excellent post. You were able to describe it much better than me. I agree that we shouldn't be trying to steal with the guys that we have, but in Moneyball the A's have Ray Durham (who had a bunch of steals with I believe the White Sox the previous year), but he had very few steals with the A's. So many games are won/lost by a couple of runs, that if you have a guy to steal, then you should let him. Where would we be without Dave Roberts?

 

Red Sox ownership is doing a great job, and Theo is the executor of that vision. I wonder if they would have signed Manny had they been in power, instead of Duquette and the previous regime.

[example1]

They would have offered Ramirez what they believed he was worth and would likely have projected him very well, perhaps projecting him to have more consistency than other teams. just a guess.

 

They didn't say steals aren't valuable. They said that overall they are only valuable if a certain percentage of them are successful. A successful stolen base is quite valuable. A caught stealing essentially reduces your OBP, gives up an out, and lowers the percent chance that a team will score in the inning. It's a cost-benefit analysis and as far as the stats tell it has to be successful something like 80% of the time for a team to get more runs than by not stealing at all or very rarely. Again, its all a probability thing. So the main things about steals are 1) it is not worth over paying for a guy who gets only 65% of his stolen bases, even if other teams love the idea and are offering him 12 million a season. If you're going to pay that much money it had better come with a player who has plenty of what is most important: OBP and SLG if he is fast and can get some stolen bases, then its a bonus.

 

So that gets into another thing about Moneyball: it is more valuable in the regular season than in the playoffs. The playoffs are such a small sample size that the numbers don't have the chance to regress to the mean. In the playoffs when it is absolutely essential to score THIS INNING, to win THIS GAME, then you have to send Roberts. Of course it was an easy call, as he had swiped something like 40 of 44 bases that year, some great number like that.

[Manny Goes Boom]

A must read then huh?

[The Monster is my Mom]

A must read then huh?

 

I think Moneyball is a must read for any baseball fan. It really does give you a new perspective on the game.

[Manny Goes Boom]

I think Moneyball is a must read for any baseball fan. It really does give you a new perspective on the game.

 

Cool. Maybe I'll understand some of the stuff people throw up on here. Like some of it theyve explained but some of it I'm like "huh?"

[elsrbueno]

Example1 said it perfectly.

 

Manny goes boom: Read it.

 

I think any baseball fan can get SOMEthing from the book. I too read it a bit late (after hearing a TON about it) and I couldn't put it down. The book absolutely fascinated me.

 

Why? Because it not only showed some nuances of running a major league baseball team, and described the power stuggle between "old and new" theories of evaluating talent, but it was just plain entertaining.

 

A great read (IMO) and worth sitting down and reading for any baseball fan. It's a pretty good introduction to the world re-evaluating the statistics we use and even creating new statistics that better measure what a player brings to the field.

[Cityofchampions33]

I really enjoyed the part about how they drafted and chose players. How even though no team would take him, they saw tremendous talent in "The Thing" who killed in the AFL, etc. And how it went over about how make-up was so important and all.