Just picked up a copy of Michael Lewis's acclaimed new book "Moneyball," a profile of how the Oakland A's -- under GM Billy Beane's guidance -- have earned their success on a low payroll by following the "sabermetric" model of player evaluation...

ie, Batting average doesn't tell you much, working counts and drawing walks are gold, high strikeout-to-walk ratios are more important than raw velocity for pitchers, and the KEY is exchanging overvalued players (like closers!) for undervalued ones.

This Thomas Boswell column will give you a crash course.

[For clarity, Billy Beane and Billy Bean are two different people.]

I've been meaning to read Moneyball since I read an excerpt of it in a magazine a few weeks back. (plus I've always like Lewis's writing).

This from a recent review:
"Beane's strength is that he is skeptical of truisms that pass for wisdom in the establishment -- including players, coaches, managers, scouts and front-office personnel. To him, received baseball doctrine (managing "by the book") amounts to little more than a cobweb of prejudices crying out for objective empirical and statistical validation.

To explain Beane's success, Lewis, hijacks the concept of efficient markets from the world of finance. An efficient financial market is one in which the prices of securities accurately incorporate all available information. In Lewis's (and Beane's) view, the market for ballplayers is inefficient, largely because evaluation of talent is often distorted by baseball bromides.

There are few baseball maxims that escape Beane's magnifying glass. Can left-handed batters really hit right-handed pitchers better than lefties? How useful are bases on balls in winning ball games? What about stolen bases? Is batting average as good a measure as on-base percentage in evaluating hitting ability? Are high school athletes or college players more likely to make the grade? How to value a hard-hitting outfielder who circles under fly balls guessing where they might come down? Beane has unorthodox opinions on all of these topics, and a sackful more to boot."

The review (reg req) also discusses Andrew Zimbalist's "May the Best Team Win" which advocates a free market solution for baseball's woes -- including eliminating my Brew Crew (bastard) at the expense of, say, another NYC team. The Mets deserve to be swept by Milw. this week just for that!!

[ June 04, 2003, 09:37 AM: Message edited by: DCBucky ]

Slate features this 3-installment dialogue on \"Moneyball\" and the A's personnel strategy between Rob Neyer of espn.com and James Surowiecki (financial columnist for The New Yorker).

Hate to quote myself, but SWEEP!!! (OK it was only a doubleheader, but at Shea no less!) Contract the Mets!

That's a really thin straw you're grasping at (or undercooked bratwurst) ... Zimbalist's book sounds dopey -- "Free market" solution reads like Capitalist Pig talk for breaking fans' hearts as the cost of bad management. Contraction Never! (As has oft been said, in 1990 Atlanta and Seattle might've been contracted.)

[ June 06, 2003, 08:24 AM: Message edited by: Bill W ]

Bill -- you trying to give me trichinosis?!

[ June 06, 2003, 08:55 AM: Message edited by: DCBucky ]

An amazing book -- if you want to understand how (some) teams are going to get better in the next 10-15 years, you MUST read it!!! And it's the #2 nonfiction seller on the NY Times list. Learn who Voros McCracken, Jeremy Brown and Paul DePodesta are!

Bill James, a significant character in "Moneyball" and the father of modern baseball analysis (sabermetrics), is interviewed by Slate...

Some sort of stat geeks? wink

Interesting article in the Toronto Star about the Moneyball strategy that the Blue Jays are trying to emulate.

It questions whether it's been the pitching that has led to the A's strong showings in recent years, rather than an OBP-led offensive strategy.

With Mulder's injury, and rookie Rich Harden being rocked in recent outings, it will be interesting to see if the A's can continue their winning ways.

From the same article:

The Phillies used to shy away from the "five-tool" type players and their farm system became a disaster. If this is what the A's are doing, they're doomed.

The book makes clear that *Billy Beane* was a "five-tool" prospect; his major-league washout is part of what makes him certain that his approach is correct. (Old-school scouts even took note that Beane "looked like a star," and went out with the best-looking girls! The sixth tool!)

First of all, you can't blame the strategy if the players don't produce. Yesterday's 17-run outburst aside, Oakland simply hasn't gotten on base or slugged enough this year.

Beane's philosophy of drafting / acquiring pitchers has gotten short shrift in the "Moneyball" fallout (since a lot of the debaters have misread it, or haven't read it). Most organizations would steer clear of a guy as short and slight as Tim Hudson, who stands with Loaiza as the best pitchers in the AL this year. No sensible analyst believes that high on-base percentage is the ONLY element of a winning team.

[ August 25, 2003, 07:42 AM: Message edited by: Bill W ]

From the Toronto Star:

Last season happened, that's what. A collapse when all seemed to be within reach for the Sox to get past the Yankees. Now it's a \"win at all costs\" mentality...

...although how FranKotite fits into that mentality I still have no idea.

Theo Epstein works for a HIGH-revenue club. To expect him to follow the payroll pattern of the Oakland A's just shows that the Toronto columnist is about as bright as ... the average sportswriter.

I also think it's likely that either Pedro or Nomar will be allowed to walk after next season. And aside from the Big Four Bosox salaries, I expect Epstein WILL pursue affordable bargain players -- Mueller and Ortiz, remember?

A new review of \"Moneyball\" from Reason.com. Makes a fine gift for the sophisticated, analytical baseball fan.

Finished it last night. WOW. What a read - more thrilling than any movie I've seen recently. And I'm not even a stat-head.

Best part was the one centered around the trade deadline. What a hoot learning how Beane juggled the Red Sox, Giants, Indians, and Mets just to acquire Ricardo Rincon. I reached for a cigarette at the end of the chapter, I was so spent.

And I loved the backstory about Chad Bradford. Don't recall ever seeing the guy pitch so I'm looking forward to this season that much more now. And I just checked his page on MLB. What a hottie!

Highly recommended read, and a great gift. I enjoyed David Wells's book, but it doesn't even compare to the rush I got this weekend devouring Moneyball. Can I be both a Yankees and A's fan?

Umm, I think you're going to have to turn in your pinstripes there, FeverDog. You've apparently fell into the charm of the gorgeous Billy Beane.

From the weekly quotes in Baseball Prospectus:


"There are things that we have tried to do with statistics but we didn't have the time or the intelligence that Jeff does in dealing with it. Now we have that at our disposal, and that's to our advantage."
--Walt Jocketty, Cardinals general manager, on statistical analyst Jeff Luhnow (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)


"'Moneyball' talked about looking at data in a different way about your players. From that perspective, we're on the same trajectory. I can't speak to the influence the book may have had on Bill or Walt or anybody else. Different teams have been doing different things long before last summer. I don't think it's necessarily something that's brand new. What's interesting is how data has become available at a level that facilitates this analysis. 'Moneyball' aside, this is coming."
--Jeff Luhnow, Cardinals director of baseball operations (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)


"Some people will resist; some will accept it. But it's here. It's not going anywhere... Scouts used to do their job without a radar gun. Now every scout has one. I consider statistical analysis to be a tool just as important as a radar gun."
--Luhnow


"I think it's to the point now where you can't solely base it on a scout's evaluation alone for the simple reason that he might see a guy when he's real good, especially in a short period of time. Statistical data looks at a longer period of time."
--Jocketty


"There will be people who do analysis well and there will be people who get it wrong. It's going to give everybody an opportunity to say, 'See, it doesn't work.'"
--Luhnow

Well, a couple of weeks ago when I went up to NYC, Amtrak was behind schedule and I had nothing to read. Wandering into the book store at 30th St. Station, I happened upon a paperback edition of "Moneyball" and bought it. With the train arriving late (and then taking longer than normal to arrive in NYC) AND with having to wait for the train home in the middle of the night at Penn Station because...well, you had to be there... wink I was about 75 percent done by the time I got home, and finished it that weekend.

Certainly it was a well-written book, and it makes an interesting case for Beane's theories. However, to me you shouldn't just build a team to get to the playoffs -- you have to try and do something to win the championship as well. So as successful as the A's have been, they're still lacking...and it seems that while they have a point about old-time scouts' ignoring players' actual performance in favor of whether they "look" like major leaguers, to me they've gone too far in the opposite direction. You need to strike a balance between talent and performance.

The movie version of Moneyball is set to play at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The movie stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiAHlZVgXjk

I will withhold judgment til I see it, but it's a really strange property to adapt into a big-budget film.

canmark had questions in the Movies thread about big-budget teams laying claim to Billy Beane's philosophy, and I thought it made sense to put my answer here, since many of you who don't know sabermetrics from Junior Vazquez will be discussing "Moneyball" know that Brad Pitt has your attention.


Well Mark, the short answer is: moneyball works better with more money.

The (very fictionalized) Jonah Hill character says at the beginning of the film that Johnny Damon isn't worth $7 million a year... and he wasn't, in 2002. The Yankees and Red Sox can overpay for talent they want; that was the problem for the A's.

Many of the CONCEPTS of sabermetrics (I don't think the word appears in the movie) are not new; Branch Rickey and Earl Weaver followed a lot of them. (Don't give away outs with sacrifices, power and walks are the key to offense, steals aren't worth the risk, etc.) And teams like the Sox and Yankees have relied on taking pitches and making the other team's starter throw a lot at least since the mid '90s; that's why when they play each other, the games take 5 hours. Moneyball is about seeing the value what your opposition undervalues -- asnd that isn't on-base percentage anymore, cuz almost all teams value it highly.

My long answer: Read the book and every word of Bill James you can get your hands on.

"So, it's not like fans have not been evaluating players based on their strikeout to walk ratio, for example."

Ha, most of the fans I know do! Subscribe to a site like Baseball Prospectus and you'll see that's usually the first thing the writers and readers look at. For another example, I find myself not especially caring whether Jose Reyes wins a batting title... because batting average doesn't tell you everything.

If by "fans" you mean people who rely heavily on Tim McCarver... well, none of this is for them.

It's funny you should use that example because I think the strikeout/walk ratio is almost as overrated as batting average these days. It's especially ironic in terms of moneyball because the K/W ratio of some of the key starters from those days wasn't especially impressive. Tim Hudson is pretty ordinary (2.22) on the stat over his career and Zito's K/W (1.81) is downright poor--David Bush has a career K/W ratio higher than Zito did in the best season of his career.

That would presumably indicate that Zito wasn't all that he seemed to be... perhaps because people were focused on the most overrated seasonal stat of all, a pitcher's wins.

The A's didn't hang on to Hudson either, did they?

Or maybe because pitching is about preventing runs from scoring, not just throwing strikes? Fine, you can have the guys like Javier Vazquez who throw the ball down the middle of the plate and rack up fabulous K/W ratios year after year while giving up 30 home runs a year. Sorry, a guy with a career ERA of 4.23, pitching mostly in the NL is nothing special, even if his career K/W ratio is vastly better than Roger Clemens. Year after year, Vazquez has given up 10% more hits and 24% more home runs than Zito--I don't believe that's a difference that can be dismissed as luck over two thousand innings.

K/W ratio can be useful for tracking the performance of an individual player--when Zito's K's started to drop and his walks started to increase, you knew he was in trouble--but I don't think it's all that valuable in comparing different players. Some pitchers will be effective with K/W ratios of 2, others won't even with K/W ratios of 3.

JC, of course K/BB is just an indicator, not an end-all stat. You're probably familiar with the thinking that it and HR Allowed are among the leading numbers to look at for pitchers, because they cover the 3 factors that pitchers have the most control over. (ie, they're defense-independent)

Yes, and considering home runs does compensate somewhat for the weaknesses of K/W, although because they are relatively rare events, it takes a lot of innings for home runs stats to become significant. I felt that Bill James became a little overly strikeout-obsessed in his thinking on pitchers over the years. E.R.A. may be a tranditional stat, but it's still a very good one, at least for starting pitchers with a fair track record. It's dependent on the ballpark and the defense to some extent, but I think the spread in E.R.A.'s between pitchers is quite large relative to those effects, except in extreme circumstances like Colorado.

Anyway, my point was that I'm not so sure that K/W ratio played that huge a role in Beane's decisions on pitchers. I just checked the K/W ratio of the Oakland staffs in the years from 1999-2007, and they only finished in the top 3 in the league K/W ratio once, and were actually below average a couple times.

From the NY Times Magazine: Billy Beane of ‘Moneyball’ Has Given Up on His Own Hollywood Ending

ERA is better than some stats, but ERA+ is better (it accounts for park differences -- Dodger Stadium and San Diego are still notably pitcher/defense-friendly); however, neither judges a pitcher on his ability to keep unearned runs from scoring, which he DOES have some control over (we've all seen a guy melt down after an error on what should've been the 3rd out, and give up 4 or 5 'unearned' runs).

Imagine he gave up $12.5M a year from the Redsox to stay in Oakland. Doesn't seem quite fair today, does it?

Read the NYTM profile linked above. Beane and others agree he wouldn't have liked Boston; it's the challenge of working with modest resources that drove him.