Book Report: Moneyball

Beane may identify OBP and OPS as very important stats, but I’m not sure (without having read it) that he identifies it as THE stats to win by. Naturally, they don’t address pitching talent whatsoever. If the Rockies had the pitching of Oakland or New York the last seven years, they would be much, much higher.

Beane has abandoned this philosophy as wrong, or chosen the wrong talent to fill this metric.

Or maybe neither? The year after Moneyball was published, Oakland fell precipitously in the OBP standings. It had long been suspected that OBP was an important metric, but Moneyball quantified it higher than expected. The NFL is known as a "copycat" league. When an innovation breeds success, it is copied until competition is once again normalized, creating the need for another innovation. The NFL isn’t the only place this copycat trait exists – it’s only more apparent in its formations and strategies. While Beane may have chosen some poor players in 08, I believe that other teams jumping on the OBP bandwagon may also be an explanation

They’ve traded away many key parts and just ran a few cheap/scrapheap guys to try and keep things competitive. To say that Beane has abandoned OBP players is shortsighted.

OBP and OPS are the keys to good offense. Clearly, the oakland players didn’t have it this year. I won’t deny that.

There’s a few problems which many people have pointed out about OPS, including Tom Tango.

OBP is intended to show how well a player is at creating a situation for others to advance him, while SLG shows a player’s individual ability to advance runners himself.

The first problem with OPS is that all baseball thinkers will rank OBP as MUCH more valuable than SLG, as you can’t score runs (as a team) without people on base, no matter how well you drive them in. Some think that OPS should really be (3 or 4)*OBP + SLG.

The second problem with OPS, and Tango touches on this in “The Book”, is that OPS is essentially suggesting that a player gets on base and then drives himself in. If you had a team full of clones, or at least a couple clones batting sequentially, then you could use OPS by itself, as you have people with identical On-Base skills and people with identical Slugging skills, and then you could just use OPS to define how well a player is at producing runs.

I talked with PF about this outside of PR, and we were talking about how OPS is nice because it’s comprised of easy-to-find numbers, without having to bust out a spreadsheet or anything like that. However, it is misleading when evaluating a player and not knowing his component numbers.

Say I have 2 .800 OPS guys. They’re equally valuable, right (assuming all the other little variables like baserunning ability and lineup position and surrounding batters are equal)? Perhaps, but say I told you that Player 1 has a line of .300/.370/.430, and then Player 2 bats .272/.272/.528. Personally, Player 1 is supreme. He makes 10% fewer outs than Player 2. I have him in my starting lineup every day. Player 2, however, never walks, however, averages a double every time he hits the ball (almost), and would most likely be my last PH option, as I don’t want to give him more than like 1, maybe 2 outs at a time to work with.

Once I’ve finally read Moneyball (I own it, it’s sitting on my table, I’m just busy as hell with school ATM) I’ll come back and make more commentary on both the Book and your report. I’m glad you’re doing this. I mean, it’s kind of dull, but that’s what PF and I get into – the boring parts of baseball.

Is how Moneyball refers to Kevin Youkilis. Even though he is only an overweight AA player at the time, the A’s covet Youkilis to the point they attempt to insert themselves in several trades to try and acquire him. Beane is sneaky in trades, he’s like the kid at the lunch table trading until he winds up with the chocolate milk, cookies and jello-pudding snacks and your sisters phone number.

Defense was actually a big write-up in the book. Although the A’s speak disparaging of its value, Michael Lewis gave a major portion of a chapter to this topic. Lewis describes a company called AVM Systems which divided the baseball field into matrices and recorded every ball put into play and divided the results into derivatives. Pretty cool stuff, although I’m not sure of its value.

Just ask him.

The story about his dad being paralyzed from a stroke and not being able to lift his arm fully. So when young Chad played catch with his dad he was programmed to pitch sidearmed. Then as his career progressed he dropped his arm angle lower and lower to overcome adversity. Until finally Bradford is so low he brushes the ground causing wild pitches.

Plus the story about the White Sox not believing in him, even though he dominates at a high elevation environment ala Coors Field. So they store him in AAA until Beane trades for him. Cool Stuff.

In comparison Dan O’Dowd has also traded ripening players Holliday and Jennings for young pitchers Bucholz, Street, Hirsch, Smith. However, O’Dowd has taken another path in his strategizing by extending contracts of arbitration eligible players in an attempt to purchase free agency years. The tactic also works towards building trust in the team by providing financial stability for the player. O’Dowd probably believes this trust can translate into the Rockies receiving future consideration when the player tests the open market.

Josh Byrnes does the same thing; that’s the more traditional mid-market path. While big budget teams like the Yankees, Red Sux, Dodgers and Mets can just spend to reload every year, the rest of us have to go in cycles of rebuilding and competing. Beane’s A’s, OTOH, don’t ever look to a certain time in the future when the roster is static because they’re continually rebuilding young. The A’s, as a result, have some level of long-term sustained success, but there’s never any “window” within which they have a particularly good shot at a World Series, either — the closest they’ve come is when they had the “Big 3” of Hudson, Mulder, and Zito. (Back when Zito didn’t completely suck)