This book is over 10 years old, so this review is a little late. In the meantime, the Oakland A’s, who were featured in the book, had their best chance team a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, their GM, Billy Beane, traded for pitching, when they needed hitting. This resulted in yet another post season flameout and the depletion of their farm system, which they’re still trying to recover from. They’ll be back to competitiveness at some point. Finding overlooked, value players, hungry to prove themselves (so they can make more money with another team) should produce another good team down the road.
There’s some obvious irony that Beane’s A’s are as guilty of having blinders on as the rest of the league. If the same strategy keeps not working in terms of a championship, just blame the format of the playoffs. At some point, you might have to think that the A’s playoff opponents weren’t just lucky to have beaten them, but maybe they had better players. In a short series, it’s not that season average statistics that break down, but rather it’s that individual players shine. And just to make it worse, there are unsung role players in the perpetual shadow of great players that will inevitably break out when given their moment in the spotlight. Statistics and analytics can’t measure heart and desire.
In the afterward of the paperback edition that I have, the writer makes an angry, bitter case for the correctness of the strategy detailed in the book. On some level, the rest of the league did listen, but they came to different conclusions. Theo Epstein, who took the Red Sox’s GM job that Beane turned down at the end of the book, was a “numbers guy,” not a baseball guy. He likely used some of Beane’s strategy and theories, but figured out what the missing ingredient was to make it work: lots of money. Epstein used that “secret” formula to bring championships to two cursed cities.
Perhaps more galling has been the Kansas City Royals. They’re a low budget team that went to the World Series twice and won one in the time since Moneyball came out, and they did so using almost the opposite strategy of the A’s. Royals position players are speedy and go up to the plate hacking. They value putting the ball in play and forcing the defense to react to their speed, rather than taking walks and then waiting for home runs. Hosmer’s Mad Dash would have gotten him fined on the A’s. (Ironically, that insane rush at home was actually a planned, calculated maneuver based on advanced opposition scouting.)
I’m not a “numbers guy” as this blog has always demonstrated. I recognize that the older stats have their limitations, but I generally like them. Batting average, on-base average, and (the basically unused) total bases are based strictly on what batters do. Newer stats add weighting to the stats, which makes them, in my view, arbitrary. Those stats can now be used to prove whatever you believe in. Sabermetricians are proof of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: examining stats influences them.
Whether using large or small samples, weighted data is going to be slanted in the some biased way to prove the legitimacy of the stat, as opposed to the other way around. Nobody has to “prove” batting average as an indicator of a player’s ability to hit. Pitchers can only really be judged by Three True Outcomes (walks, strikeouts, home runs) by Sabermetrican theories. Every other result is luck. Yep, that’s why teams pay great hitters and pitchers millions, because they’re lucky. Judging a pitcher by walks is even a bit misleading, because walks are sometimes a defensive weapon. Batters are pitched around and intentionally walked to go after hitter that are perceived to be a better matchup or less dangerous.
Moneyball featured two connected arguments. One, you can pick better players by focusing on certain statistics, rather than just picking players by looks and traditional methods. Two, you can put a winning team together on a budget using that focused strategy. Michael Lewis dismissed what I think was the actual real issue in the book. Yes, you can build a good team on a budget. A low payroll team can compete with and beat out high payroll teams to get to the playoffs. The problem is the year-to-year competitive imbalance between those two types of teams.
Big payroll teams are good at finding good prospects. They’re bad at figuring out when a good player is going to decline or not going to live up to expectations. Much of the big payroll teams’ payroll goes to players who are retired, not on the team, not playing regularly, off the playoff roster, just plain suck, or are taking up so much payroll that they can’t put a complete team around them. When small payroll teams make these kind of mistakes, they may be done for years. The big payroll teams just keep spending, if for no other reason than it drives up player salaries to keep them away from smarter-managed teams.
The Dodgers are playing well right now because of great young players, some guys who have performed above expectations, guys finally living up to expectations, and some good trades (namely Yu Darvish), not because of their payroll. A bunch of that has gone towards guys not on the team anymore, high-priced veterans who don’t play every day, and Clayton Kershaw. Yes, Kershaw gets them wins, when he’s healthy. He’s missed significant time over the last three years from injury, and let’s face it, he hasn’t been that great in the playoffs.
Sports leagues sell competition, but some franchises are much more valuable than others. While the franchises seem to be in economic competition, this market isn’t a capitalistic exercise. A richer franchise putting a poorer franchise out of business, wouldn’t make the rich franchise stronger, it would make the league weaker, and thus the rich franchise weaker as well. Nobody’s paying full price to watch the Yankees take infield and BP. A national audience isn’t going to be satisfied with watching the Yankees play the Red Sox every weekend. (I might be wrong on there, since the baseball-carrying networks clearly believe otherwise.) So, richer franchises are constrained by the rules of the game and in business transactions, not just for the good of the poorer franchises or the league, but also for their own good.
I’m okay with a league that has smart, small payroll teams playing dumb, big payroll teams. On some level, this should be encouraged as it will increase innovation in the game. But, the dumb teams can learn from the smart ones and put money behind those theories if they’re proven to work. They can also waste a bunch of money making it work and only have to pay a luxury tax penalty for doing it. Small payroll teams lose their good players to free agency, or if they do pay to keep someone who then flames out, they’re wrecked for years rebuilding. If it ever gets to a point where small payroll teams can’t compete for a championship, this issue will need to revisited.
So overall, Moneyball was a thought-provoking book, which is almost more important than whether the theories it supported are right or not. Baseball, with all of its statistics, fools you into thinking you make sense of it, but you never will. They mystery will only reveal just enough of itself every night, on every ball field to keep you coming back for more. In the end, the biggest question the book raises is: How did they make a movie out of this?
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