The Ultimate Failure of Moneyball | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate Failure of Moneyball

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26 pointsjakarta24 comments

Moneyball has been so successful that it is now invisible. Because it is widespread knowledge, the competitive advantage has disappeared, and the teams with the most money come out on top.

Money helps teams compete every year, but a lesser team with a good strategy can sometimes contend. 2008's World Series winner was the Phillies, 13th in payroll. They played against the American League Champions and the Rays, who were second to last in payroll.

The Rays beat the White Sox ($121M payroll) and the Red Sox ($133M payroll) with a payroll of $43M. The Yankees, with their $209M payroll, didn't even make the playoffs.

This article, in typical sports journalism fashion, is written based on current events with no historical perspective and cherry-picked data.

It's not cherry-picking to note that several players whose obscurity and subsequent utilization by the A's were basically the focus of Lewis' book had unimpressive careers in the majors. Jeremy Brown had 10 MLB at-bats total; the book, IIRC, ends with him hitting a home run.

And again I'll just note, the author of this article is a reporter of some real repute.

I thought it was interesting that the reporter downplayed Lewis' focus on Barry Zito. That was the only real name I remember from the book, aside from Beane. IIRC, Zito got a good deal of coverage in Moneyball.

That his players had unimpressive careers is to be expected. IIRC, it was recognized in the book that any player the A's could get for cheap was by definition dysfunctional. The point wasn't that these players would become great, it was that they were a little bit better in specific ways than their salaries reflected.

But certainly Jeremy Brown was a bad example, and his 10 at bats say it all. He shouldn't have been held up as a successful acquisition.

Kevin Youkilis was also prominent in the book ("the greek god of walks" is how he was described). Seems to be doing quite well.

You are right. The Sabermetrics used in baseball by teams like the A's gave them an advantage over their competitors in 2000, but it would be crazy to think Theo Epstein and Brian Cashman haven't read Bill James.

However, I think your example is "cherry-picked" in iteself. The Rays finished only third this year, and in their whole 12 year history finished in dead last 9 times... mainly because they did not have the money to compete.

Theo Epstein was mentioned in the book as a believer in sabermetrics. It seems dishonest to ignore him, as the original article did.

Also I found that the article's point that the A's success was largely due to 3 20-game winning pitchers to be fallacious. Wins by pitchers aren't really a useful statistic.

The old guard will do anything they can to discredit sabremetrics so they can go back to the old ways of folklore.

re: It would be crazy to think Theo and Cashman haven't read Bill James...

In fact, they hired him before Moneyball came out, privatized his research and are essentially the ONLY people that have been able to read him for much of the last decade.

I got to go to what seemed to be a rare Q&A with him last year, and it was pretty f-ing fascinating. He talked at length about trying to statistically evaluate leadership, chemistry, fights and catching defense contribution.

James works for the Red Sox as a consultant, and his principles are definitely behind decisions to trade players or let them leave via free agency once they hit a certain age (e.g. Garciaparra, Damon, et. al.).

As for the Yankees, there was an article recently that said something to the effect of "it's not just the size of the payroll, but their ability to spend it wisely which scares other teams".

Yes, that's true if by "consultant" you mean "they own his research." He pretty consistently checked in with a 'minder' in the auditorium to see what he could talk about. Fun stuff.

Having a low payroll does not in and of itself mean a team is trying to apply moneyball principles. It can also mean that the ownership is trying to keep costs down and doesn't care if the team is competitive as long as it's turning a profit.

The Rays were like that, until they got a new owner and dumped pretty much their entire front office right before 2006. Their best 2 seasons have been the last 2, with Andrew Friedman as head of baseball operations, and he's regularly lumped in with the moneyballers (his focus has been strong defense, something that hasn't historically been valued as highly as offense).

"Market inefficiences are harder and harder to find, one of the ironies of Beane's brief but successful reliance on on-base percentage from 2000 to 2002 is that it has made players with such skill far too expensive for his pocketbook."

Market inefficiencies don't last when a book is written about them. Not that surprising.

Exactly. But then the author ends with this note: "But [Billy Beane] is not the man who changed baseball."

It seemed to me the author was making the argument that Billy Beane's tactics, which once were unique, are now widespread and without that advantage, his team stinks.

So... it sounds like he did change baseball. At least he changed the appreciation of OBP and Slugging Percentage. This article's conclusion is confusing.

Defense is the new one in baseball - it's very hard to quantify and it's been historically neglected. So there's been lots of big money contracts to all offense, no defense players.

The Seattle Mariners were an absolutely terrible baseball team in 2008. Their front office had made a lot of bad decisions, so the new regime in 2009 didn't have much in the way of money or other resources to build their team. They focused on getting a lot of defense-first players, and turned in a very respectable season.

Also, Oakland was thought to be a contender this year before injuries hit. That's why Beane traded for Matt Holiday before the season started. Then a ton of injuries hit the A's and they went nowhere. But they were definitely in the mix.

Finally, the Yankees are always going to look good the year they sign the top three free agents in the market for a combined half-billion dollars. Those contracts are going to look pretty awful in five years though, thus leading to the recurring, "How the hell are the Yankees not winning with twice the payroll of everyone else?" in the following years.

If you read any later edition of Moneyball, Lewis mentions how much the 'baseball establishment' disliked his book, and frequently referred to it as "Billy Beane's book". This is interesting, since, for those of who've read the book, Billy Beane is sort of a distant figure, almost certainly not the motivator of the story. He's sort of a figure that Lewis can hang his hat on as the ostensibly interesting figure in a story that's really about cultural changes in an American sport.

The little comments at the end of this article make me think that a true old-school baseball insider is writing the article.

So, in 2002 or so, Billy Beane was doing something interesting with statistics that gave him an edge in baseball. Since then, we have baseballprospectus.com, many (most? all?) teams have full-time statisticians (Red Sox being the most famous), and there have been multiple books about baseball analysis from all different angles.

I don't even mention Pitch/FX, and the great excitement it has generated among baseball stats folks for how it will help their analysis of the game.

All this to say, this article reads like a weird Billy Beane slam from someone who doesn't really get what the hell Michael Lewis was talking about, (market inefficiencies first exploited by cheap teams, and already put in play by rich teams by the time you or I read his book) and, frankly, probably doesn't care.

This is kind of a red herring.

First a large part of Moneyball isn't about player salaries. Billy Beane was forced to build teams with lower payrolls. But what he really did was change a lot around how players are evaluated. Taking these methods of rating players and adding them to a decent payroll and you're going to see increased success.

Also I personally think that Billy Beane's main focus wasn't really post-season success. It's putting a competitive team on the field - and puts butts in the seats for as long as they can in the regular season.

I know the A's are a bit battered right now but its hard to argue with the success they had for a long period in the late 90s' to early 00's with a really minimal payroll.

I'm not familiar with the arguments for and against a salary-cap in baseball, but in the NHL (my primary sport) it has done a great job of making the teams relatively even. There's no equivalent to the Pittsburgh Pirates in the NHL - the worst teams last year were in the playoffs just a bit before.

I am not sure that buying talent helps the top teams as much as it pushes the worst teams down by making it impossible for them to afford to keep their talent.

There are a lot of systems in place to help small market teams, including "profit sharing" and a compensatory draft system.

One of the differences between MLB and NHL is the number of teams that make the playoffs each year. In hockey you get 16, in baseball there is only 8 across the same number of total teams. I'm sure the commissioner would love to change that, but the season is too long as it is.

As a diehard Dodgers fan, I experienced the flaws of Moneyball firsthand during the brief tenure of Paul DePodesta (Billy Beane's protégé) as GM.

DePodesta took Beane's emphasis on statistical analysis to the extreme, almost completely ignoring player personality, team chemistry, and the recommendations of Dodger scouts, who are some of the best in baseball.

He signed guys like Jeff Kent, Milton Bradley, and J.D. Drew with great talent, but selfish or non-existent personalties. As a result, the team was really more like a sum of parts rather than a united, functioning group.

Luckily, the Dodgers fired DePodesta in favor of Ned Colleti. Colleti's more pragmatic approach, which takes into account more than just stat sheets, has taken the Dodgers from 20 games under .500 in DePo's last year to 3 straight playoff appearances.

For what it's worth, Bissinger also wrote Friday Night Lights, which is one of the more famous investigative journalism pieces ever written about sports.

It's one thing to point out that, having identified and (famously) exploited market inefficiencies in the MLB Draft, Billy Beane helped eliminate his claimed edge. That's how markets work. It's another thing to take Michael Lewis' book, look at the career of one of the central characters (Jeremy Brown), and find that he wound up only getting 10 at-bats before retiring. Ouch.

Yeah, and Joe Blanton's in the World Series for the 2nd year in a row, and Nick Swisher's a game away. What's your point? The list of players from Moneyball isn't exactly embarassing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball:_The_Art_of_Winning_a...

One of the main reasons Jeremy Brown was featured so prominently in the book was because he was such a long shot to make the majors but was being drafted anyways. He was also doing pretty well in the farm system his first two seasons before injuring his thumb. It's sports - lots of players, regardless of how promising or hyped they are, have to leave the game for a wide range of reasons. Jeremy Brown's career is not at all evidence that Moneyball's premise was flawed.

All I can say is that that is a good point.

Yes, it seems to me that the lesson of this article is that the author still does not understand statistics, even though he has read a famous book-length Michael Lewis treatise on the subject.

Sabermetrics isn't clairvoyance. No matter how good your data, you still have to play the game.

Meanwhile, while we're playing the anecdotal-data game, those of us in Boston are pretty happy with Billy Beane and company's predictions about Kevin Youkilis.

Bissinger's a really good sportswriter when he's focused on his subject in his own voice, but he's definitely a jock, and he's got a history of being a jackass to other writers:

http://deadspin.com/385770/bissinger-vs-leitch

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