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December 21, 2004
Moneyball
Over the course of the weekend trip to and from Ft. Worth my wife and I finished listening to I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy and listened to almost all of Moneyball. Spock was interesting to listen to because I had no idea how bad Nimoy thought the third season of Star Trek was. It makes sense as it had bad episodes like Plato's Stepchildren and several so-so episodes like Spock's Brain (which Nimoy for obvious reasons as an actor did not like).
Moneyball was the far more interesting book. I had heard similar theories expounded several years ago and tended to agree with them, but I never heard them in this depth. The basic theory of Billy Beene the GM of the Oakland A's and several other theorists is that there are great market inefficiencies in professional baseball that can be exploited by people willing to do their homework and ignore tradition. Runs are the product of the industry and outs are a scarce resource. Speed, fielding, and batting average tend to be overpriced when measured in player salaries, while walks, ability to run up pitch count, and on base percentage tend to be underpriced. In pitching ERA , pitch speed, and number of hits are not the most effective measurements. The most effective measurements are the number of walks, strike outs, and home runs allowed because they rule out luck since no other defensive players are involved. The people who argue these are the efficient ways to run a team cite statistical abstracts that prove these theories. The other evidence is that even though they have one of the lowest salaries in baseball the A’s keep having one of the best records and make the playoffs almost every year. This year they were only one game behind the Angels for the AL West lead at the end of the season and had made the playoffs for several years in a row before that.
The main point of Moneyball is that new knowledge is almost always attainable even in subjects that have been thoroughly studied like baseball statistics. The other major point was the problem of subjective experience tainting views of objective stats. One of the strongest points of the book is how it intersperses narrative biographies to illustrate its statistical points. Chad Bradford for instance is a relief pitcher who throws underhanded and was repeatedly sent to the minors despite hardly allowing any runs. He pitches slow and underhanded so despite his fairly decent stats he kept getting stuck in minor leagues because he did not throw like a normal reliever. I have not read any other baseball book that I can think of, but will probably read a few more now that I am done with this one. I think I am going to look up how the players the A's drafted in the book because of high on base percentage have done so far and report on this in a future post. Nick Swisher is the only name from the book's draftees I recognize on the A's current roster and he has a respectable OBP of .352 and SLG of .417.
Posted by Pete at December 21, 2004 02:15 PM
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Comments
I was exploring a lot of those Moneyball ideas during college, and a lot of the info I gleaned from my senior math project.
I've got a copy of a lengthy speech that former A's assistant GM/current Dodger general manager Paul DePodesta gave to a mutual fund conference that covers some of the same stuff that Moneyball discusses. The text of the speech got yanked off the Web after the Dodgers hired DePodesta, but I had saved a copy of it on my hard drive before the page got yanked. I think you'd find it enlightening, and I can send it to you if you'd like.
Posted by: Lennox at January 1, 2005 02:48 AM