6.08.2005
A Small Watershed
Earlier I mentioned that pretty much everyone around MLB has begun to grasp the importance of on-base percentage. Now, no less a figure than Peter Gammons has confirmed and elaborated on the subject a bit.
It's quite illuminating to hear every broadcaster, scout and talking head in baseball rip on Moneyball in a decidedly knee-jerk fashion whenever it pops up in discussion, and yet here we have a suddenly widespread practice around MLB for managers to put high-OPB hitters in their leadoff spots, speed be damned (Brandon Inge?!). A few years ago Oakland GM Billy Beane tried this with Jeremy Giambi and was roundly panned; now Gammons has decreed the practice to be the order of the day. While this turnabout has been approaching for years, it seemed unthinkable as recently as the turn of the century.
The main misconception about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book that has come to be reviled as Beane's Mein Kampf, was that it was conceived as an advocate of stats-crunching, laptop-carrying front office geeks who only look at spreadsheets in lieu of videotape, who draft only college players sight unseen, etc. Lewis did not set out to promote OBP over AVG, statistics over scouting, or any other cause, but instead to merely explore how, in an era of Yankee dominance fueled by the ever-skyrocketing Yankee payroll, coupled with Bud Selig priming the pump for further labor strife by trumpeting MLB's supposedly critical problem of "competitive imbalance," Billy Beane and the Oakland A's were able to succeed consistently on a much smaller payroll. That's it.
What Lewis found was Beane's use of statistics, such as OBP, that a) other front offices paid far less attention to and b) correlated more strongly with winning than, say, batting average or overall athleticism. This led to players like Scott Hatteberg, Matt Stairs, and Olmedo Saenz being undervalued in general and thus available at low cost to the A's. It was not the only advantage Beane was able to exploit during his team's run of success -- he also relied, and presumably continues to rely, on pitches seen per plate appearance and other metrics so far on the inside that Beane wouldn't even reveal them to Lewis -- but OBP was undoubtedly a bedrock.
The gap has since closed. Sabermetric-friendly GMs decorate the landscape, from Los Angeles to Toronto, and all of them have more financial resources than Beane. The defending champion Boston Red Sox have a GM who trumpets Baseball Prospectus and keeps Bill James in his employ, not to mention a starting second baseman, Mark Bellhorn, whose obscene strikeout totals and marginal defense belie his high OBP, making him a prototypical "Moneyball player." Another Beane philosophy depicted in Moneyball, the practice of heavily favoring college players over high-school players in the draft, has caught on with such force that the pendulum has arguably swung back the other way, negating any advantage Beane may or may not have had in that regard. That this changing of the guard corresponds with Oakland's foundering in the AL West standings does not bode well for the boys in green and yellow.
So Beane needs something different if he is to continue succeeding. We are approaching the window of expected influence from his 2000 Moneyball draft. Nick Swisher and Mark Teahen have made the bigs with limited success, though Teahen helped bring Dotel in last year's deadline trade; Jeremy Brown, aka the Poster Child, hasn't done enough to suppress his myriad of inevitable critics; meanwhile, Jeremy Bonderman, the object of Beane's ire in the book, has blossomed into the ace pitcher the A's could so sorely use right now. Like it or not, the draft class of 2000 will likely make or break Beane in the public eye, and so far the returns are distinctly mixed.
Never a slave to conventional wisdom, Beane dealt away his two best pitchers, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson, in the offseason for a handful of role players and prospects (notably Dan Meyer, Dan Haren and Daric Barton), making Oakland's future brighter but sacrificing the present to the talk-radio wolves. With a dismal season in the makings for Oakland thus far, what Beane needs the most right now are the patience of his superiors, which he will likely receive due to his track record, and the patience of the baseball media, which he certainly will not. I'm no A's fan, but I wish you good luck, Billy, and Godspeed.
It's quite illuminating to hear every broadcaster, scout and talking head in baseball rip on Moneyball in a decidedly knee-jerk fashion whenever it pops up in discussion, and yet here we have a suddenly widespread practice around MLB for managers to put high-OPB hitters in their leadoff spots, speed be damned (Brandon Inge?!). A few years ago Oakland GM Billy Beane tried this with Jeremy Giambi and was roundly panned; now Gammons has decreed the practice to be the order of the day. While this turnabout has been approaching for years, it seemed unthinkable as recently as the turn of the century.
The main misconception about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book that has come to be reviled as Beane's Mein Kampf, was that it was conceived as an advocate of stats-crunching, laptop-carrying front office geeks who only look at spreadsheets in lieu of videotape, who draft only college players sight unseen, etc. Lewis did not set out to promote OBP over AVG, statistics over scouting, or any other cause, but instead to merely explore how, in an era of Yankee dominance fueled by the ever-skyrocketing Yankee payroll, coupled with Bud Selig priming the pump for further labor strife by trumpeting MLB's supposedly critical problem of "competitive imbalance," Billy Beane and the Oakland A's were able to succeed consistently on a much smaller payroll. That's it.
What Lewis found was Beane's use of statistics, such as OBP, that a) other front offices paid far less attention to and b) correlated more strongly with winning than, say, batting average or overall athleticism. This led to players like Scott Hatteberg, Matt Stairs, and Olmedo Saenz being undervalued in general and thus available at low cost to the A's. It was not the only advantage Beane was able to exploit during his team's run of success -- he also relied, and presumably continues to rely, on pitches seen per plate appearance and other metrics so far on the inside that Beane wouldn't even reveal them to Lewis -- but OBP was undoubtedly a bedrock.
The gap has since closed. Sabermetric-friendly GMs decorate the landscape, from Los Angeles to Toronto, and all of them have more financial resources than Beane. The defending champion Boston Red Sox have a GM who trumpets Baseball Prospectus and keeps Bill James in his employ, not to mention a starting second baseman, Mark Bellhorn, whose obscene strikeout totals and marginal defense belie his high OBP, making him a prototypical "Moneyball player." Another Beane philosophy depicted in Moneyball, the practice of heavily favoring college players over high-school players in the draft, has caught on with such force that the pendulum has arguably swung back the other way, negating any advantage Beane may or may not have had in that regard. That this changing of the guard corresponds with Oakland's foundering in the AL West standings does not bode well for the boys in green and yellow.
So Beane needs something different if he is to continue succeeding. We are approaching the window of expected influence from his 2000 Moneyball draft. Nick Swisher and Mark Teahen have made the bigs with limited success, though Teahen helped bring Dotel in last year's deadline trade; Jeremy Brown, aka the Poster Child, hasn't done enough to suppress his myriad of inevitable critics; meanwhile, Jeremy Bonderman, the object of Beane's ire in the book, has blossomed into the ace pitcher the A's could so sorely use right now. Like it or not, the draft class of 2000 will likely make or break Beane in the public eye, and so far the returns are distinctly mixed.
Never a slave to conventional wisdom, Beane dealt away his two best pitchers, Mark Mulder and Tim Hudson, in the offseason for a handful of role players and prospects (notably Dan Meyer, Dan Haren and Daric Barton), making Oakland's future brighter but sacrificing the present to the talk-radio wolves. With a dismal season in the makings for Oakland thus far, what Beane needs the most right now are the patience of his superiors, which he will likely receive due to his track record, and the patience of the baseball media, which he certainly will not. I'm no A's fan, but I wish you good luck, Billy, and Godspeed.
