Money Ball

#52
#52
I spent the week in the field averaging about 4 hours of sleep so last night I crashed and slept for at least 11 hours. Tonight there's too much college football on. I really want to see this movie, but I'm afraid of how pissed it's going to make me. Still laughable to think that Beane is getting all the credit when Alderson brought in Chavvy, Tejada and Giambi. Beane can find pitchers, but that's it. Wonder what the movie says about Prince Fielder and Upton? They've done quite well for themselves, but according to Beane, they wouldn't work out.
 
#53
#53
volfanbill said:
I spent the week in the field averaging about 4 hours of sleep so last night I crashed and slept for at least 11 hours. Tonight there's too much college football on. I really want to see this movie, but I'm afraid of how pissed it's going to make me. Still laughable to think that Beane is getting all the credit when Alderson brought in Chavvy, Tejada and Giambi. Beane can find pitchers, but that's it. Wonder what the movie says about Prince Fielder and Upton? They've done quite well for themselves, but according to Beane, they wouldn't work out.
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Wouldn't work out, or he couldn't afford them? Did he pass on drafting them? Every GM ever has passed on players that panned out.

League average OBP = .319, and here is a list of players that hit well over that (for at least one season) under Beane from 1998-2003:

Ben Greive
John Jaha
Scott Spiezio
Tony Phillips
Miguel Tejada
Eric Chavez
Randy Velarde
Terrence Long
Jeremy Giambi
Frank Menechino
Johnny Damon
David Justice
Scott Hatteburg
Mark Ellis
Jermaine Dye
Erubiel Durazo
Eric Burns

None of these guys were doing it with the A's before Beane got there. As you can see it wasn't just the Jason Giambi show.
 
#54
#54
Some of those guys Beane brought in, but you're still naming off a bunch of guys that were either in MLB or no more than a year away when Beane got the GM job.

OBP is great, but let's face it, it's the stat you pump up when you can't afford the other part of the OPS equation.
 
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#55
#55
I actually heard a review of the movie from a baseball guy (can't remember which one) on the Herd last week. He said that it was a good movie but that if you knew the game, you needed to suspend disbelief before walking into the theater.
 
#58
#58
GoBigOrangeVols said:
really?

I saw it yesterday, thought it was decent. Slow, and way too long, but well acted and shot. There just isn't enough there for a 2 and a half hour movie.

It wants to be The Social Network but it is nowhere close.
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If it falls short of "The Social Network" it must be a horrible movie, cause that is exactly what "TSN" was.
 
#60
#60
there's an article in yesterday's nyt magazine about beane where he oddly seems to take credit for the moneyball system while also recognizing that it was not only taught to him by his predecessor but he also admitted the party was probably over, making me believe that even he really knows their success was moreso outside his doing.
 
#61
#61
he seems like a cool guy and i like that he turned down the easy route with the red sox. he'll probably end up working for their owner with his european soccer team though. beane said he's obsessed with that sport.
 
#63
#63
GAVol said:
Some of those guys Beane brought in, but you're still naming off a bunch of guys that were either in MLB or no more than a year away when Beane got the GM job.

OBP is great, but let's face it, it's the stat you pump up when you can't afford the other part of the OPS equation.
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Yeah, but OPS was part of Beane's formula as well. It's just harder to buy slugging, because it was already highly valued.
 
#64
#64
justingroves said:
Almost as good as the "I scored higher than you" on the SAT.
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Except for I didn't put myself above anyone. My understanding of statistics was insulted and I simply named my credentials. You seem to be the one inferring that my credentials supersede yours.
 
#65
#65
See? Cracked.com gets it, I don't know why y'all don't get it.

#5. The Moneyball Guy Gives His Formula to the Competition, Starts Losing

The Story You Saw: Moneyball
Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is the brilliant general manager of the Oakland Athletics who hates every piece of furniture he comes into contact with.

Beane is tasked with assembling a winning team despite having the third-lowest payroll in the league. Realizing that he is totally screwed by every conventional definition of the term, Beane adopts a radical new method of evaluating players called sabermetrics, a system that values statistical analysis over the traditional practice of sitting around and deciding which guy looks best in uniform.

Ridiculed by industry professionals at every turn, the A's eventually prevail, winning 103 games during the regular season and earning a spot in the playoffs. Despite not making it to the World Series, Beane's fancy book-learning theories gain recognition for their genius and he flips over the entire inventory of an Office Depot in celebration.

The Unpleasant Epilogue
After the struggling Athletics made the playoffs three years in a row, other teams got suspicious and wanted to figure out exactly what Beane was up to. Evidently eager to help them out, Beane authorized the publication of a 288-page book, Moneyball, which provided some very specific details about Beane's thought process throughout the 2002 season. And by specific details, we mean it explained which statistics he thought were the most important and why, which players he liked and didn't like, his trading strategies and the ways he inflated the values of his players. It would be like Coca-Cola hand-delivering its secret formula to Pepsi, or the Weekly World News disclosing its investigative techniques to the CIA.

Not surprisingly, other teams began to use the same strategies outlined in the book. Nine teams hired sabermetric analysts following Moneyball's publication. This included not only poor teams that were looking to level the playing field, but also some of baseball's richest franchises, like the Mets, Red Sox and Yankees.

Predictably, the Athletics began to suck really fast, making the playoffs only once since 2003 and ranking among the worst in the league for the last five years. Despite this, their payroll actually increased and is now only the 10th worst in the league. Moneyball's author, Michael Lewis, has openly admitted that the book "probably cost the A's an opportunity or two," which is something that he maybe should have mentioned before the book was written.
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Read more: 6 'Based on a True Story' Movies with Unpleasant Epilogues | Cracked.com 6 'Based on a True Story' Movies with Unpleasant Epilogues | Cracked.com
 
#68
#68
nbakerld said:
Give me a break. So the rest of baseball started copying him, but it's not why he lost his advantage?
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What's so hard about this? He hit the jackpot with some young pitchers and complimented them with some economical guys that could get on base. Then they got older and more expensive and he couldn't catch lightning in a bottle twice.

He had some different takes on how to do some things, but to pretend like Oakland hit hard times because his ideas were so great that everybody copied him and took away his advantage is just goofy.
 
#69
#69
GAVol said:
What's so hard about this? He hit the jackpot with some young pitchers and complimented them with some economical guys that could get on base. Then they got older and more expensive and he couldn't catch lightning in a bottle twice.

He had some different takes on how to do some things, but to pretend like Oakland hit hard times because his ideas were so great that everybody copied him and took away his advantage is just goofy.
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It's probably some of both (luck + sabermetrics), but the evidence is clear, the rest of baseball started copying him and is still copying him, so he was obviously onto something.
 
#70
#70
nbakerld said:
It's probably some of both (luck + sabermetrics), but the evidence is clear, the rest of baseball started copying him and is still copying him, so he was obviously onto something.
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I don't deny that the Bill James stuff has it's place, I just bristle a little at Billy Beane being turned into the MLB equivalent of Einstein.
 
#71
#71
GAVol said:
I don't deny that the Bill James stuff has it's place, I just bristle a little at Billy Beane being turned into the MLB equivalent of Einstein.
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It's not like that at all. He didn't come up with the math/statistical analysis....he just adopted it. He was the first guy to listen to the Einsteins.
 
#72
#72
Moneyball revisited 20 years after the fact. Some highlights from the interview:

- Beane didn't know that the book was going to be about how the A's played Moneyball. He thought it was about baseball in general. When he read the book, he was livid about how he was portrayed (his Mom was super upset about all the swearing). Lewis said, "I thought you would be mad I gave away your secrets." but Beane didn't think anybody was going to read the book.

- If Moneyball hadn't been written and Beane never was, the revolution still would have happened. The Red Sox were already in the process of developing data-driven decision making.

- advanced stats ruined baseball (because it encouraged less movement) and made football and basketball better (because it encouraged more movement).

- Lewis never meant for people to think the data should be a total replacement for experience in decision-making. It's great to make decisions with an understanding of the data, but you shouldn't be a slave to the data.

- one major argument (one that we had here ITT) against Beane's success in the season the book covered was that he was lucky to have 3 aces, but Lewis points out that all 3 of them were moneyball draft picks (1s rd, 1st rd, 6th rd), so it's an argument for Beane, not against him. He also pointed out that if they didn't have so much run support from scrap heap guys, nobody would have been talking about their 3 aces.

And after 20 years, it's even more clear that the rest of baseball copied him (and according to Lewis, nobody is investing more into stats than Houston, who is dominating), so I guess that puts the Beane debate to rest. A .533 record with a minuscule payroll every year is a damn good result, especially considering his advantages were ruined by the book.

Did Michael Lewis Just Get Lucky with “Moneyball”? - Freakonomics
 
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