
The Ultimate Failure of Moneyball - jakarta
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/against-moneyball
======
GavinB
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.

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

------
agbell
"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.

~~~
jbenz
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.

------
vessenes
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.

------
mikeryan
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.

------
maudineormsby
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.

~~~
Joboo
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.

------
gbookman
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.

------
tptacek
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.

~~~
jfager
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball:_The_Art_of_Winning_an_Unfair_Game)

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.

~~~
mechanical_fish
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.

~~~
jfager
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>

