

Billion-Dollar Billy Beane - jsnell
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/billion-dollar-billy-beane/

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discardorama
Billy Beane's A's may be winning games, but during the period in question
(2002-2014), the Red Sox have won 3 World Series Championships, and the A's
haven't been to one in 25 years... it's the World Series wins that count,
eventually. Everything else is irrelevant.

~~~
avemg
MLB playoffs are a crapshoot. You can construct a team that consistently
performs well over the 162 game regular season but once you reach the
postseason it often comes down to luck and which teams are hot at the right
time. Billy Beane has been very unlucky there.

~~~
chatmasta
I'm not sure I agree with this. At least in comparison to other pro sports,
the MLB playoffs seem to be the most representative of actual talent. The
early rounds are 5-game series, and the best teams are playing the worst
teams, so you would expect a low sample size is needed to determine the "best"
team. In the later rounds, when teams are much more closely matched in talent,
the series last 7-games. I haven't done the math on this (would anyone care
to?), but I surmise that the statistical power of a 7-game series, spread over
10-14 days, is far higher than that of say, NFL playoffs, where the sample
size is 1. This is not even considering the fact that each game has 200+
separate pitches from which to derive success or failure, as opposed to ~100
plays per NFL game.

Baseball has 162 games, which is twice as many as the NBA and NHL, and ten
times as many as the NFL. It also has more independent events (pitches) per
game than any of those sports. Of all the major sports, it seems baseball is
the "fairest" in terms of representing talent, by the simple fact that it
requires orders of magnitude more successes of independent events to win the
World Series.

~~~
curun1r
There are good reasons why the A's don't do as well as other teams in the
playoffs. Mostly, it's that "playoff" baseball is different than regular
season baseball. The strike zones expand, the scores drop and the breaks
between innings increase to allow for more commercials. There's also more
rest/travel days between games. All of this magnifies the value of top
pitchers since it allows them to pitch a greater percentage of games, pitch
longer in those games and pitch more effectively in those games. Meanwhile,
the value of the pitchers at the bottom of the rotation is minimized or
eliminated.

One of the reasons the A's have won so much in the regular season is that they
make up for the lack of high-priced stars by being solid, top to bottom. As
evidenced by this season, when two of their starters went down for the entire
year, they had guys in the minors who were almost as good and the drop off was
minimal. But whenever one of their guys starts to look really good, they trade
him to replenish the minor league stock. It happened with Hudson, Mulder,
Haren, Gonzalez and Cahill. This incredible depth of similar players works
really well in the regular season and makes the A's pretty much injury-proof.
But it works against them in the playoffs when 1 stud pitcher can basically
dominate them as we've seen with Justin Verlander.

They've been eliminated twice by him in games where he basically pounded the
outside corner on a pitch that isn't a strike but the umpire was giving the
entire night, albeit to both pitchers. But since the A's don't have a pitcher
that can hit that spot with near-100mph heat reliably, the Tigers were able to
take advantage of a few location misses. When the schedule means that you're
facing Verlander for 40% of a series and the extended breaks between innings
make it easy for Verlander to pitch the entire game, it all adds up to the A's
getting beat and, I think, explains why Beane went out and got Samardzija to
pair against Verlander or whoever that #1 guy they face is thinking that both
of them can pound that outside-the-zone strike with upper 90s stuff equally
well.

Also, the OPS-minded strategy doesn't work as well against #1 guys as it does
against #4 and #5 guys who you're not going to face much in a playoff series.
And with lower scores, the teams that manufacture 1-2 runs in a game do better
in the playoffs than the teams that know that sacrificing will lead to fewer
runs over the course of a season.

~~~
icelancer
It should be pointed out that not a SINGLE sabermetrician has shown the
"facts" in this post to be true. BPro used a similar concept called "secret
sauce" that had many of these ideas in them, and it was routinely debunked
years after it was published.

The A's are almost certainly the victim of variance, the likes of which
apparently even Hacker News readers can't grasp. For them to have the record
they do in the playoffs given their expected talent level is something like a
17% shot on chance alone.

Ever see something happen that was an 83% underdog? No?

~~~
jeffdavis
"For them to have the record they do in the playoffs given their expected
talent level is something like a 17% shot on chance alone."

Not an expert on the subject, but baseball doesn't have and explicit chance
component, so please explain what you mean when you say "on chance".

I assume, embedded in your definition, will be statistics about the same teams
playing each other or something. However, it seems like it would be hard to
apply these statistics to refute someone who is saying both that "the A's are
different" and "championship games are different".

For instance, if Michael Jordan wins 100 one-on-one games of basketball
against me, I could come out an say "Yes, but if we played on the
International Space Station, then I'd win. ISS games are different.". To
refute that you'd need a body of evidence of basketball games on ISS. Let's
say you have 5000 games of history on the ISS, where the players' success
rates are almost identical to those on Earth's surface. I could still say "But
_I 'm_ different. Everyone else tries to play ISS basketball like Earth
basketball, but I have these cool tricks.". Controlling for both of those
things seems to require having lots of data about _me_ playing on the ISS.

None of that means the post to which you responded is right. But if the claims
"the A's are different" and "the championships are different" both seem
plausible; and if the A's record in championships is poor compared with the
regular season; then you should dial back the confidence a bit.

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mathattack
Oh my poor miserable Cubs on that list. And I thought they were bad because of
underinvestment. The list shows they're bad even relative to that
underinvestment!

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keithwarren
I love me some 538 but I cannot read it without noticing how they gloss over
some major factors that create variables in the systems they are trying to
examine. Feels like Malcolm Gladwell for Statistics.

~~~
Splendor
It might add more to the discussion here if you described what you feel is
being glossed over.

