Moneyball: "Your gut makes mistakes and makes them all the time."

Bryan
The evidence is quite good. Oakland did well with it. Then Theo Epstein, who believed in the same approach, moved to Boston Redsox and had both that method and a high payroll to work with. The results in Boston in the last decade speak for themselves.

During the time Moneyball was taking place, saber groups were consistently beating the odds in Vegas for predicting end of the year records. That isn’t true anymore since it’s not public knowledge.

However, people began realizing around the middle of the last decade that there is significant value added in scouts. It’s a tacit knowledge thing.

The Tampa Bay Rays now are rated as having the best front office by people into sabermetrics. They consistently win while keeping a very low payroll despite playing in the most competitive division in baseball. See The Extra 2% by Jonah Keri for their story.

Andrew, they did something different after failing to win a championship for 80 straight years. Maybe the effect was marginal, but it paid big dividends.

The evidence is strong that the 2003-2004 Red Sox benefited from applying a Moneyball philosophy. These two teams’ offenses ranked among the most prolific of all time. Theo replaced about half the linkup in 2003, traded a truly average “All-Star” named Shea Hillenbrand. You look at that lineup, they vastly improved at 4 positions. (see http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS/2003.shtml ) Contrast with 2002 in OPS+ (>100 means better than league average).

I’m not sure how you’ll get better evidence than a few case studies of individual teams like the A’s and Red Sox earlier this decade. Clearly the value of the strategies pursued by these teams eroded as other teams discovered them. Paul DePodesta, the Asst. GM who the Brand character was loosely modeled after, was a failure as Dodgers GM 2004-06. The Red Sox haven’t been nearly as successful lately. No doubt everyone applies some Moneyball lessons today. That’s why the Sox & Yankees now play 4-hour games regularly and always work deep in counts.

It’s an overly simple lesson to conclude from Moneyball that innovating in Sabermetrics is going to be the path to a sustainable competitive advantage. It may be true that the next competitive advantage is going to be in aspects of the game that aren’t easily quantifiable, now that teams are devoting so many resources to quantification. So many free agent signings are busts today, guys who just stop working once they get the big deal: maybe teams should hire more psychologists?

The movie is very good and the screenplay is one of the smartest I can remember. I am in awe of how much of the book they got into the movie in a comprehensible fashion.

Of course, what’s not mentioned is the interaction between moneyball and steroids. Beane’s strategy appears to have been to find players with a natural ability to not swing at bad pitches, tacitly encourage them to juice up, which discourages pitchers from throwing the ball over the middle of the plate because they’d crush it for a homer, which leads to even more walks. The Giambi brothers are the most obvious examples but there are a lot more. Bill James’s World Series winning Red Sox were similar with juicers Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz.

Oakland was the center of the baseball juicing universe under the leadership of Billy Beane’s predecessor as General Manager Sandy Alderson, the first GM to appreciate Bill James. In 1993, a baseball agent told me that Jose Canseco was the Typhoid Mary of steroids, now infecting Texas after infecting Oakland (e.g., Mark McGwire). A decade later Canseco wrote a book detailing exactly that scenario: he had been the first to openly proselytize for PED use in lockerrooms. (Before that it appears to have been furtive and solitary.)

I don’t think you can blame moneyball for steroids. And I wonder what the evidence is for the claim that Beane encouraged them to juice up. I suspect that the word “tacitly” means there is none.

@frankcross I don’t think Sailer was blaming Moneyball for steriods, just observing that Beane took advantage of them.

Surely it was obvious to Beane (and countless other baseball execs) that some of his players were breaking the rules – rewarding them for the results of that is tacit encouragement.

Paul DePodesta, the Asst. GM who the Brand character was loosely modeled after, was a failure as Dodgers GM 2004-06.

Because at 31 he had none of the skills needed to be a GM. It was no failure of sabremetrics.

Knowing a lot about statistical analysis gives you none of the business and baseball skills needed need to be a GM. Otherwise they’d be recruiting GMs out of math departments. If you have the skills to be a GM, then adding the statistical knowledge makes you a better one.

There’s one scene in Moneyball were Beane gets on the phone with the Mets Steve Phillips and robs Phillips blind in a trade. Personally outmaneuvers him in negotiations and gamesmanship. That illustrated the fundamental GM skills that made Beane who he is and Phillips a TV commentator (until he lost that job too). They don’t teach those in econometrics class.

The Moneyball philosophy is moving into the NFL too, where the top practitioners are Bill Belichick (’nuff said) who has a degree in economics, and Lions coach Jim Schwartz, who’s doing a very impressive job lifting a perpetual cellar-dwelling team up into the light. So on the evidence it helps an NFL coach to be a stat head. But being a stat head does not in any way qualify one to be an NFL coach, obviously.