I read yesterday's comments, and it was interesting to see everyone else's take on the book. I, for one, don't think the book is flawed. Not at any time does it say that Billy Beane is God and that the process of eliminating the inefficiencies of the game in this manner is the end-all and be-all of the game as we know it.

I think someone pointed out the delicate balance between the traditional masher and the OPSer is necessary to maintain in order to achieve true success; a great example is the 2004 Boston Red Sox (aka Oakland Athletics with lots of cash).

Just this afternoon I picked the book up again and flipped to a random page, which happened to have a small table of the A's players and the percentage of pitches outside of the strike zone that each player swung at. How can you tell me that taking this concept into account is flawed? I think that's dead on.

While I do believe that Lewis could easily be accused (and perhaps rightfully so) of being a buttkisser because he simply got the opportunity to kick it with the A's front office, I was impressed after being able to get past the gobbeltygook.

A recommended book for your reading pleasure - Alan Schwartz, a writer for ESPN, wrote a book called "The Numbers Game". It contains lots of nifty and gadgety numbers concepts that many individuals over the years have done for baseball, and some of the concepts he discusses are really interesting and insightful. While it takes more of a historical perspective as opposed to a technical one, I definitely recommend giving it a look-see.

I'm not al the way through yet, but I got two feelings from the book almost immediately:

1) The point of the 'psychology of statistics' that is emphasised a few times really led me to feel that Beane's methodology somewhat evolved from his own attempt to statistically evaluate his own failure as a player - almost as if he found a statistical formula to show the world that he was in fact a flawed ballplayer from the start, and it was those dumb scouts' fault for not realizing that.

2) It's somewhat amazing that a guy who so holistically evaluates trends and numbers representing player performance would hire Art Howe to manage - Art being the ultimate gut-feeling, old school ideology manager, and an asscrap manager at that. Watching Art eschew all knowledge of the Twins pure inability to hit left- handed pitching a couple years back and lead off their division series with righty Tim Hudson and not one of the big lefties was both brutal and delightfully amusing as a Twins fan. Howe was a horrible helmsman for such a systematic operation.

Billy Beane 4 Pope!

Wow, I knew Batgirl was ahead of her time but how did she post this article at:

Posted by Batgirl at April 20, 2005 08:38 AM

Its only 8:02 AM on the 19th in my world. No wonder she's so smart - she's a day ahead of us all. No there's a talent Billy or (even better) T Ryan could use.

I think that one of the points that is lost in all of discussion about the specifics of the Oakland case, is that in addition to franchises with fewer financial resources having to be smarter with the resources they have, they need to stick to an institutional model of some sort. Sure, the Twins rely of fewer statistical tools/more traditional scouting than the Athletics do, but all of the decisions made in the Terry Ryan era have been made with a few Twins' institutional policies in mind, namely (and these are purely my subjective descriptions):

1)only take kids who can play defense and who have reputations as hard workers
2)when in doubt, draft based on signability first, talent second (Mauer vs. Prior)
3)don't give up on players early (e.g., Lew, who barely saw duty with the Twins before he was 26/27)
4)stockpile pitchers because their success/failure is much harder to predict than position players

and so on.... Obviously, the A's (OPS), Yankees ($), BoSox ($ + bloody sock), and Braves (pitching + Jane Fonda) have different institutional philosophies, but the point is, those teams have won (at least in the regular season) consistently because they have a model that they don't deviate significantly from. This is stark contrast to say, the Brewers who have no plan beyond 7th inning sausage races, and the Bitchsox, who manage to endure long periods of suckage in spite of the 5th highest payroll in the league. Also, as noted by TD, it does help to have a manager who isn't George Bush-dumb in charge of otherwise capable players (for two other recent examples, see Little, Grady; Bowa, Larry).

Pitching + Jane Fonda. He he! That makes me laugh....

Moneyball works best when it's trying to be journalism.

When it's trying to be "the revealed word of God" it fails.

Not even Bill James thinks sabermetrics explains all of baseball.

As the Benedictines taught me - balance in all things...

(Sorry for the double religion references. No dogmatic inferences should be drawn.)

I think the story of Moneyball worked a lot better than the crusade of Moneyball. By which I mean, the narrative of how Billy Beane changed the way the A's (and to a certain extent, the fans and some folks in other organizations) evaluate players and prospects was more solid than the way it tried to urge that system as a pattern-card for all of baseball.

What Beane did inside the A's organization was great. Revolutionary, in many ways. It's something other organizations (Twins included) can and should learn from. And the story of how Billy Beane became the man who could and would do all those things was fascinating, but I don't think Lewis examined Beane's system critically enough. He didn't seem to even try to find the holes, much less to explore them and balance his analysis.

Lewis is a "true believer", that's obvious. Which is fine, and his enthusiasm is certainly infectious, but personally I thought that a more thorough examination of the results of Beane's changes could have elevated Moneyball from "great story with interesting ideas" to "real baseball classic".

MoneyBall works as a book in bringing the statistics side of things a little more accessible to the average person. I like statistics, but I didn't necessarily understand some of them-how they were calculated and what they meant. I agree with ThatsRich, that when they're giving the journalism side--the facts--it works very well. When they start worshipping at the church of Billy Beane, it gets annoying.

I enjoy the knowledge of how they do it. It's fascinating. It's a good way to work out a ballclub with low money. It's a good way to run a ballclub efficiently even if you have money. It's not the only and bestest way in the whole world to run any ballclub. And Billy Beane isn't perfect.

I'm always of the thought that gut instinct can sometimes be a strong indicator. It only gets you in trouble when you hold so strong to it even in the face of long-term failure. But that's for tomorrow's discussion, I think.

I'll apologize in advance if anyone has noted this already, but a couple months back Baseball America posted a really interesting "summit" discussion, moderated by Alan Schwarz, between two prominent baseball people from the scouting world and two leading "statheads."

Here's the link: http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/features/050107debate.html

All four admitted to some instinctual hostility for "the other side," but they also readily acknowledged the value, and even the necessity, of both approaches. The statheads, for instance, are quick to point out that high school performance numbers might mean nothing without some sense of the level of competition the player faced. And the scouts concede that they look at the numbers sent out from their teams' central offices.

It's a great piece that I think points the way toward what baseball organizations really will look like in 20 years' time. There will always be a place for scouts, and the metrics of performance analysis likely will become more and more refined, with greater predictive power.

I read the ESPN discussion that Jeffstoned referred to. It is pretty interesting to read.

The JP Riccardi method of firing the entire scouting dept seems far too reactionary and I would predict if the Blue Jays continue down that line they will never be all that successful.

I think the point about an institutional philosophy is right on. It's also worth considering the Great Man theory of success. I think it applies to baseball and the success of certain individuals within the game. The A's are successful b/c Billy Beane is a really good GM. The Twins are successful b/c Terry Ryan is a really good GM. Both men have several really talented people working for them. These two organizations have a great management team. As opposed to the White Sox who seem to have a terrible management team.

A good way to evaluate the abilities of GMs is to look at trades they approve. Terry Ryan, in my mind, has made better trades than anyone else in the game right now. Billy Beane too has made some pretty good trades. The Keith Foulke trade with the White Sox where he essentially dealt one terrible closer for a really good one. Again, to pick on the White Soxs, they have made consistently terrible trades. Most GMs have made some good trades and some poor trades. And I believe that's b/c most GMs are pretty good. Some are great. Some are terrible.

The same is true of on the field managers too I believe. Tony LaRussa is a great manager. And if you doubt that, look at the consistent success teams have had with him as their manager. After he left the A's, they were a significantly worse team. I have little doubt that if Billy Beane left the A's, they would suffer again, b/c whoever replaced him would not be as talented.

In the end, Beane is an exceptionally talented manager who took advantage of tools that others probably didn't use as much. Terry Ryan, on the other hand, is an exceptionally talented manager who took tools that have been more widespread and refined them.

I like Michael Lewis as a writer and some of the posts have reminded me of some absolutely wonderful scenes in MoneyBall. I think one of my favorite chapters was about the Sabermetrics guy who was working as a floor guy at the Chicago Merc Exchange and in his spare time devised this revolutionary system for evaluating pitchers which Beane stumbled upon and employeed to get Chad Bradford in a trade. The chapter on Scott Hatteberg is great as well. And the entire early part of the book about Billy Beane as a baseball player is riveting. The scene where Lenny Dykstra has never heard of Steve Carlton. How great is that?

I recommend Liar's Poker as well. If you ever want to know who it is spending all our 401k's and just how big of aholes they are, that book is the magna carta.

I too found Lewis's attitude towards "the establishment" rather grating. Most people in baseball management (personnel people, scouts, and coaches; not owners) played baseball professionally. I think it's safe to assume people who play baseball professionally possess extremely competitive natures, being weaned in the zero-sum environment of the game where one player's success directly results in the other's failure and all. I just find it difficult believing they'd value platitudes and Copenhagen over finding ways to win games. Especially considering their job security hinges on their on-field success (defined differently for different teams).

That's not to say every coach, scout, and GM who's ever worked in the game is a veritable Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, or Whitey Herzog clone. On the contrary, most of us here can easily and quickly name a bunch of duds in management in today's game. (The previous Batgirl book club selection--Ball Four--had a good illustration of one with pitching coach Sal Maglie, the inveterate second-guesser.) And of course, there's plenty of history out there that suggests the establishment will sometimes place winning secondary to other concerns (for instance, even after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby demonstrated what black players were capable of at the major-league level, several teams still stalled for years before integrating.)

I guess what I'm saying is I agree with Batgirl's assessment that Lewis holds too much of a black-and-white perspective on this issue. That may be partly intentional, considering the audience he and his editor perhaps had in mind. But there's plenty of people from the "traditional" side of the game--the side we sense Lewis would like to see dissolved for good--that do extremely well. To write about a success story like the A's and then jump to the conclusion that it's the only reasonable choice is absurd when there are alternatives such as the Braves and the Twins out there.

The Cardinals have elected a Pope!

We now return to our regularly scheduled discussion.

what they really need is another starter and a catcher with some pop, but I guess a Pope will do..

What's interesting about Ricciardi and Toronto is that this year he has raved about the Twins process as a model to emulate. So he apparently has backed off his extreme approach a tad.

With regard to the scouting, I think what Beane would prefer is that scouts not project what could happen, but rely more on already observed phenomena. Look for kids who already have a wicked changeup, ala Johan K., not hope some kid will fill out and throw 95 mph ten years down the road.

I loved Moneyball, and I respect Beane's approach to the game via the economic inefficiency route, but I do think scouts can have a huge place in the game. Obviously the Twins scouts have figured out what makes for a successful ballplayer.

What gets overlooked is the reason behind this move for Oakland. It's not the only way to do things, but for Oakland it was the economically necessary way. They didn't have the owner commitment to gamble with high school pitchers, so they signed people they knew could perform at a higher level of competition. It's really an approach based on eliminating as much risk as possible via an extremely mathematical perspective, rather than the end all of approaches.

While Beane probably is a bit of a Charleyhead about his success, he's a former baseball player. Aren't they all to some degree?

I don't really know about LaRussa being a great manager. The BitchSox got better the year after he left in 86, the A's got better in 96 after he left, and finally the reason the Cards got better in 96, his first year is the rotation they had that year the difference is ridiculous. Horrible staff in 95 Mark Petkovsek was one of the aces in 95 in 96 they had the Benes boys. Also, they had Eck who was old but still good as their closer with Larussa. As for the A's winning with LaRussa that is like the Yankees winning today. They had one of the highest payrolls if not the highest, they some of the biggest stars in the game, Canseco, McGwire, Eck, Dave Stewart etc. Then in for the last three years they were under .500. Finally, how many world series has Larussa won, 1. He should have won three with the A's in the 90's. He has also been to the playoffs with the Cards five times, but only one WS appearance and everyone in the world knows how that went, just ask a Red Sox fan. I credit Sandy Alderson and the old A's owner, Haas I think his name was, don't have my Moneyball at work. They put that team together, Alderson getting quality guys and the owner willing to lose money every year to put out a winning team. That is the kind of owner every team deserves. And if you don't think you can lose money every year owning a baseball team and then come out ahead in the end look at Steinbrenner in NY. He bought the team for $10 mill in 1973. That's half a Jeter. The team is worth what $1 bill or more. He could have lost close to $33 mill/yr and still come out even to this point. And know I don't like the Yankees just wish that the boss owned my team instead of the idiot Wilpon family.

To answer BG's question: As a book, I think it works great.

Lewis marshals his facts to produce a compelling story. He became infatuated with Beane, no doubt, but he believes Beane is right even aside from his non-sexual man-crush.

Does it get too strident? Yes. Does it ignore other possibilities? Sure. (As one other poster put it, the real trick is to pick a strategy, get really good at it, and ram it down your opponents' throats. A scouting-dominant approach can work just as well if you can do it better than everybody else.)

But if I wanted to read "on the one hand this, one the other hand that," I'd go back and read those undergraduate political science texts I should've donated to Goodwill years ago.

metsfan said: "He bought the team for $10 mill in 1973. That's half a Jeter. The team is worth what $1 bill or more. He could have lost close to $33 mill/yr and still come out even to this point."

Not exactly. If he lost 33 million bucks a year, the team probably wouldn't be worth a billion dollars. I think I understand what you are saying, and I wonder how you feel about the new regime over there. Forget 0-5, and the ensuing 6-0. How do you feel about what they are trying to put together over there? Does it fit in with any overall strategy? Moneyball maybe (Beltran is expensive...but is he worth the cash from a Moneyball perspective?)

YankeeFan

This is great discussion! Lewis is great at selecting subjects with enormous depth. When you first read Moneyball, the 2 sides (traditional and sabermetric) seem so at odds that there is no way to mesh them. Many teams either do just that, or at least try (even though they don't understand).

After playing a lot of baseball under many different coaches, I think I can sum some of these strategies up and mesh the sabermetric values with the traditional ideals.

Outlining it all here, will take up way too much room though. I'm going to post it at my blog, but PLEASE - by all means - read all the Bat-Girl content your heart desires... then if you're curious about 'how' players actually 'play baseball' under the sabermetric philosophy... head over to my website at:

http://twins.mostvaluablenetwork.com

Excerpt:

"Know yourself and your happy zone.
Be comfortable hitting with 2 strikes.
Be patient and make the pitcher challenge you on your terms.
and finally be alert to what he's doing with hitters.

Now this doesn't say - always try to walk, or take a bunch of pitches to run up his pitch count. It's more about getting a pitch you are looking for - and knowing when/where you can look for it."

I was thinking more about Moneyball today and some of the strategy specific things talked about in the book and in this discussion.

Specifically, I was thinking about the role of relievers and relief pitching. It seems extremely contradicatory to me in that I think relief pitching is a huge part of the overall success or failure of a baseball team, both in the regular season and especially in the postseason, yet individual relief pitchers are overvalued and as free agents usually poor investments.

Why, for instance, do some teams have good bullpens and others such bad bullpens? What I thought was this is likely highly correlated with the defensive ability of a team. All the teams that are considered to be good defensively tend to also have good bullpens, and the inverse seems to be true as well. Who were the teams with the best bullpens last year? I would say the Twins, the Angels, the Red Sox, the Yankees and the Rangers in the American League. All those teams had very good to great defensive teams in late inning situations (ironically the Red Sox, the team that won everything probably had the worst defense). And what team in baseball exemplified the sucking hole that a bad bullpen can be last year? From my observation that was clearly the Chicago Cubs whose bullpen was as bad as could be last year. What else was terrible on that Cubs team last year? The defense.

But what is the causal relationship? I suspect it has to do with the importance of good defense in situations where a pitcher is getting three outs or six out at the most, while a starter is typically going to be responsible for, hopefully, about 18 outs in a game. Over six innings a couple great defensive plays might keep the score down but a pitcher who is struggling will probably get hit his 2nd or 3rd time through a lineup. But when it's three outs, a good defense seems important.

This might also explain why established relief pitchers are bad investments as free agents or in trades. B/c maybe what makes them good is partially the defense behind them and change that defense and the guy who looked great for the Twins (lets call him the Hawk) suddenly looks terrible for the Cubs.

All this relates to Moneyball b/c it seems Billy Beane figured this out, and probably so did Terry Ryan. And looking back it seems the Atlanta Braves were always good at letting relief pitchers go to other teams where that pitcher was not nearly as good as when he had Andruw Jones in Center field.

Having read most of Mr. Lewis' other books as well, I've long admired his skill in writing personality profiles - he's one of the best we have at doing that kind of thing. If he has a literary calling card, it's finding great real-life characters, stringing together a great story, and adding just enough controversy to sell the book. (He's also a decent satirist, if you've read any of his freelance columns.)

I think he was wise to frame Moneyball as a faux-religious argument - mostly because that's the only thing that'll register with many baseball fans... and the book's status as a lightning rod has kept it from being just another blow-by-blow baseball tome that nobody bought (ever seen the book notes in the back of Sports Weekly? There are at least 20 published every month!). Lewis probably learned how to pull this off from Bill James, come to think of it.

Plus, he espoused Tabitha Soren. I will always stand by my brethren in the Int'l Brotherhood Of Dudes Who Married Redheads.

This focus on stats keeps bring me back to to these numbers:
LOB-10 + GIDP-3 = Twins Loss.
Let hope for some clutch hitting tonight.

HAHAHAHA

Charleyhead...love that.

For all the BB worship in Moneyball, I still enjoyed reading it. It was not a difficult read, even if the man-love was suffocating at times. But even in the worshipful prose, I did notice that Lewis did write about a few of Beane's weaknesses/weak moments. If Lewis had omitted that content, the book would have nearly been unreadable to me, in that, I could not have "bought" Billy Beane as perfect man and GM.

I don't understand how everyone keeps up with this. By the time of day that I have time to check in and do my reading it takes me until bedtime to reach the end of the thread, and then I am many column inches beyond the specific posts I wanted to respond to. At least I'm not swinging at the first pitch.

There was a passing reference yesterday that got no admiration, but should have. It went like this: "And is 'through-the-roof ceiling' an oxymoron?" Answer: It might be, but more importantly, I lived in a house with one of those, and I got very wet.

Stylistically, Michael Lewis reminds me a lot of Tracy Kidder ("Soul of the New Machine," "Among Schoolchildren," "House," etc. Each time he gets inside the world of someone else -- computer designer, architect, elementary teacher -- and recreates the essence of that life, area, or profession in a way that gets you engaged with the mindset, the issues, the challenges, and what ultimately works and doesn't. Kidder and Lewis are both excellent at conveying "inside" stuff in a way that makes compelling reading, even if you don't initially think you'd be interested in the topic.

I think that the difference is that Lewis had more of a pre-determined agenda than Kidder normally does. He suspected, or probably knew, in advance that wheeling and dealing in the baseball market had a lot in common with Wall Street, and in Billy Beane he saw an unconventional player who appealed to him in the same way that certain stock market operators managed to win without unlimited resources. His pre-determined message isn't a bad thing, and he was essentially correct in his advance judgment; but the reader should be aware that this author was going to find what he was looking for. He was going to select and emphasize the elements of the story that distinguished Beane as a paragon of smarter-than-anyone-else "virtue" in baseball.

It seemed to me that Lewis was so taken with Beane that in his writing the narrator and subject become indistinguishable from each other. That is, in large part, why so many readers and non-readers think of it as Beane's book.

Someone way back in yesterday's thread admired Beane's humility. Really? I'm going to have to re-read the book several times to find that one. Granted that he learned from his own failings as a "can't miss" player, but then he became very proud of what he had learned and become, at least if Lewis's characterization of him belittling the fat scout and other general managers are accurate. I don't have any other real source of information on the man to balance against that. Does he have much to be proud of? No doubt.

If someone hasn't had their fill of this discussion already, there was a similar thread on the DTFC Minnesota Twins forum last summer that covered much of the same ground, but with more of a focus on comparing the Oakland and Minnesota approaches. It's still there at:
http://p216.ezboard.com/fdtfcdtfcminnesotatwinsforum.showMessage?topicID=3815.topic
or http://tinyurl.com/create.php

I'd second the motion for a subsequent discussion of Alan Schwarz's "The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics."

Chicagofan:"The JP Riccardi method of firing the entire scouting dept seems far too reactionary and I would predict if the Blue Jays continue down that line they will never be all that successful."

I think the whole Toronto firing all the scouts thing was slightly overblown as well. Riccardi fired alot of scouts, but not all of them, and he did so because he thought the scouting department in Toronto had gotten bloated and wasn't doing a very efficient job. He has also hired scouts of his own since joining the Jays, and the firing of old scouts and hiring of new scouts is pretty standard when a new GM comes in. Not that I think he's done a great job in Toronto, but he gets a bad rap as a guy that hates scouts when I don't think that's ever been the case (maybe someone can correct me, but I thought his background in baseball was originally scouting?)

Chicagofan: "I would say the Twins, the Angels, the Red Sox, the Yankees and the Rangers in the American League."

I think the Yankees defense was pretty bad last year though. And the Red Sox defense was also bad throughout most of the year (until they added Mienkiewixcistlskd and Cabrera).

But I think team defense has a significant impact on pitcher performance (take a look at some of Voros McCrakens work on defense independent pitching and the work that has followed for some stats that try to eliminate defense from the equation, which is mentioned in the book).