[Cracked Sidewalks] ‘The Moneyball Myth’ strikes out; A's finish 43 1/2 games ahead of next best poor team for decade as Brewers clinch home field

[CrackedSidewalksSays]

‘The Moneyball Myth’ strikes out; A's finish 43 1/2 games ahead of next best poor team for decade as Brewers clinch home field

Written by: jpudner@concentricgrasstops.com (bamamarquettefan1)

The Wall Street Journal’s criticism of ‘Moneyball’ has similarities to criticisms of some responding to the ESPN piece on my Value Add system.  Whatever the sport, some just don’t buy the stat revolution.

In celebration of the Brewers clinching home field for the playoffs tonight, I wanted to unite with my baseball colleagues in the world of stat geeks.  Since the A's turned to Sabermatrix to replace superstars Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen and Johnny Damon after the 2001 season as portrayed in 'Moneyball,' they have gone 852-767 - at least 43 1/2 games better than any of the other 14 teams with below-median salaries:


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Lowest 15 SalariesWinsLossesGB[/tr]

Oakland Athletics	852	767	0
Toronto Blue Jays	809	811	43.5
Florida Marlins	808	812	44.5
Houston Astros	799	820	53
Arizona Diamondbacks	787	833	65.5
Cleveland Indians	784	836	68.5
San Diego Padres	775	846	78
Milwaukee Brewers	773	846	79
Cincinnati Reds	770	851	83
Seattle Mariners	758	862	94.5
Tampa Bay Rays	750	868	101.5
Washington Nationals	726	893	126
Baltimore Orioles	696	923	156
Pittsburgh Pirates	679	938	172
Kansas City Royals	668	952	184.5

As in basketball, the doubts of stat critics just don't usually hold up - we really can know with pretty good precision that DJO, Jae Crowder and Davante Gardner are three of the top returning players in the country, and Billy Beane knew what he was doing with the A's.

Strike 1 against the stat critics â€" not much difference between Yankees and Pirates?
The 1st strike against the WSJ criticism of ‘Moneyball’ is the claim Beane’s 103-win season on a meager payroll wasn’t that big a deal because the disparity isn’t that great between the Yankees and the “so called poorer ones like the Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals, Minnesota Twins and Oakland A’s.”  

FACTS:  The Oakland A’s team featured in the ‘Moneyball’ movie was the only of the 150 poor teams of the decade to win 100 games â€" coming in at 103 wins â€" while the Phillies just became the 11th rich team to reach 100 wins.  Overall rich teams have been 3.5 times as likely to make the playoffs.   This year six more rich teams made the playoffs to make it 62 teams in 10 years, while the Brewers became only the 17th poor team to make it and Tampa Bay became the 18th team to make the playoffs late tonight.

Strike 2 â€" The drop in OBP from .333 to .323 since 2001 shows 'Moneyball' hasn’t worked.
When everyone else had given up on David Justice and Scott Hatteberg, Beane picked them both up cheap because no one realized how many runs they could create based partly on their high on-base percentages.  The article proposes that if ‘Moneyball’ had worked, then there would be higher on-base percentages throughout baseball.

FACTS: That completely ignores that Beane applied the same theory to pitchers, having lightly regarded Chad Bradford take the mound an incredible 75 games because he only issued about one unintentional walk for every nine innings.  Likewise, when Billy Koch issued too many walks during his 'Moneyball' season, Beane gave up his 100 mph fastball for Keith Foulke’s 87 mph fastball but better control the next year.  Foulke finished 7th in voting for the Cy Young Award before leaving for more money like the other A’s stars.  'Moneyball' era pitchers who throw fewer balls are trumping ‘Moneyball’ era batters who have better eyes for the strike zone â€" no evidence here to discredit 'Moneyball.'

Strike 3 â€" Little space is given in ‘Moneyball’ to the fantastic pitching of Mark Mulder, Barry Zito and Tim Hudson.
Let me get this straight.  The A's had six great stars on the 2001 team.  Three of them leave and three stay (Mulder, Zito and Hudson), and you win more games without the three stars that left (Giambi, Damon and Isringhausen).  Why would the story focus on the three stars that stayed?  The anti-stat guys are really grasping for straws at this point.

FACTS:  The amazing feat was replacing the three stars the A’s could NOT afford to keep.  Jason Isringhausen (2.65 ERA, 34 saves), Jason Giambi (.342 BA, 38 HRs) and leadoff hitter Johnny Damon (34 doubles, 27 SBs) left to get an average of $33 million a year between them each of the next seven years â€" the same amount of money Beane had TOTAL for all 25 players in 2001.  The fact is that Beane had to replace these three stars with two players that the other teams thought were washed up - Justice and Hatteberg â€" as well as the lightly-regarded Bradford and a rented leadoff hitter in Ray Durham for the last 52 games of the season.  And after replacing superstars with leftovers, he improved the A’s to 103-59.

Conclusion
As I’ve stated in previous posts, systems like Value Add in basketball and Runs Created in baseball are precise measurements that weight stats to give a very accurate measurement of how much players help their teams win games by affecting the score.  There are things that cannot be measured, but modern teams cannot ignore these measurements as a big part of determine who should play, and in the pros be traded, etc.

The fact is that as much as other baseball insiders apparently despise Beane, they all have stat guys trying to duplicate what he does â€" determining how valuable each player is based on their statistics.  No, modern stats will not guaranty you win a best-of-five playoff series, which Bobby Cox once called a “crap shoot,” but it will increase your chances dramatically of earning the right to be there after 162 games.  

The one legitimate point raised by critics is that the science is much less accurate when trying to translate the performance of high school prospects to how they will perform at the next level.  This is true, but the same point could be made about how much less accurate baseball scouts throughout history have been compared to their counterparts in other major sports where speed and strength are so paramount.

To this same end, I would never suggest that some of the measurements I’ve played with of high school players are nearly accurate enough to guide recruiting decisions.  Davante Gardner did not play against top flight competition in Suffolk, VA, so he probably would not show up as a top prospect based on pure statistical conversions, and many of Beane’s draft choices did not pan out as the translation from aluminum bats to wooden bats changes the entire game.

It’s fair to hang bad draft picks like Jeremy Brown on Beane, but traditional scouting passed over Mike Piazza for 61 rounds and Keith Hernandez for 41 rounds, and even more recently has had several No. 1 overall picks that never panned out.

However, the overall record of Bill James statistics helping to deliver the Red Sox their first two World Series in 86 years, and Beane so outperforming all other poorer teams makes it clear that Hollywood rather than the WSJ have it right â€" so go watch the movie.  But you can read the Wall Street Journal too â€" even the best strikeout once in a while.

Good luck Brewers - and try to complete the sweep of the NL Championship Series on October 13 so that everyone can still go to March Madness on Friday, October 14!

http://www.crackedsidewalks.com/2011/09/moneyball-myth-strikes-out-as-finish-43.html

[lab_warrior]

Awesome read; again, great work.  I always like Beane's line, "My s*** doesn't work in the playoffs."  Really, it doesn't work, because there aren't enough games (not enough significant sample size, so you can get "anomalies").  Even in the most epic collapse ever, the 3-0 rally by the RedSox in '04, the runs between the two teams:  45-41 Yankees with the slight edge--BUT, they scored 19 in one game.  Oops.

Also, it helps to have 3 horses pitching for you like Zito, Mulder, and Hudson (also, see '10 Giants w/Lincecum, Cain, Bumgartner, and '88 Dodgers with Herchiser, Herschiser, and Herschiser)  PITCHING MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER.

[Buzz Williams' Spillproof Chiclets Cup]

The other thing to remember is that the Moneyball A's play the AL West, so in the regular season, they're really not competing against the Yankees and Red Sox other than 2 weeks worth of games combined.

So boiled down, Moneyball is the Cinderella story about how the small-market Oakland A's beat out those traditional powerhouse big-market teams like the Texas Rangers and the Seattle Mariners to....NOT go to the World Series...

[karavotsos]

‘The Moneyball Myth’ strikes out; A's finish 43 1/2 games ahead of next best poor team for decade as Brewers clinch home field


As in basketball, the doubts of stat critics just don't usually hold up - we really can know with pretty good precision that DJO, Jae Crowder and Davante Gardner are three of the top returning players in the country, and Billy Beane knew what he was doing with the A's.

What I will say is this: Moneyball is about getting additional value because you cannot just get the guys who everyone sees as the best.  So if you're not Duke or UNC, you do not get the best recruits.  You have to do other things to be the best.  Therefore, figuring out the best returning players are does not seem to be a valuable exercise to me unless you can project it backward to traits that the players had at the high school or prep school or JC level that made them valuable to your team.

Additionally, any stat that ranks Gardner as one of the best returning players in the nation cannot be worth all that much.  This is a guy who could not stay on the floor in a number of games because of the style of play that other teams played.  I can recall specifically Louisville and Notre Dame.  Louisville doubled too quickly off the perimeter for Gardner to use his post moves and ND was obviously too perimeter-oriented for Gardner to be on the floor.  There were others in BE play, but those are the two that stand out the most to me.  The best players can play against anyone.

I am not saying that Gardner will not be a great player for MU next year.  However, if he is, it is because he has both continued to transform his body and diversify his game.  If Gardner is simply a year more experienced version of what he was last year, he will not be one of the best returning players. 

I think MU is good because, as Buzz and the players point out, MU has a great training staff that works with guys to get them physically prepared.  Also, Buzz recruits his guys -- hard workers- blue plate specials- who are going to go through boot camp.  Additionally, MU appears to have fairly sophisticated scouting reports, incorporating whatever the name of that video service is.  You scout a teams tendencies and play smart that way.  All of these things help.  That seems to be the Moneyball of the MU situation to me.

Finally, I will continue to be an advanced stats bball skeptic until advanced stats rank Kemba above Jordan Taylor.

[Jay Bee]

Haven't read it all yet, but what strikes me right away is that I don't like the grouping, which (haven't done the math) I fear may have been done based on total cumulative dollars vs. a weighted average of where organizations were each year, individually, in comparison to other (which would be more appropriate for this analysis).  

The result is that the A's get praised with the 43 1/2 games ahead figure while Minnesota, who has been in the bottom half of all teams for each years except the past two (including this year's 99 loss season) is disregarded.  Quick math... I'm coming up with Minnesota having 866 victories compared to the A's 852 (MN did play a couple of extra games).  Again, this includes the 11 games Minnesota lost from their lead on Oakland this season, when the Twins had their highest payroll of all-time individually and relative to other teams in the decade you're looking at.

Blasphemy!  

[CTWarrior]

those traditional powerhouse big-market teams like the Texas Rangers and the Seattle Mariners to....NOT go to the World Series...

Baseball is a different animal from other sports because not only does the best not always win, they usually don't win.  When you look at baseball since the 8 team playoffs, the best team probably doesn't win much more than 1 out of 8.  Contrast that to basketball where the best NBA team probably wins 75% of the time. 

When Beane says his S%*& doesn't work in the playoffs, it means that it is back to random at that point.  Moneyball probably gave his ego a nice boost, but it really hurt him, because it accelerated the other teams jumping on the bandwagon and smart and rich beats smart and poor.

As for the relationship to basketball, I think the analytical community is in its relative infancy.  Baseball is pretty straightforward in measurements, since it really an individual game within a team concept.  When a flyball is hit to CF it doesn't matter how good the SS is to determine whether or not the ball will be caught.  When you're hitting against a pitcher, it doesn't matter how good the other guys on your team are, at least not to a great extent.

In basketball, however, so much of a players success or failure is directly linked to those playing with him.  Big men need guards to get them the ball, guards need passing options to open up lanes, etc.  Separating all of that to determine the true value of a player is much more difficult.

[PuertoRicanNightmare]

Superbar?

[WI inferiority Complexes]

I always go to Cracked Sidewalks for my MLB coverage.

[Bob "Big Daddy" Wild]

I just did a case study on moneyball.  Hakes and Sauer, two economists, looked at the data from baseball for the 5 years leading up to the release of moneyball, and for the year after moneyball was released.

If you look at the data, you can see that the explanatory value of extra wins derived from an increase in OBP (both offensive and defensive) is about double that of slugging %.  However, the pay scale for the two metrics was completely opposite.

The most interesting thing (IMO) was the year after moneyball came out, pay scale for OBP players jumped and much closer to an additional unit of slugging.  What does that imply?  That other GMs started to incorporate Bean's model into their talent evaluations.

For any nerds out there like me: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.20.3.173

[Jay Bee]

I just did a case study on moneyball...other GMs started to incorporate Bean's model into their talent evaluations.

I think you mean Beane.  Billy Bean also has a model for evaluating talent but it's quite different than Billy Beane's.  If you'd like to do a case study on Bean's evaluation techniques, hang out with ZFB on one of his trips to La Cage.

[oldwarrior81]

for the past 5 seasons (2007-2011) the A's opening day payrolls have averaged 23rd in MLB (a little over $61.5 million annually).

Their W-L record over the same 5 seasons has them 24th.

[bamamarquettefan]

Finally, I will continue to be an advanced stats bball skeptic until advanced stats rank Kemba above Jordan Taylor.

LOL - I need that line to get away from all the Big East news.

I decided when I wrote this I was making my case, and I wouldn't go back through the point by point when those of you who don't agree made your points back.

Enjoyed reading them all though and couldn't help responding to that sentence - I agree!

Unfortunately my rule is that if I set up something like Value Add that I run the numbers and print them however they sort - I can't tweak!

However, the fact that the formula's first sort showed it put Kemba and Fredette No. 2 and 3 seemed to indicate it was a pretty accurate read. 

But yes, I will go to confession for producing something that gave media outlets an excuse to run a photo of Jordan Taylor (SI) and then JJ Redick (ESPN) photos on their pages.  Uggghhhhh!

[karavotsos]

But yes, I will go to confession for producing something that gave media outlets an excuse to run a photo of Jordan Taylor (SI) and then JJ Redick (ESPN) photos on their pages.  Uggghhhhh!

This made me happy to read.  The JJ Redick picture and ranking made me go back and watch the 2004 UConn-Duke Final Four game.  I wanted to see if Redick appeared that much better offensively than his counterpart, Ben Gordon.  Hard to tell.  Neither of them had great games.  Gordon had that sneaky quickness to get around his man, but his mid-range game wasn't really on.  Neither he or Redick were great at finishing around the hole from what I saw and from what I remember.  The game itself is a great game.  I will continue to argue or nitpick at basketball advanced stats, fully realizing that I am doing so from the point of view of the knuckle-dragging neanderthal arguing against the wheel and the fork.


I think the

[buckchuckler]

I think Billy Beane and his moneyball stuff are completely over rated.  The guys that are highlighted as "moneyball" guys aren't the guys that made the difference.  During their playoff runs they had Jason Giambi, Jermaine Dye, Johnny Damon, Eric Chavez and Miguel Tejada (Chavez and Tejada were the only ones there the whole time but they were both 30/100 guys).  And as was mentioned, they also had 3 pitchers that could pretty much have made any team a competitor in Hudon, Zito, and Mulder. 

Certainly there is some value in the concept, but really?  Its the same story as ever.  Pitching.

[MountainCreekHouse]

What a stupid post for a basketball blog put up

[Skatastrophy]

What a stupid post for a basketball blog put up

It's a defense of the statistical methods being applied to basketball and baseball.  More specifically defending the recent use of those statistics in CrackedSidewalks college basketball analysis.  It's a very appropriate post for CS.