Moneyball...

Author: Michael Lewis
Rating: 9

Moneyball is a behind the scenes look at baseball's Oakland Athletics during the 2002 playing season. The intriguing statistic about the A's is they finished both the 2000 and 2001 season with the lowest payroll and yet had one of the best records in baseball.

What Oakland does is two things - Billy Beane has to be one of the shrewdest negotiators in all of baseball and secondly they bust the prejudices rooted in baseball tradition.

Those prejudices are the ability to run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power - what's knows as the "tools". Those prejudices are put into place by the scouts - the scouts have traditionally been the heart of the game deciding who gets to play and in turn one could say that how the game of baseball is played is really an image of the scouts mental picture of what a ball player should be.

The Billy Beane story is of itself a widely fascinating story of a kid who had all the traditional "tools" but couldn't make the mental leap into pro baseball because he didn't know how to fail. He was always the star, it came easy, so when he struggled a wall came down between him and his talent that led to big league disaster as he struggled at the plate - spectacular one moment, awful the next which typically unraveled into a mess. In 1990, he left the field and walked into the front office and chose to retire and be a scout.

Then a series of events happened - in 1995 the A's were sold to businessmen who wanted to run the team as a business. Starting in 1993 the teams GM started a bit of a scientific experiment concluding that batting average didn't correlate to the team score, but that on base percentage and slugging percentage did. Those two events produced a system whereby scoring runs was a process that could be built with efficiency (payroll to runs scored in a season) in order for the A's to run as an effective business. Billy Beane ran with that mantra and started to look for undervalued minor league and amateur players.

One of the most intriguing phenoms of baseball is the draft and the treatment of amateur players. Once selected, a player's rights is with that team for 7 years (if in the minors) and up to 6 years (if in the majors). Therefore the draft becomes critical in locking in a low salary high performing workhorse (which is how players are looked at in professional sports).

What Oakland looks for in a draftee - number of walks (ability to control the strike zone), on base percentage, pitches seen per plate appearance. College players and not high school. In other words they break the prejudice by not looking at the physical player, but by what they have done to provide offense. They draft ballplayers (not stars or might be's).

An interesting tidbit - win with nobodies - the fans show up - the nobodies become stars - lose with stars - the fans stay home - the stars become nobodies - assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games and watching them become stars - priceless

The system is more important than the individual - baseball players are fungible - on-base percentage and slugging percentage are the keys to winning and can be used to predict a winning season - on-base percentage is 3x more valuable than slugging percentage - the variances between the best and worst fielders on the outcome of the game is significantly smaller than the variance between the best and worst hitters on the outcome of the game - the important thing when losing a key player is to replace the aggregate

On coaching - coach creates an alternate scale to judge the performance - the player may be a D, but coach makes the player feel like it's a B and rising - builds confidence - coach helps the player fool himself, feel better than he was until he actually becomes better than he was - then it becomes fun which equates to outstanding performances

The chapter regarding Scott Hatteberg is priceless and should be read by every young ballplayer.

Prejudices in pitching - hits and the all famous earned run statistics are useless - walks, strikeouts, home runs, extra base hits - that's how pitchers should be evaluated - again as above, it's not the looks or how fast he pitches, but what he has accomplished, the ability/efficiency to get outs

On managing - while the mantra is you don't change guys; they are who they are - Billy will tweak them - for example he made a $50 bet every time a guy swung at an outside pitch - if he tried to pull it he owed Billy $50 - if he went opposite way Billy owed him $50 - this gives Billy the "excuse" to nitpick - it's a subversive way to keep nagging the player without him knowing about it

Negative momentum:
1) every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength
2) the balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind
3) psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards