The Changing Landscape Of "Moneyball"
- Friday, January 15, 2010 11:42 AM
- Written By: Andrew Simon
In his preface to “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis described a conversation he had with J.P. Ricciardi, who had worked with Oakland GM Billy Beane before leaving for Toronto. According to Lewis, Ricciardi illustrated the intellectual gap between Beane and his counterparts around the league by raising one hand as high as he could and lowering the other as low as he could.
At the time Ricciardi made this point, in the early part of this past decade, it was true. Beane really was working on a different level from most everyone else, and the success of those Oakland teams demonstrates that.
Of course, the baseball landscape is much different in 2010. Sure, you still have a handful of guys out there running teams who are still fumbling around in the dark. But these days, Beane has company in his honors classes, and a lot of those guys – Boston’s Theo Epstein and Seattle’s Jack Zduriencik to name a couple – have much bigger budgets at their disposal.
As the people running baseball teams have grown more accepting of advanced statistical analysis, some of the original qualities associated with “Moneyball” have necessarily fallen by the wayside. Of course, the whole point of the book, which many people who never read it failed to accept, was that Beane succeeded by exploiting inefficiencies in the marketplace. In other words, he valued commodities that were undervalued.
When the book was written, that stat was on-base percentage. But times change.
As Dave Cameron describes in this ESPN.com piece (Insider Only), slow guys who draw walks are no longer so undervalued, which has caused sharp GMs like Beane, Epstein and Jack Z to pursue defense and even baserunning as new under-appreciated avenues. With the recent boom in advanced metrics that measure a player’s abilities to run, field and throw, it’s now easier than ever before to target players who will keep runs off the board or tear up the basepaths.
Hence, you have the offseason acquisitions of Coco Crisp by Oakland, Adrian Beltre by Boston and Chone Figgins by Seattle, to name a few. As Cameron puts it, “The results of this shift toward run prevention? The "Moneyball" teams are targeting the type of fast, athletic, fundamentally sound players that scouts have been drooling over for years.”
The question that intrigues me is where we will be at three, five or 10 years down the road. Eventually enough GMs will catch on to the defensive fad, just as they did with OBP, that it will no longer be undervalued. When that happens, Beane and his ilk will have to move on to something else.
But what will that commodity be? I have no idea, but if anyone out there has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
