A Team For The Statheads

The Oakland A’s beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays 4-3 today, winning their ninth game in a row. This has become an A’s trademark, to come on strong in the second half of the season, often after Biilly Beane has made a clever trade just before the July 31st trading deadline. I have just finished reading Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, which is an account of how Billy Beane, general manager of the A’s, has turned the A’s into a successful franchise through superior wiles and a deep statistical understanding of the game despite having a rock-bottom budget. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read, even if you aren’t enamored of statistical analysis or particularly interested in baseball. (Tim O’Reilly, the renowned tech publisher, is one of the latter, writing about the book: “I’m not much of a baseball fan, but Michael Lewis’ Moneyball has been a revelation. Not only has it given me understanding of why people like baseball so much, it’s given me a real impetus to rethink how I approach my business.”)

The book gives an excellent account of how a set of passionate fans and writers, most notably Bill James, started doing novel quantitative analyses about the game. They questioned the traditional statistics used in baseball, such as RBIs or win-loss records for pitchers, and began to come with better metrics for individual performance, such on-base percentage. These fans were all outsiders to the baseball managerial system, but their ideas started to percolate.

Enter one Billy Beane. He started out as a baseball player who had the burden of being marked for greatness. But rather becoming the All Star everyone expected him to be, he floundered in the majors, and at the age of 27 made the unusual decision to quit playing the game to take a front office job. Here he excelled, and a few years later became general manager of the A’s. Because of his experiences as an unsuccessful player, he was skeptical of traditional baseball methods for evaluating prospects, and quite receptive to the statistical approach of Bill James and his followers. With little money to spend, Beane soon calculated he was far better off stocking his team with unheralded up-and-coming players rather than paying top dollar for established stars (noting that once stars reach free agency, they are usually old enough that their performance starts to decline).

Good baseball quote for the day:”Baseball is a fat Victorian novel, replete with colorful minor characters and discursive subplots, into which a fan can disappear for months; football is a series of quick- cutting TV cop shows.”