Out of Cheese

I finished Michael Lewis’ Moneyball last night. It’s one of the books I bought a few days ago.

The book is about the Oakland A’s and their front office, specifically general manager Billy Beane. Lewis followed the front office during the 2002 season, sitting in on the June draft, trade discussions, and personnel decisions. The result is a fascinating tale of how the A’s understanding of how baseball works is completely different from how everyone else thinks…which explains much of why they’ve done so well in recent years despite their tiny budget.

The premise is that baseball is scientific — that with the right understanding of statistics (and, just as importantly, the right statistics) — money can be used optimally to acquire the best players for producing wins. This belief isn’t new with the A’s; Bill James and other sabermetricians have adhered to it for years. What makes the A’s interesting is that they’re the first baseball team to put it to the test. What makes them even more interesting is that they’ve been phenomenally successful at it.

I could go on about this for pages and pages, but I probably shouldn’t. I have to say, though, that it’s great to read something like Voros McCracken’s discovery that for pitchers, only strikeouts, walks, and home runs matter for predicting future performance because the pitcher has no control over whether a batted ball becomes a hit. As I read that, I thought, “That can’t be entirely right — pitchers influence their ground-ball/fly-ball ratios, and ground balls are less likely to turn into runs.” A few pages later, Lewis mentioned that the A’s loved McCracken’s work, with one catch — it didn’t take ground-ball/fly-ball ratios into account. Maybe I could be an assistant GM after all.

Another interesting argument from the book might be a bit misleading. Lewis puts forth the case that baseball’s money disparity — the large-market teams can afford to spend far more than the small-market teams — doesn’t matter as long as the small-market teams manage their money effectively, as the A’s do. The problem here is that the A’s can only manage their money effectively as long as the market for players is inefficient. The A’s philosophy has already spread to Toronto (where former A’s assistant J.P. Ricciardi is now GM) and Boston (where GM Theo Epstein and owner John Henry admire Beane, and Bill James and McCracken are consultants). As those teams continue to succeed, their methods will spread. In an efficient market based on the A’s logic, the Yankees will dominate because they can pay the most money for the most valuable players. The A’s have an advantage today, but they won’t have one forever.