Moneyball

Michael Lewis “Moneyball,” 2004, W.W.Norton & Co, 304pp. (Paperback)
This book (now a movie) may suffer from the author’s unabashed attempt to ingratiate himself with baseball powers-that-be—a sample: “Those associated with baseball, other than the actual players, live in a structure that is less a business than a social club and there really is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated. The Club includes not only the people who manage the team but also, in a kind of Women’s Auxiliary, many of the writers and the commentators who follow it, and purport to explain it. There are many ways to embarrass the club, but being bad at your job isn’t one of them.” (p. 287).
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My baseball enthusiasm waned in the late 1950s—I now seldom watch it; yet, I can still name the playing roster for the Milwaukee Braves (yes, Braves not Brewers). However, the later musical chair movements of teams (including the Braves), players arrogance, and strikes turned me away… permanently. Yet: I liked this book—probably because of its’ intellectual, business, and statistical approach to the game as evidenced by the management of the Oakland Athletics. Lewis investigates just why Oakland is always one of the best teams in spite of having one of the lowest payrolls. His answer is Billy Beane, the GM who chooses and schools his players based on statistical criteria which Beane determined important (data readily available in publications). His statistical criteria used in selecting players is especially valuable as it went against conventional wisdom, so he had little competition.

My notes:
Pg. xii: As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A’s success ‘an aberration,’ but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how’d they do it? How did the second poorest team in baseball, opposing ever greater mountains of cash, stand even the faintest chance of success, much less the ability to win more regular season games than all but one of the other twenty-nine teams?

Pg. 16: High school pitchers had brand-new arms, and brand-new arms were able to generate the one asset scouts could measure: a fastball’s velocity. The most important quality in a pitcher was not his brute strength but his ability to deceive, and deception took many forms. In any case, you had only to study the history of the draft to see that high school pitchers were twice LESS likely than college pitchers, and four times less likely than college position players, to make it in the big leagues. Billy made his scouts stay away from high schools. He had come to believe that baseball scouting was at roughly the same stage of development in the twenty-first century as professional medicine had been in the eighteenth.

Pg. 33: No one in big league baseball cares how often a college player walks—they don’t give the statistic any weight in their scouting reports. This is one of Oakland’s important statistics. They also believe that foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew is the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone. They believe in the overwhelming importance of on-base percentage, the significance of pitches seen per plate appearance. They believed that a guy’s hitting ability had a far greater effect than his fielding ability on a team’s performance. Billy did not get along with conventional scouts; they had a name for what he wanted: “Performance scouting,” which is considered an insult in scouting circles.

Pg. 83: In 1984, Bill James wrote to what was now a rapidly expanding crowd of baseball nuts and proposed a radical idea: Take the accumulation of baseball statistics out of the hands of baseball insiders. Build an organization of hundreds of volunteer scorekeepers who would collect the stuff you needed to know to reduce baseball to a science. Baseball teams didn’t have the sense to know what data was important to collect, and so an awful lot of critical data simply went unrecorded: how batters fared in different counts and different game situations, who was pitching when a base was stolen, how different outfielders affected the audacity of runners on the base paths, where hits landed and how hard they were hit, how many pitches a pitcher threw in a game. James philosophy was hypothesize, test against the evidence, and never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be. Don’t believe a thing is true just because some famous baseball player says that it is true.

Pg. 120: After the 1999 season, Bud Selig put together a Blue Ribbon Panel to investigate whether baseball’s economic system has created a problem of competitive imbalance in the game. He invited former U.S. senator George Mitchell, Yale president Richard Levin, the columnist George Will, and former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Paul Volcker to write a report. Selig owned maybe the most pathetic poor team in all of baseball, the Milwaukee Brewers. He no doubt wanted to believe that the Brewers’ trouble was poverty, not stupidity. The panel concluded that the poor teams didn’t stand a chance, that their hopelessness was Bad for Baseball, and that a way must be found to minimize the distinction between rich and poor teams. Paul Volcker, the only commissioner with a financial background, to the growing annoyance of the others kept asking: If poor teams had no hope, how did the Oakland A’s, with the second lowest payroll in all of baseball, win so many games? They even had Bill Beane come and explain it to the Commission: Beane stated that his success was probably just ephemeral. (He would never turn more money down should the report decide to divide the proceeds.)

Pg. 274: The play-offs frustrate rational management because, unlike the long regular season, they suffer from the sample size problem. Peter Palmer, the sabermetrician and author of “The Hidden Game of Baseball,” once calculated that the average difference in baseball due to skill is about one run a game, while the average difference due to luck is about four runs a game. Over a long season the luck evens out, and the skill shines through. But in a series of three out of five anything can happen. In a five-game series, the worst team in baseball will beat the best about 15 percent of the time. Baseball science may still give a team a slight edge, but that edge is overwhelmed by chance, in the short run.

Pg. 297: One way of looking at the revolution in baseball that Beane may well inspire is the beginning of a search for players who, for one unfair reason for another, often because of their appearance, had been maligned and undervalued by the markets—less dramatic versions of Jackie Robinson.


Addenda;
Baseballprospectus.com
Other books by Lewis that I have read and reviewed: “The Big Short” and “Liars Poker”. He also wrote “The Blind Side”.