New Book Destroys Moneyball, Bill James, Red Sox, Tooth Fairy

Just pick players for your team out of the phone book, because freak occurrences will screw everything up anyways?

I’m sure Murray Chass ordered at least a few dozen copies, much like the several dozen balls needed for BP during spring training. Gotta train the mind for meaningful stats like pitcher wins and RBIs.

Always funny watching the geeks get flummoxed… What a theory! Someone should actually leave the math lab and watch a baseball game. You need to be reminded that baseball got along fine for 100 years before the mathletes came along.

The Moneyball approach is finding players who are undervalued by the market. No more, no less. It’s almost tautologically a good strategy.

I veer towards the sabermetric side of life, but as an Angels fan I can’t but appreciate Mike Scioscia’s approach, who (barring 2010) is able to consistently win close games with his “Contactball” and aggressive (but smart) baserunning strategy; the Angels have beaten their Pythagorean record for, I think, seven years in a row…that’s not just luck, I would think.

Now if you combine a Mike Scioscia’s field tactics with a Bill James’ team-building strategy you’d have a recipe for a true dynasty.

I think there’s a strong case to be made that sabermetrics don’t add that much value. i.e. a) advanced stats and metrics don’t tell teams that much that they didn’t already know, and b) sabermetrics doesn’t have that much to say about the things that are most important to the success of an MLB team. So, I’m interested to read the book.

btw, what is the basis for saying that saber won 2 WS for the Red Sox? This is baloney, IMO. Theo is great, but I’d point out that 2004 was year 2 for him, and almost all the key players were holdovers. And that IMO, The Sox’ success has been about drafting, player development, and throwing their financial weight around. Not cleverly acquiring under-valued assets. Their trade and FA record under Theo is actually pretty mixed.

Most folks would be surprised that todays advanced stats began with Branch Rickey in the 1940’s-50’s.

http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/btf/pages/essays/rickey/goodby_to_old_idea.htm

Moneyball was basically about finding value. OBP was undervalued and cheap, and so Oakland went after it. Now OBP is not cheap, and has not been for many years, but perhaps SLG is undervalued. Fielding defense is cheaper than SLG, so team seem to be chasing it more, and for some teams is more valuable than a 1Bman who can hit 25 HR (Mariners showed how well that worked last year). Some teams like the Red Sox and Yankees can afford to chase everything.

As for the idea that chance plays a big role in individual games, and that this is somehow contrary to sabermetrics, I can only shake my head. Every sabermetrician fully appreciates the role of chance, in fact, many go way overboard and insist clutch hitting, catchers game calling influence on ERA, breakout years, etc, are simply nothing more than chance events (because they can find no evidence), but the absence of “statistical” evidence simply means it is hard to find (lack of control group, SSS, etc) .

That said, over a season, individual veteran players production can be estimated or predicted reasonably well. However, injuries and breakout years, or age related collapse can not be predicted with great certainty, nor can rookies performance in their first year, so such predictions on team performance can be wildly erroneous.

Seems to be the authors of this book are creating a straw man, and embracing some fallacies about what sabermetrics is, but I have not yet read the book.

As for the reason the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and 2007, they had inherited many good players from Duquette. Guys like Manny, Damon, Youkillis, Pedro, Lowe, Nomar, etc. Some of them they traded for pieces they needed (Cabrera), allowed to leave FA and obtain draft picks. They also signed Keith Foulke and Papi as FA, and Papi was a cheap and suprising gold mine given he was supposed to start the 2003 season as Jeremy Giambis backup. Not known as an OBP or SLG guy, he became both. In some cases they traded top prospects inherited from Duquette to acquire Beckett and Lowell which led to 2007 and Curt Schillin in 2004. They also went and got themselves a pretty good manager in Tito. If he was managing in 2003 instead of Little they probably would have won the World Series then too.

Lot of luck, and a lot of good drafting/development and player evaluation which was based on both scouting and the numbers. Theo has said he values both.

Sometimes they made mistakes, such as when the scouts and sabermetricians said Renteria and Lugo would be great SS at Fenway, or that JD would improve as a hitter in Fenway, or that Daisuke would be worth 103 million. A big mistake was when the Red Sox thought Arroyos numbers in 2005 meant he would not pitch well in 2006 and since they felt they had enough pitching, they traded for Wily Mo pena. In 2006, Theo discovered you can never have too much pitching. Lesson learned. Some of that is bad luck, some bad judgement, maybe even bad numbers.

My 2009 projections actually predicted the ball hitting the pigeon in the outfield, though I did get the inning wrong.