04/26/24
April 30, 2010
Can Billy Beane Bring Moneyball Back to Oakland?: The start of the Oakland A's has USA Today revisiting Moneyball again, seven years after the book made General Manager Billy Beane's legend. But these days, only Eric Chavez, Mark Ellis and Justin Duchscherer remain from the era described in the book, and Beane hasn't been able to rely on his old tricks. "[N]ow that major leaguers with high on-base-plus-slugging percentages are priced out of his budget, he's on to new ways of trying to maximize resources," Jorge L. Ortiz reports.
It's not about ground-ball pitchers. It's about trying to find something undervalued and accumulate lots of it.
Maybe. But when I think of Moneyball I think of on-base percentage and delaying the third out as long as possible. If Beane has replaced that with a bromide about "exploiting market inefficiences," and he doesn't have something more concrete to build a team on, his magic act is short a rabbit.
posted by rcade at 12:04 PM on April 30, 2010
Kind of a high bar to clear, isn't it? You want him to say what he thinks is undervalued?
posted by yerfatma at 01:02 PM on April 30, 2010
That's what he did in Moneyball. If he's decided that his strategy must remain secret to be successful, that's a repudiation of his earlier position.
posted by rcade at 01:04 PM on April 30, 2010
I don't see it that way. He let Michael Lewis have free reign and Lewis deduced what they were going after and it all came out years after the fact. It's not like Beane was the Richard Stallman of GMs and standing on street corners in Oakland shouting out fantasy advice.
posted by yerfatma at 01:46 PM on April 30, 2010
I stopped reading right around the first line, "The spirit of Moneyball is barely perceptible in the Oakland Athletics nowadays." Really? I don't understand how the author can go on to state (correctly, from my perspective), "the underlying current of Beane's system was exploiting market inefficiencies" and then think this is "barely perceptible". It's not about on-base percentage. It's not about ground-ball pitchers. It's about trying to find something undervalued and accumulate lots of it. And trading off parts when their value is highest. What's changed in Oakland that doesn't match that ethos?