Now that spring training is in full swing, I finally got around to reading Michael Lewis' 2003 book about the Oakland Athletics, Moneyball. I had expected to read about all sorts of arcane baseball statistics and strategy, and there's plenty. But Lewis goes beyond the science to bring us closer to a number of compelling personalities in the sport and business of baseball.
The book begins with the fascinating story of Oakland's GM Billy Beane. As a young man, Billy was perhaps one of the best natural talents in baseball – ever. And that’s saying a lot. So of course you ask yourself, "then why haven't I ever heard of him?" and before you know it, you're sucked into the book and reading about Beane's amazing physical gifts and his mental demons. Throughout the book, Lewis weaves additional narratives of A's players in between discussions of baseball stats and the A's expert use of them.
So let's examine the A's vaunted system, which came about because of financial pressures. The A's have one of the lowest payrolls in baseball (2002 payroll: $40 million), yet they reach the playoffs regularly and came pretty close to beating the Yankees (2002 payroll: $126 million) in the playoffs a couple of years ago. The A's are able to compete because they find players that other teams don't want. In essence, they look for inefficiencies in baseball's player evaluation system, which has been historically based on finding players that look athletic. In contrast, the A's don’t care about how a player looks. They find players who can perform efficiently in the areas that help the team win games – getting on base and scoring runs, and making plays in the field to take away runs from the other team.
Sounds simple. You're thinking OK, just evaluate players based on high on-base percentage and low strikeouts. Yes, the A's use OBP and other stats to evaluate how efficiently a batter produces runs. But Lewis explains how they take statistical measurements to an entire other level. For example, it's difficult to measure a player's defensive skills beyond the highly subjective stat of errors. However, the A's lifted a system from the finance industry that measured the expected run production value of every event in every baseball game for ten years – down to the level of a line drive hit at x trajectory and y speed to a specific grid point on the field.
Thus by comparing a player's actual performance to the average of balls hit to the player's vicinity, the A's can understand how many runs a fielder saved the team. And if you lose that player to a team that can afford to pay him more money, then you either have to replace him with another player of equal defensive ability, or with a player – or multiple inexpensive players – with poorer defensive skills but who can contribute more runs offensively to compensate.
Billy Beane and his staff comb through players' stats and wheel and deal with other teams to assemble an inexpensive portfolio of players that can score more runs than they allow. And that's how you win ball games.
If this summary is at all interesting to you, definitely read the book. But even if you have no idea what sabermetrics is, you can skip the stat-heavy chapters and read the engaging stories about Scott Hatteberg, the most patient hitter in baseball, or Chad Bradford, the talented yet modest pitcher from Mississippi that probably wouldn't have made the major leagues for any other team. And read about how Beane came oh-so-close to being the GM of the Boston Red Sox.
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