Rereading Moneyball the Day of the Mitchell Report

[Gregory Pratt]

I've often cracked that Beane was helped as much by innovation as steroids. I don't mean it to the extreme -- he's still a fantastic GM. But this article is an interesting and enjoyable read, IMO. (From Slate.)

 

How the steroids report changes the Moneyball story.

 

The purpose of a parable is to convey a deeper truth. Consider (or reconsider) the one at the heart of the most influential book of what's now officially baseball's Steroids Era. In Chapter 3 of Michael Lewis' Moneyball, the author tells the story of how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane became a paradigm-shifting baseball executive.

 

Before Beane was a front-office revolutionary, Lewis recounts, he was an outfield prospect—a baseball Adonis blessed with unimaginable physical talents but cursed with a mind too tightly wound to handle the pressures of batting. As he made his way through the Mets farm system, Beane was struck by the contrast between himself and a fellow outfielder, a stumpy, unprepossessing player with an unflappable arrogance at the plate. That other guy, Beane told Lewis, was "perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball." While Beane was a washout, his teammate went on to be an All-Star and a world champion.

 

That player, built to thrive in modern baseball, was Lenny Dykstra.

 

Moneyball, published in 2003, was a rebuttal to one George Mitchell panel report on the problems of baseball: the 2000 findings of the Commissioner's Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics, which concluded that low-revenue teams were operating at a hopeless disadvantage against the top-revenue teams. Oakland gave the lie to that conclusion; it had a meager budget yet was a perennial contender, thanks to the innovations of Beane and his predecessor, Sandy Alderson. Moneyball's subtitle was "The Art of Winning an Unfair Game."

 

This week's report refers repeatedly to another problem of unfairness. "We heard from many former players who believed it was grossly unfair that some players were using performance enhancing substances to gain an advantage," Mitchell wrote. The Mitchell report makes a mordant appendix to Moneyball's good news about the state of baseball. What Dykstra helped teach Beane, Lewis explains, was that "[t]he physical gifts required to play baseball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones." Particularly, the Mitchell report implies, when the mental gifts could get an assist from some Dianabol.

 

Or, as Beane says elsewhere in the book: "Power is something that can be acquired. ... Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don't become good hitters." Oakland, with its limited funds, wouldn't spend payroll to buy power hitters. Instead, it invested in cheaper, patient hitters. And those hitters, it seems, bought the power themselves.

 

Did Beane have steroids deliberately or explicitly in mind? He was talking about his hopes of drafting someone who could be the next Jason Giambi. And Jason Giambi, the 2000 American League MVP, was juiced. So was his younger brother and Oakland teammate, Jeremy. So, according to Mitchell, was the A's other MVP, Miguel Tejada, who asked for and received steroids and testosterone from teammate Adam Piatt. And Oakland's veteran pickup David Justice ("an extraordinary ability to get on base was more likely to stay with a player to the end of his career than, say, an extraordinary ability to hit home runs"). The Oakland locker room, the report says, was an open-air drug market.

 

Not much of this was news to people who had paid attention to baseball's drug scandals. The Giambi brothers had been publicly tied to the BALCO scandal a year after Moneyball came out. Each had made some sort of public apology or semi-apology; Jason, for good measure, had been sidelined by a tumor consistent with a ravaged endocrine system.

 

But the value of the Mitchell report is not in what it demonstrates about the pervasiveness of steroids. It is in what it demonstrates about the pervasiveness of steroids denial. The preview stories about the report declared that it would include the names of multiple MVPs. This could hardly have been considered surprising news when Jason Giambi, Jose Canseco, and Ken Caminiti were already on the record as admitted users.

 

For more than a decade, baseball relied on a cycle of collective forgetfulness. A bad report would surface about someone, the player in question would deny it or obfuscate, and the news would get filed away in a dusty cabinet under the presumption of innocence. "Let's keep our asterisks, innuendo, and, perhaps, even a bit of our conscience in the closet," the Washington Post's Thomas Boswell wrote in 1998, rooting in print for Mark McGwire. What Mitchell did was to dump out the whole cabinet (or at least whole drawers of the cabinet) at once: Roger Clemens' seven Cy Youngs, Eric Gagne's 84 consecutive saves, Jose Canseco's 40-40 season, Juan Gonzalez's two MVPs, the startling longevity of Andy Pettitte and Benito Santiago, the whole slugging record book rewritten by McGwire and Barry Bonds.

 

Where were the steroids in Moneyball? They were out of sight, where the baseball world wanted them to be. This is not a reflection on Lewis' reporting, even. The book advanced people's understanding of baseball, on the terms in which people were willing to think about baseball at the time. It accurately named and explained the batting approach that defines this era: power hitting channeled through strict strike-zone discipline. This is the engine not only of Oakland's budget offense, but of the bankroll-busting offenses of the Yankees and Red Sox—each of which has included a Giambi brother on its roster (though not necessarily fruitfully).

 

Of Jason Giambi, whose $120 million move from the A's to the Yankees is a key part of Moneyball, Lewis wrote: "In all of baseball for the past few years there has been only one batter more useful to an offense: Barry Bonds." The plucky Athletics, in other words, were playing exactly the same game as everyone else.

[Balta1701]

Since Pratt wasn't kind enough to provide a link to the full article (everyone, please do so in the future when you're excerpting text)....here it is.

[RockRaines]

Wow, so Beane essentially aquired players that had the natural hitting skills, and the players bought the power.

[Gregory Pratt]

Since Pratt wasn't kind enough to provide a link to the full article (everyone, please do so in the future when you're excerpting text)....here it is.

 

I didn't think it was necessary since I pasted the whole article and cited that it was from Slate. My bad.

[Balta1701]

I didn't think it was necessary since I pasted the whole article and cited that it was from Slate. My bad.

The more of an article you cite, the more appropriate it is to make sure you include the link. In general for-profit websites will get very annoyed if you post the majority of their articles, but they'll get especially pissed if you start posting full articles without linking to their cite, because then they get zero of the ad revenue for the read. Not a problem here, just note for the future...hyperlinks are important, they're basically the currency of the net right now.

[daa84]

whether beane did it or not...theres no doubt in my mind that execs all over baseball looked at talent (at least amateur talent) and took into account the fact that roids may help some guys more than others, or that guys who were considered non users were judged as "having more potential"

[SoxAce]

Swisher was the main example of the book. Hopefully he didn't "get an edge" in the minors/majors. I'm still surprised Beane traded one of his last/main Moneyball player(s). Supposedly, Street and Chavez will be next.

[Balta1701]

Swisher was the main example of the book. Hopefully he didn't "get an edge" in the minors/majors. I'm still surprised Beane traded one of his last/main Moneyball player(s). Supposedly, Street and Chavez will be next.

IMO, you have to hold on to Chavez...until he actually has a decent run of games where he's healthy. Despite the cost, basically you'd be giving him away for nothing and paying for another team to take him at this point.

[iamshack]

So I wonder just how much of this was intentional, and how much of it coming to light has forced Beane to rethink his philosophies?

 

1) Did he know acquiring good hitters could "buy" their power; or

2) Did he honestly believe that good hitters "developed" their power?

 

Is he now unsure whether that theory will hold true once we reach the post-PED era (if we ever in fact reach one)?

 

He seems to now be espousing the "Marlins" philosophy more so than his "Moneyball" philosophy...

[iamshack]

The "Moneyball" philosophy was not buying "patient" hitters who developed power. The "Moneyball" philosophy was acquiring players that were undervalued on the market that had something of value. And at that time, the "undervalue" was on-base-percentage and patient hitters. This past season, since MANY teams tried to now acquire the on-base hitters, Beane went for defense-first players - who had been undervalued since the on-base frenzy. Don't think Moneyball was about acquiring simply "on-base" hitters who developed power. It was about acquiring players that were "highly undervalued" on the market because they were cheap and fit his budget.

 

No, I understand that. And he is now selling-off solid young players that are cost-controlled for a commodity that is perhaps more overvalued now than in any time in recent history- prospects with upside.

 

Since the Marlins turned their 03' World Series winning-team inside-out by dealing anyone of value for prospects and actually came out ok doing so, combined with the runaway FA market, the cost of acquiring well-regarded prospects has skyrocketed.

 

So what does Beane do? He goes and buys that commodity, which is exactly what the "Moneyball" concept was NOT about.

 

I guess he has reached the point with the franchise though where there were few other commodities to sell off other than the ones he did, but I am a little surprised he didn't do something a bit more innovative....

Edited January 15, 2008 by iamshack

[scenario]

I just finished re-reading Moneyball over Christmas.

 

The concept has been interpreted in many different ways, but basically there are three main points:

 

(1) The analyses of stats developed by Bill James and the sabermetric community suggest different measures of individual and team success than those used by 'traditional' thinkers in major league baseball.

 

(2) Teams that are aware of these measures can use them to their strategic advantage to win more games than other teams.

 

For example, (a.) runs scored is the strongest predictor of wins; (b.) OBP correlates to runs scored stronger than any other baseball statistic. In fact, depending on who you listen to, OBP is somewhere between a 1.5-3X better predictor of runs than the next closest stat, which is slugging percentage; (c.) many other strategies team use (for example, steals) are relatively weak predictors of runs scored and therefore less likely to produce wins.

 

(3) The differences between sabermetric and traditional analysis also create market inefficiencies around what teams value that can be exploited by teams to save money, particularly when it comes to player evaluations. (ex. a moneyball team may value a particular type of player differently than a market full of non-moneyball teams and therefore save money in acquiring the players they want).

 

So... moneyball is not just about taking advantage of inefficiencies (point 3).

 

It is also about introducing different and better ways of identifying what measures in baseball are relevant and important (point 1); and understanding what strategies are more/less likely to produce wins (point 2).

 

The strength of the OBP-Runs-Wins connection is why moneyball continues to focus on OBP. Other factors may provide inefficiencies that can be taken advantage of. But if they don't correlate strongly to wins, what's the point?

Edited January 18, 2008 by scenario

[A's fan]

Swisher was the main example of the book. Hopefully he didn't "get an edge" in the minors/majors. I'm still surprised Beane traded one of his last/main Moneyball player(s). Supposedly, Street and Chavez will be next.

 

 

IMO no one is safe but I doubt chave is on the outs when his value is this low and beane has said street is young enough to stay and has been talking a long term deal with him.