Chapter 6: The Science of Winning an Unfair Game

In 1999, MLB created a Blue Ribbon panel to determine how economics affects baseball. It was expected to render that poor teams could not compete with rich teams. Surprisingly, George Will (I am a fan of his) called for socialism in baseball; cap on player's salaries and revenue sharing.

What he [Beane] believed was what Paul Volcker seemed to suspect, that the market for baseball players was inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash.

This pretty much sums up Billy Beane's approach.

Paul DePodesta created a model: 96 games needed to be won. To win 95 games, the A's would need to score 130 more runs than their opponents. The task was to craft a team to do so. Barring big-time injuries, the A's were expected to score between 800-820 runs and give up between 650 and 670.

They had also lost to free agency three stars, in MLB terms: Isringhausen, Damon, and Giambi.

It is more efficient to create a closer than to buy one. The A's felt they had created Isringhausen and they could easily create another closer whose stats would be inflated, thus someone they could sell off down the road. But what the A's did isn't exactly as what Lewis makes it out to be. While it is true the A's created a closer out of Isringhausen and then let him go when he got too expensive, the A's did not create a closer out of Koch. He came to the A's as an established closer with 31, 33, and 36 saves for the previous three years in Toronto. And for him, the A's parted with a prospect at third, Eric Hinske, who became the AL Rookie of the Year the year Koch was instilled as the Oakland closer. The A's only held onto Koch for the 2002 season.

The question the panel asked should not have been How do teams keep their stars once they are free to negotiate? but rather, Can a team keep creating stars who are not free to negotiate?

DePodesta created a statistic which weighed OBP higher than slugging percentage, unlike OPS, where each was equal. DePodesta's stat was dOPS (Depodesta's OPS, for lack of a name)=3OBP+SLG.

Furthermore, players who got on base a lot tended to be underpriced compared to other baseball traits. This was another area for the A's to exploit in the marketplace.

Thus, when Johnny Damon departed for Beantown, the A's lost not a top-flight lead-off man, but a lead-off batter who was .10 under the league average in dOPS. It was the defense that needed to be replaced. And to determine what his defense meant to the team, Lewis takes us on a trip tot he financial markets where we learn about derivitives. The guys that exploited Wall Street in the 1980s in derivitives had created AVM Systems, a company that sought to apply the same principles to baseball.

Instead of using arcane stats to explain a situation (which it is implied that James and others had done), AVM re-invented baseball. They plugged into their computers each event in each game for the previuos 10 years. This entailed placing a grid on the diamond and describing each ball hit with a trajectory and a velocity, as well as placement and outcome. Lewis doesn't describe how, but each of these events is credited with an expected run value. Over the course of a year (or 10 years) it can be determined that a ball hit with a certain force to a certain area, etc. will be a hit X amount of the time, caught Y amount of the time, and a different kind of hit Z amount of the time. Then, one can calculate how a particular fielder fields those balls. Does he catch more or less than the average? So, through this complicated matrix, the value of a player's defense can be determined . . . somewhat. It was rightly pointed out that Damon may have been able to catch more balls because the Oakland coaches positioned him correctly. So, this matrix is only valuable to describe past history, not predict the future. But finally, Beane had a tool to quantify defense, and it was more valuable than the market had priced. Interesting to note, DePodesta, after using AVM Systems for a few years, duplicated the system so Oakland could save the consulting fees.

Oakland could not replace Damon defensively, so they sought to improve the offense of the CF position to compensate for the loss of defense they would have.

Giambi's loss was not covered in this chapter. Apparently, the explanation is so great, he requires a chapter of his own, which is next.

Also blogged on this date . . .

Tags:

Post a Comment

By submitting a comment here you grant ladow.net a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution.