You really should read Moneyball. It is a good book.
Oakland is 28 out of 30 in team salary.
I’m going to watch the A’s tomorrow in Spring Training. I’m looking forward to seeing them this year. The AL West could actually be interesting this year as I think 3 of the 4 teams might have a chance to win the division. I’m not thinking the M’s are going to do anything.
The A’s have been the most interesting team in the offseason outside of the Yankees. The A’s have a very young pitching staff without an ace. But, they’ve made a lot of moves to bring in some bats. It looks like the A’s will also bring in Nomar Garciaparra. On top of Matt Holliday, Giambi, and Orlando Cabrera, this makes the 2009 a fun team to watch this. I’d move Bobby Crosby and they could move Jack Cust as well. Brad Ziegler will be an excellent closer.
Lewis is lucky that Youkilis panned out. All the other of those supposedly underrated prospects mentioned in the book turned out to be complete busts.
I didn’t see they grabbed fuentes. Fair enough, losing K-rod isn’t that big of a loss i guess.
I have no idea what we would do with nomar. We already have a giant logjam at 1B/DH. Do we really need another .270 hitter with no power there? I also like Devine better than Ziegler. I like ziegler better in the chad bradford role - setup guy who you can bring in off the bench to get out the good right handed hitters. His delivery reeks of gimmick pitcher, not lights out closer IMO. Last year he obviously was fantastic at first, but I think once the league got to look at him and watch the tape he wasn’t as effective.
You really don’t think the angels are a much better team with manny in left instead of juan rivera? Manny absolutely destroyed the ball last year with the dodgers.
Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, and Mark Teahan all have been regulars in the majors. It wasn’t the greatest draft ever, but those aren’t busts.
Additionally, they all produced for far less salary than those not considered “underrated”. There was talk over the off-season of a cost/win measurement - I’m Beane spent far less per win than most other comparable teams did over that period.
Yeah I guess it was just the major hype from the book that inflated their perceived value to me. They were acting like Beane was discovering all of these hidden phenomenal players when really all he was doing was finding C- talent for D- dollars.
It isn’t my judgment that’s relevant there, it’s the Angels’ judgment. Their answer is No. Their reasons are pretty plain even if they won’t articulate them in public, because they’re the same reasons everyone but the Dodgers has.
So the Angels must think Teixeria sucks too. After all they decided to go with Morales instead of him. In fact 29 teams think he scuks, because they didn’t sign him.
Well this makes me glad as an A’s fan. If the angel’s signed manny you could pretty much hand them the division right now.
I think you might mean “the stupid talk about the book, mainly by people who never actually read it.”
I’m constantly amazed by how many people make claims about Moneyball, and about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s based on the book, who clearly either haven’t read the damn thing, or didn’t understand it. Hell, Joe Morgan hates it, and he has steadfastly refused to read it, and still seems to think it was actually written by Billy Beane.
While your “C- talent for D- dollars” is a considerable overstatement, the fact is that the book was precisely about finding distortions in the market that a team could take advantage of. It wasn’t about getting A-Rod for minimum salary; it was about putting together a complete team on a budget far below the league average, and the consequent need to find players with undervalued skills.
And it’s hard to argue that Beane was unsuccessful. In seasons 2001-2006, the A’s never won fewer than 88 games. They won over 90 games on 4 occasions, including two hundred-win seasons. They made the playoffs 4 out of those 6 years, and won their division twice. In the six years, 2001-2006, their team payroll rankings were: 29th, 28th, 23rd, 16th, 21st, and 21st.
Sure, they never did much in the playoffs, but the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2000 either. The real test of a team’s overall quality is getting to the playoffs. Once you’re in the playoffs, anything can happen, and luck can play a considerable role. But any team that can make the playoffs in 4 out of 6 years (and 4 of the last 8) with a payroll far below league average is doing pretty damn well.
I was really referring to the players in the book, not so much his overall skill. Believe me, I have had a front row seat for the Billy Beane era and couldn’t be happier with his results. I am still amazed he didn’t bolt for Boston - turning down a wealthy franchise that has the potential to win the WS year in and year out, versus staying in oakland which is at best a mediocre baseball area with fans divided between 2 teams and the A’s in a lousy stadium clearly in the shadow of Pac Bell/whatever they call it this year Park is pretty remarkable.
I think Beane’s real talent is identifying players who work best with his system/stadium/coaches, and knowing when to pull the trigger and when to let them go. He invariably gets better production from his players then when they go to other teams, and has a knack for bringing in veterans left for dead by other teams who can still produce.
:rolleyes:
Every team, every one, with the ability to meet the price for Teixeira, and some who didn’t, was in on the bidding. Only one team could have the high bid, though.
Don’t thread-shit.
Spoken like a fan of a team that hasn’t won the Series since long before 2000.
You know the saying - “Second Place is First Loser”.
Maybe it was for the same reason a lot of *players *who can dominate in small, undemanding situations avoid Boston, New York, and Chicago - a fear of being unable to succeed in a high pressure environment. Beane is clearly more comfortable in a small pond, and that’s fine.
As a Boston fan, I’m glad Beane didn’t come here, anyway - his first act was going to be to dump Jason Varitek because of his OBP.
Now does anyone seriously think they’d have two Series titles without 'Tek handling and stabilizing the staff?
Handling a pitching staff, in that demanding environment, and providing leadership don’t matter to stat geeks, since they’re not quantifiable, just as defense at other positions, or pitching itself, or especially intangibles, doesn’t matter to them either. Sure, Bill James provides an occasional interesting insight here, but he’s kept in his place - he has to be. Fortunately, the Boston ownership knows on-the-field baseball too, not just fantasy-league silliness.
Wait wait hold on a second, you are a boston fan and you are saying Beane WOULDN’T have succeeded there? Boston hadn’t won ANYTHING until they blatantly stole the A’s formula and added $ to it. “Hey it says here that the A’s use Bill James’s stats to determine a player’s worth. Lets just hire Bill James!” If baseball were Back To School, the A’s would be Keith Gordon and the Red Sox would be Rodney Dangerfield.
Yes, if by occasional interesting insight you mean things like telling ownership to grab Ortiz, who was only one of the single most important reasons for your recent success.
Well, counterfactuals are, by their very nature, impossible to determine, but if the only change was losing Varietak, and all the other players remained the same, i would be quite comfortable saying, “Yes, i think they could have won those same two championships.”
Why do you always feel the need to misrepresent the ideas and the motivations of stat people when you talk about baseball? You do it almost every time, and it gets really old.
It is simply not true to say that providing leadership “does not matter” to stat people. It cannot be quantified, but that doesn’t mean that stat people feel it’s completely irrelevant. What they generally argue is that, in a team full of professionals making millions of dollars a year, nebulous qualities such as “leadership” and “chemistry” are nowhere near as reliable predictors of success as players’ actual performance.
And to say that defense doesn’t matter to them demonstrates nothing except that you must not ever have read single thing produced by people like Bill James, the folks at Baseball Prospectus, etc. Hell, the BP people have written long articles about the best ways to evaluate defense, and have put hundreds of hours into finding ways to correct for things like park, position, age, and a whole bunch of other factors when determining a player’s defensive contribution.
Hobostew, it’s one of ElvisL1ves’s little peccadilloes that he loves to take any opportunity he can to shit all over stats people in baseball threads. Every time he does it, all he demonstrates is that he actually doesn’t understand the people he’s criticizing. Here’s one of his more egregious recent examples:
Don’t you see? Statheads, according to Elvis, aren’t even interested in watching the game! They’re all probably sitting in their mothers’ basements with multiple Excel spreadsheets open, masturbating over OBP and sticking pins into the Intangibles doll.
I think RickJay offered one of the funniest critiques of Elvis’s position in that same thread:
You think Jason Varitek made Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez good pitchers? Wow, that’s insane. Had you never heard of these guys before they went to Boston? You’re aware they play mjaor league baseball in other cities, yes?
You know absolutely nothing about handling pitching staffs and who is or isn’t full of it. Since you are not a major league catcher, pitcher, and aren’t a part of the Red Sox organization, you’re speaking from a position of complete ignorance. Your comments are without any basis in fact and are therefore useless.
Tell me, who is it that believe defense doesn’t matter? Specific names, please. Not “Stat geeks” - specific names. Bill James? Nope, not him; he’s put a lot of effort into understanding the value of defense. So who is it? Please provide examples.
Frankly, I don’t believe you even like baseball. Have you ever even played catch? God alone knows why you pollute good baseball threads with this sort of ignorant nonsense.
You do realize there were 10 other guys on the staff, right? No? THAT’s insane. :dubious: Don’t you thread-shit either.
Compared to you, you mean? 
Anybody who would get rid of a catcher for not drawing enough walks.
Billy Beane. To repeat, don’t thread-shit.
I have no patience with fantasy fans. Anybody who thinks, as you do, that THAT is baseball is, in your word, “insane”.
Recess is over, kiddies. Go back to your desks now.
The dollars were finally available, once the new ownership started exploiting the market properly instead of pleading poor all the time. The understanding that Yawkey and his estate managers never had, that pitching and defense do matter, finally took hold too. So, for that matter, did the realization that scouting and player development matter. We could also mention the new realization that nonwhite players can have talent too. Only then did “The Curse”, not of the Bambino but of the drunken bigot who owned the team for so many decades, get ended. But it doesn’t take Bill James to explain all that, hmmm?:dubious:
You do realize, I hope, that the Sox brought Ortiz in after his release in MN because of lobbying by Pedro Martinez, and then only as a backup for Jeremy Giambi at 1B. Or, obviously, you didn’t know that. Ortiz had to be heavily coached to hit for power instead of in the Twins’ Astroturf-grounder style, and THEN he became Big Papi. Where the hell did you get the idea that James had anything to do with it? Or could have, for that matter?:dubious:
Try to be a fan of the *real *game, on and off the field, and you’ll have a lot more fun, trust me.