Which was absolutely true. In 2002 with the A’s Pena had a .305 OBP - that’s just horrible.
Also, I’m not sure I buy that Pena was a much, much better player. Better, sure. But cumulative WAR since 2002 has Pena at 15.1 and Hatteberg at 6.7, and that’s considering that Pena is 8 years younger. For those extra 8.4 wins teams have paid Pena an extra $26 million.
For the years that the A’s could reasonably have kept Pena (until free agency, basically, when he started making $6-$10 million), Pena was a 1 win or less player every year. Hatteberg in those years (2002-2006) was between 1 and 1.5 wins (save a bad 2005, and with a great 2.7-win season in 2002).
Benching Pena for Hatteberg was a good idea in 2002.
Where did you get this information? I’ve just looked in the book, and none of the discussion about Pena mentions that Beane told Art Howe not to play Pena due to low OBP.
In fact, what happened was that Pena played almost every game from the start of the season through to May 19 (Source), and was then sent down to Triple-A Sacramento.
At the time he was sent down, Pena was hitting .218/.305/.419., not exactly the sort of performance you hope for from a first baseman. In May, he played 14 games and was hitting .108/.267/.108 with no homers and no RBI. He was still young, and sending him down to work on his swing and his plate discipline is something that plenty of clubs would have done. It’s hardly a move that’s unique to Billy Beane.
The movie stressed it. The figures you cite did not matter to the manager. he was going by his accumulated knowledge of the game. Pena was just a better player in his view.
Well, you’ll forgive me if i don’t accept the evidence of a piece of Hollywood entertainment as definitive evidence for what actually went on in the clubhouse. It might have happened as portrayed in the movie, but it might not have. The book didn’t tell it like that.
I’m sure you’re right that this was Howe’s opinion.
And yet, as Jas09 has already noted, we don’t need predictive abilities to see how good Pena was in the years after 2002. We can see what he actually did, and he wasn’t really anything special for the next few years. He wasn’t bad by any means, and was a perfectly capable day-to-day player, but he wasn’t anything like the player he would become in 2007.
Pena’s best full-season OPS+ before 2007 was 113. Since 2007, his average OPS+ is 132. If we exclude defense (where he really hasn’t been very good at all) and focus on his hitting, before 2007, he had a total offensive WAR of 4.9 over 6 seasons. Since the start of 2007, his total offensive WAR is 16.1 over 5 seasons. He had been, over the past 5 seasons, a dramatically better player than he was over his first 6 seasons.
And that timing is important in the context of the Moneyball debate.It’s easy to look at Pena’s last 5 years and say that Billy Beane didn’t know what he was talking about, but the fact is that, even if Billy Beane had been completely convinced that Pena would end up as an excellent hitter, the fact is that Oakland wouldn’t have been able to afford him by the time he began to really perform. Pena has earned about $34 million over his last 4 seasons. No way Oakland would have paid that.