Moneyball
I'll get around to posting about the Minnesota trip at the end of the week. I don't have time to write anything tonight or tomorrow, and I am in Philadelphia on Tuesday-Thursday this week.
I read a great book this weekend while traveling between Hartford and Minneapolis. Moneyball, which is a great book about how the Oakland As keep winning year after year despite having one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball. Oakland identified several underappreciated and highly important statistics in baseball that could be used to effectively evalute hitting and pitching talent and used it to draft, trade, and sign players that most other teams would not touch, and therefore be able to pay these players a small amount of money and watch them outperform their peers. The talent evaluation aspect of the ballclub was essentially transferred from the scouts to "computer geeks" with no prior baseball experience, but who knew how to analyze statistics effectively. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and definitely recommend it to any sports fan, even if you do not like baseball that much.
There were a couple parts of the book that I especially enjoyed. Back in 2001, Beane fired his head of scouting for a first round draft pick that violated the rules he thought he established for player evaluation. "Do not draft high school ballplayers" (even though Beane himself was a first round draft pick out of high school back in the day). Although the pitching prospect was tall, strong, and had a great arm, Beane believed that he was too much of an unknown at the age of 18 to risk such a high draft pick. A couple years later, the pick was a throw away player on a 3-team trade involving Jeff Weaver from the Detroit Tigers. That player? Jeremy Bonderman. While Beane's system is correct most of the time, it's not always perfect since Bonderman has blossomed with the Tigers.
The main focus of the book was the 2002 season. After losing Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen to free agency after 2001, the team came back and won even more games in 2002 despite beign written off because of their losses. The A's took advantage of an inefficient marketplace that refused to accept knowledge/research from those outside the game and used it against the rest of baseball by winning cheaply. Pure genious!
Thank you, DrT, for the recommendation!
I read a great book this weekend while traveling between Hartford and Minneapolis. Moneyball, which is a great book about how the Oakland As keep winning year after year despite having one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball. Oakland identified several underappreciated and highly important statistics in baseball that could be used to effectively evalute hitting and pitching talent and used it to draft, trade, and sign players that most other teams would not touch, and therefore be able to pay these players a small amount of money and watch them outperform their peers. The talent evaluation aspect of the ballclub was essentially transferred from the scouts to "computer geeks" with no prior baseball experience, but who knew how to analyze statistics effectively. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and definitely recommend it to any sports fan, even if you do not like baseball that much.
There were a couple parts of the book that I especially enjoyed. Back in 2001, Beane fired his head of scouting for a first round draft pick that violated the rules he thought he established for player evaluation. "Do not draft high school ballplayers" (even though Beane himself was a first round draft pick out of high school back in the day). Although the pitching prospect was tall, strong, and had a great arm, Beane believed that he was too much of an unknown at the age of 18 to risk such a high draft pick. A couple years later, the pick was a throw away player on a 3-team trade involving Jeff Weaver from the Detroit Tigers. That player? Jeremy Bonderman. While Beane's system is correct most of the time, it's not always perfect since Bonderman has blossomed with the Tigers.
The main focus of the book was the 2002 season. After losing Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen to free agency after 2001, the team came back and won even more games in 2002 despite beign written off because of their losses. The A's took advantage of an inefficient marketplace that refused to accept knowledge/research from those outside the game and used it against the rest of baseball by winning cheaply. Pure genious!
Thank you, DrT, for the recommendation!
posted by GaryGinew at 11:41 PM
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