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1. Revisiting Moneyball
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
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1 Revisiting Moneyball Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestselling book Moneyball has sold well over a million copies. The 2011 movie Moneyball has exceeded $120 million in box-office sales and was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best actor and best picture. It is safe to assume that the story that Michael Lewis fell in love with back in 2002 has been widely assimilated by people who care about baseball as well as by many who don’t. The book was a significant catalyst in spreading the sabermetric gospel in baseball front offices, as well as feeding the growing popularity of sports analytics over the Internet, in academia, and in fantasy sports leagues. In a sense, the book brought into the mainstream the incorporation of sabermetric practice within the baseball industry, much as Bill James had popularized new statistical ways of understanding the game and its players. Yet, for all its storytelling virtues, the book, though containing an underlying truth, substantially misrepresents baseball reality, and the 2011 movie, as movies are wont to do, distorts reality still further. Thus, before we begin our discussion of the intellectual state of baseball analytics, its application in the industry, and its future prospects, it is important to clear away the popular debris that has been left behind by the two versions of Moneyball. Moneyball on Screen The film has the same basic storyline, stripped of its emotional embellishments and flourishes, as the million-copy-selling book. The Oakland A’s, a 2 Chapter 1 small market team with a parsimonious owner, needed to find a way to remain competitive after the 2001 season. The team was going to lose three of its star players (Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen) to free agency (and to the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cardinals, respectively), and the owner would not provide the cash to sign any worthy replacements. The A’s general manager (GM), Billy Beane, travels to Cleveland to discuss a trade for relief pitcher Ricardo Rincon and discovers that Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro is paying close attention to the opinions of a dorky-looking Yale grad on his staff (called Peter Brand on screen). After the meeting, Beane corners Brand in the parking lot and presses him to reveal how he approaches valuing baseball players. An enthralled Beane hires Brand and adopts a unique strategy to assemble a winning team based on Brand’s philosophy. (Brand’s character was based on the real-life Paul DePodesta, a tall, slender Harvard grad. Once he saw what the screenplay did with his character, DePodesta did not give permission to have his name used for the film.) A central tenet of this unconventional philosophy is that teams pay too much attention to a hitter’s batting average (BA) and not enough attention to a player’s on-base percentage (OBP, roughly batting average plus walk rate and hit by pitch rate). The basic idea is that walks were dramatically undervalued ; just like a hit, a walk puts a runner on base, avoids an out, and brings another batter up to the plate. Of course, many have also observed that players with a good eye at the plate help to run up the pitch count of the starting pitcher and accelerate getting into the opposing team’s bullpen. In the movie, Peter Brand’s approach, in turn, is represented as being derived from that of Bill James. By focusing on OBP, the A’s could identify undervalued players and assemble a winning team on the cheap. (This is the idea of a market inefficiency. The actors in the market are making decisions based on incomplete or wrong information which means that some inputs— players in this case—are systematically paid more and others less than they are worth.) The movie and the book both make the case that the A’s implemented this philosophy. Further, it is represented that the strategy worked and explains why the team won an American League record twenty straight games and the AL Western Division title in 2002. [34.227.112.145] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:30 GMT) Revisiting Moneyball 3 One of the most dramatic events in the movie occurs when Billy Beane walks into the team clubhouse after a loss and sees the players dancing to music, led by outfielder Jeremy Giambi. (Beane acquired Giambi via trade before the 2000 season, but he is represented as having been acquired by the A’s during 2001−2002 offseason due...