Money Ball- The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game
Money Ball- The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game
Curse of Talent
How to find a ball player
Billy Beane had changed, and it wasn't just what had happened to him, but what had not. He had a life he had not led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.
The 2001 draft was rough. The players that Billy and the scouts had discussed in advance had been snapped up by other teams before the Oakland Athletic’s turn came to make their pick. Only guys the scouts loved, and Billy knew next to nothing about remained. Billy was irritated by the uncertainty that followed drafts.
There was the bias of everyone who played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience, or an inclination to be overly influenced by a player’s most recent performance forgetting that the most recent performance does not make the player.
Finally, there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen forgetting that the human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw.
He worked with his assistant Paul DePodesta, and they paid mind to stats rather than scouts because the stats offered them new ways of understanding amateur players. They had seized upon a new system of thought to make the draft a little less uncertain. The Oakland Athletics survived because of this science experiment.
The Enlightenment
The Mets only had the highest expectations of Billy. The Mets’ head scout, Roger Jongewaard, fully expected Billy to rocket through the minors and into the big leagues well ahead of Darryl Strawberry whom they also signed in the 1980 draft.
They assigned Strawberry to the low-level rookie team with high school kids and Billy to the high-level rookie team with the college players. They had presumed Billy’s nature and set him up to fail.
When the season ended, he enrolled in classes at the University of California at San Diego and forgot that he played baseball for a living. He didn’t do any training until the following March.
The next year went well, and by the summer of 1982, he got promoted to the Mets’ Double-A team in Jackson, Mississippi. He played left, while Strawberry played right, and the whole team played the field. Strawberry was named the most valuable player in the Texas League that year.
Billy could not even match, so, he spent a lot of hours in the outfield dwelling on Strawberry’s heroics and his failure. Billy’s weakness was simple; he could not hit. Among the older men, the consensus was that his breakdown was mental, and was advised to see a shrink.
He reached the breaking point and decided he wanted a job as an advance scout (those who travel ahead of the big league team and analyze the strength and weakness of future opponents). Even though the manager was perplexed that someone would quit as a player to be an advance scout, he hired him anyway.
Billy thought that he couldn't say he was talented if it didn’t lead to success. So, he stopped being the guy who should have made it from playing and became the one making decisions about players, with his ferocious need to win.
In 1993, Alderson, touched by the creative enthusiasm Billy used to attack the tasks he got, brought him in and made him his assistant. His job was to scout for undervalued minor league players. He then handed Billy the pamphlet he had commissioned from Eric Walker, on the works of Bill James.
When Billy read Walker’s pamphlet, he realized an objective view of baseball. It more than made sense to him. His mind finally found an escape hatch, and he put his learnings to use.
Field of ignorance
The Jeremy Brown blue plate special
Beane read all twelve of Bill James’s Abstracts, and felt James speak to him thus: you were on the receiving end of a false idea of what makes a successful baseball player and you will realize that there are better ways to do things.
Ten years after James stopped writing his Abstracts, the Oakland Athletics took the knowledge developed by James and other analysts outside the game, implemented, and also extended the information inside the game.
From their wish list of twenty players, they snatched thirteen players, four pitchers and nine hitters. They had drafted players dismissed by their scouts as too short or too skinny or too fat or too slow. They had drafted pitchers who did not throw hard enough for the scouts and hitters who had not enough power.
They also drafted kids in the first round who did not think they would get selected before the fifteenth round, and kids in lower rounds who did not think they would get drafted at all. Again, dishing the old false idea of what makes a baseball player.
The science of winning an unfair game
You possess $40 million to spend on 25 baseball players when your opponent has already spent $126 million on its 25 players and holds perhaps another $100 million in store. What do you do with your $40 million to avoid mortifying defeat?
The poor team is forced to find bargains: young players and whatever older guys the market has undervalued. All the real talent were already picked up by the wealthy teams, and against all the odds, the Oakland Athletics stood a chance.
The Blue Ribbon Panel Report was created in 1999 to examine the question of whether baseball’s current economic system has created a problem of competitive imbalance in the game. In July 2000, the panel concluded that poor teams didn’t stand a chance, that their hopelessness was bad for Baseball, and that a way must be found to minimize the distinction between rich and poor teams.
If financial resources so determined results in pro-baseball, how did the Oakland Athletics, with the second-lowest payroll in all of baseball, win so many games? Maybe they were merely lucky, or perhaps they knew something other people didn’t, or they were becoming more efficient.
The answer is that baseball players are a lot more replaceable than the people who ran baseball teams believed. With the right formula, the managers could decipher the one attribute most critical to the success of the baseball team, that the team could afford to buy.
Giambi’s hole
Jason Giambi's departure from the Oakland Athletics team left a gaping hole, and there was no other first baseman like him, and if there were, they couldn’t have afforded him. Bill decided that the important thing was not to recreate the individual but to find the pieces of Giambi the team could not do without, and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.
The Oakland Athletics’ front office had broken down Giambi into his apparent offensive statistics; walks, singles, doubles, home runs, along with his less obvious ones; pitches per plate appearance, walk to strikeout ratio, and asked; which can we afford to replace?
They realized they could afford to replace his most critical offensive trait, his on-base percentage, along with several less obvious ones. Oakland Athletics had gone out and acquired, or promoted from within the organization, three players most teams didn’t want to have anything to do with to fill Giambi's hole: former Yankee outfielder David Justice; former Red Sox catcher Scott Hatteberg; and Jason Giambi’s little brother, Jeremy.
44 513 people had come to watch the latest plot twist in one of the great David and Goliath stories in professional sports: Oakland A's vs. Yankees.
Goliath, dissatisfied with his size advantage, bought David’s sling — Jason Giambi. The joy of rooting for David is that, while you do not know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.
The Oakland Athletics lost the game due to the hole they could no fill.
Scott Hatteberg, pickin’ machine
Scott Hatteberg played for the Red Sox with a ruptured nerve in his elbow that he crushed each time he straightened his throwing arm. He had finally caved, and had the nerve moved back where it was meant to be; but when the operation was over, he could not hold a baseball, not to talk of throwing one. He had to relearn how to do a simple thing he had done his entire life, the simple thing he now did for a living.
A minute after the Rockies’ rights to Scott Hatteberg expired, Paul DePodesta, assistant general manager of the Oakland Athletics, called Hatteberg’s agent. Hatteberg did not have the slightest idea why they were so interested in him that they could not wait until the morning to make him an offer. They even contacted his agent on Christmas Day.
The Rockies initiated a bidding war when they heard that the Oakland A’s had called Hatteberg’s agent. They wound up nearly matching Oakland’s money. They wanted him just in case something happened to some other guy, whereas Billy wanted him to play.
Hatteberg directed his agent to cut a deal with Oakland, and the moment he signed it, he had a call from Billy Beane, who said he was pleased to have him in the lineup.
Hatteberg labored over the most basic task such as getting into position to receive throws from other infielders. And then something changed, the more he went out to play first base, the more comfortable he felt there. He started to relax and began to want the ball to be thrown to him. He began to feel himself. He was having fun and made plays people did not expect him to make.
The trading desk
It was July, and Billy didn't need to look at the boards to make connections, he knew every player on other teams that he wanted and every player in his system that he didn't. To make juicy trades at this period of the year, the trick was to persuade other teams to buy his guys for more than they were worth and sell their guys for less than they were worth. It was something he had done very effectively for some years now.
This trick worked because the bad teams lost hope and with loss of confidence came an urge to cut costs, which led to the dumping of players. As the supply of players rose, and their prices fell, Billy was able to acquire players he could never have afforded at the start of the season. He kept in mind five simple rules:
1. Change is always good, no matter how successful you are. When you don’t have money, you can’t afford long term solutions, only short-term ones. You still have to be upgrading.
2. You can always recover from not signing a player, but you may never recover from the signing a player at the wrong price.
3. Know what every player in baseball is worth to you, precisely. Put a dollar figure to it.
4. Know who you want and go after him.
5. Every deal you do will be scrutinized by subjective opinion. Everyone who has ever picked up a bat thinks they know baseball, so ignore the newspapers.
He was, however, unable to follow Rule No.5, but he compensated for this by following the other four religiously. Although his approach to the market for baseball players was unsystematic, it was incredibly efficient.
Anatomy of an undervalued pitcher
The team went from good to great when Billy acquired Ricardo Rincon and Ray Durham. The only team that had a better second half record than the 2002 Oakland Athletics in the past fifty years was the 2001 Oakland Athletics. Awesome right?
Chad Bradford, whose statistics clearly showed that he was not just the best pitcher in the Oakland Athletics setup, but was also one of the most effective relief pitchers in all of baseball, was the most critical to the team’s success. Chad is someone who up until the Oakland Athletics snapped up for next to nothing, nobody in the big leagues paid attention to.
Top executives in the game attribute Oakland A’s win to Billy being lucky with the pitchers. The author offers the explanation that Billy Beane embraced a different mental model of the Big League Pitcher.
Pitchers were more like writers in Billy's mind. Like writers, pitchers initiated action and established the tone for their games. They had several ways of achieving their effects, and they needed to be judged by those effects, rather than by their outward appearance, or their technique.
Great pitchers were pitchers who got outs, how they did it was beside the point. It was all Billy’s sheer ingenuity to spot a diamond in the rough.
The human element
The Oakland Athletics were on a 19 game winning streak, and it had become a national news story. They needed to get a win against Kansas City Royals to complete a 20 game winning streak.
Billy did not have the intention of watching his team make history. To him, it was just another game, and he did not watch matches because they provide him with subjective emotion, and that can be counterproductive.
A now relaxed Billy points at the TV, where Eric Chavez, had just made a tough defensive play look routine. He is quick to state that Chavez is the most naturally gifted player in the game.
When others tried to make comparisons between Chavez and Jason Giambi, Barry Bonds, and Alex Rodriguez, Billy’s simple response was that baseball players follow similar patterns, and these patterns are etched in the record books.
Of course, every so often, some players may fail to embrace his statistical destiny, but on a team of twenty-five players, the statistical aberrations will tend to cancel each other out.
Meaning, most of them will conform fairly precisely to his expectations. The author explains that every player is different, and each should be viewed as a distinctive case.
The speed of idea
Billy Beane defined himself by his distaste for his sour ball-playing past, which separated him from most people who made their living from baseball. The Oakland Athletics faced the Minnesota Twins in the first round of the playoffs and lost to them.
He could not quite believe how little appreciation there was for taking the team into the playoffs and went looking to make a trade to clear his mind. But, there was no player on his mind, and the only person in the organization who he would gladly get rid of was his team manager, Art Howe. It was not long before he had a novel idea to trade Art Howe. It took him about a week to trade him to the New York Mets.
Oakland Athletics had run a low-budget franchise as efficiently as a low-budget business, and no one noticed. No one cares if you find radically better ways to run a big-league baseball team.
All people cared about was how you fared in the postseason. He, just like his players was gravely underpaid and still needed funds to move forward, so all he could think of was to exploit the grotesque market inefficiency by trading himself. His timing was about perfect.
John Henry had just acquired the Boston Red Sox was looking to overhaul his franchise in the image of the Oakland Athletics. He appointed Bill James as “Senior Consultant, Baseball Operations,” in late October.
If Billy Beane had agreed to run the Boston Red Sox, he would be guaranteed $12.5 million over five years; the most anyone had ever been paid to run a baseball team. When it came for Billy to sign the Red Sox contract, he could not do it.
He was paralyzed when the choice involved himself. Billy Beane would've been the highest paid general manager in the history of the game. But, now that everyone knew his actual value, Billy didn’t need to prove it anymore.
Since he was not doing it for the love of the Red Sox, he rejected the offer and went back to scheming how to get the Oakland Athletics back to the playoffs, and Paul DePodesta was back to being on his side.
He feared that he and Paul might never find smarter ways to build a great baseball club with no money, but that, unless they brought home a World Series ring or two, no one would know. Even if they win a world series ring, where did that leave him?
He would only be one more general manager among many who were celebrated for a day, then forgotten. No one would know that, for a brief moment, he was right and the world was wrong.
But he was wrong because he was the perfect vessel for an oddly shaped idea, and that idea was on the move, like an Oakland Athletics base runner, station to station. That approach had caused Billy Beane to take action, and his actions had consequences.
He transformed the lives of ballplayers whose hidden virtues the world wouldn't have seen otherwise. And now, those players who had been on the receiving end of the idea kept busy returning the favor.
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