Mack
On Baseball – Moneyball
So much has been written about the movie
“Moneyball”. People ask if that was the way it happened and I remind them that
this was a production out of Hollywood. I have no idea exactly what went on in
the front office of Billy Beane, but I guarantee you that the book
was closer to the truth.
The new word, Moneyball, is far more a concept than
an actual plan. The movie portrayed it as an operating agenda that Paul DePodesta,
currently the Vice President of the New York Mets said on MLB-TV was to help
build a team from nothing, with nothing.
The premise was to build a team almost exclusively
based on the player’s on-base percentage, or OBP. The idea is, if you have
players that get on base more often than the norm, then your team will score
more runs than the teams that have players that don’t get on base as often. The statement makes tons of sense on paper,
but we also have to remember that we haven’t ever seen Beane accept The
Commissioner’s Trophy from Bud Selig.
First, I don’t like the word. To me, Moneyball
better described what the New York Yankees have been doing for many years. I
grew up in New York so I’ve had the pleasure of rooting for teams that are
tagged “big market”. It took a move to
Pittsburgh in the 1980s for me to get an idea of the frustration fans have with
the free agency system currently in place in baseball.
Moneyball to me means how much money is left after
you sell tickets, food, cable fees, and paraphernalia to fans of your team, pay
your players, and run the operation of your organization. We used to call it
profit.
The revenue intake for a team in a city like
Pittsburgh is far less than ‘big-market’ teams in Chicago or Los Angeles. You’re not going to be able to bundle
together some gazillion dollar cable deal to create the kind of money top
players are demanding, and getting, in the 21st century.
Forbes Magazine[i]
said that the 2010 Arizona Diamondbacks produced a gross revenue of $172mil.
What happens to the balance sheet of this team if they sign four ballplayers in
the $15-20mil per year salary range?
You can’t regroup this kind of operational cost,
even if you do make the World Series. Fans in towns like Phoenix are not going
to be able to pay the same parking fees as you can charge in Boston. At last glance, the Los Angeles Dodgers were
charging twelve bucks for a beer. Go ahead and try that in Kansas City.
General Managers of small market teams have been
operating like Billy Beane for years. They never called it Moneyball. It was
called ‘cheap’.
This is not a perfect world and building a team
solely on one statistic is sort of silly. In 2011, the Boston Red Sox led every
other team with a combined .349 OBP[ii].
They also were ranked number one in slugging percentage (SLG)[iii]
and on-base + slugging (OPS)[iv].
They also didn’t make the playoffs.
Baseball isn’t just getting on base. Hitting and
pitching work together like words and music (by the way, the same Boston team
spoken about two paragraphs earlier came in ranked 22nd in earned
run average (ERA)[v]
and 16th in walks[vi]
and hits per inning pitched (WHIP[vii]).
Let’s stay on this “money” ball theme.
In 2011, the New York Yankees ($207mil), Detroit
Tigers ($106mil), Texas Rangers ($92mil), Philadelphia Phillies ($166mil),
Milwaukee Brewers ($83mil), and Arizona Diamondbacks ($56mil) went to the
playoffs as a divisional winner. As you can see, team payrolls[viii]
were all over the place.
Who exactly was the big winner here? Was it the
Yankees who spent the most (and also made the most) money or Arizona, who got
to the playoffs on the cheap?
I will tell you one thing that the movie taught the
general fan. You simply can’t get to the World Series unless you build the
foundation of your team through the draft and international signings.
This is how I would play Moneyball.
Yes, both the Yankees and the Phillies are stocked
with free agent talent, and both Detroit and Texas have signed even more
expensive players during the 2011-2012 hiatus, but the fact still remains that
the foundation of all four of these teams still came from their organization.
I have never understood why teams didn’t go all in
at draft time. I’ve watched the Mets draft a couple of big names and then shy
away from the next big bonus baby. I think all teams make a genuine effort to
pick a stud on their first pick. Sometimes, it carries over to the second
round, but eventually your pick comes around and there’s a player like RHP Anthony Renaudo or LHP Matt Purke still
left unpicked.
There might have been a high risk due to a previous
injury or the public knowledge that a player wouldn’t sign for the slotted
money, but seriously, if you knew the player could have the ability to excel in
a game so few do, why wouldn’t you invest a million dollar bonus rather than
pay the same person twenty million dollars a year, years later, when they
become a free agent?
Of course, all this is a moot point now that the new
collective bargaining agreement limits the amount a team can offer players as a
bonus. Still, it sickened me to have
watched teams pass on potential stars because they either were spooked that the
player was going to attend college.
Beginning in 2012, teams will be assigned a specific
total amount that can be allotted to bonus money and exceeding their total
aggregate cap will create at least a 75% penalty tax on all overages. They also
could be fined future draft picks if they don’t play by the rules.
What would I do?
Well, I’ve done the numbers and I know the small
percentage of baseball players drafted after the third round that go on to pro
glory. The new rules demand a team to be
aggressive.
If allowed, I would spend my allotted money on the
highest ceiling players still available to me at the time I drafted, especially
through the first ten rounds.
At that point, I would quietly draft based on
positions needed to fill in my organization.
There isn’t a team in baseball that has ten “A”
rated baseball prospects in their system at the same time, so why in hell are
they trying to pay 50 players a year to play? To hell with the ‘diamond in the
rough’ approach that someone like Omar Minaya used in the past. Do you offer
the most money to the free agents on the market that haven’t blossomed yet, but
you think are going to?
Let’s look at the 2011 draft and cite a few
examples:
·
The Arizona Diamondbacks draft high
school OF, Justin Bianco, in the third round and sign him for a $369K bonus[ix].
They could have picked LHP Matt Purke, who went to the Washington Nationals two
picks later for a $4,4mil bonus.
·
The Boston Red Sox draft high school catcher, Jordan Weems[x]
($50K bonus), with the 111th pick overall, when they could have picked
one of the top first basemen in the draft, USC’s Ricky Opressa ($550K bonus),
who went five picks later to the San Francisco Giants.
Both of these were third round picks. Both teams
chose high school kids with unproven, higher ceilings rather than established,
less projectable college juniors.
Are you supposed to be trying to save money in the
first three rounds? And, is there something wrong with starting off your picks
at the A+ level because, technically, they just completed three years of
“organized ball” while in college?
I could go on like this all night.
Are you asking if the Red Sox needed a first baseman
rather than a catcher? The answer to that is they need both at this point in a
players development. A college player has the chance of making it to the pros
in three years. High School graduates project out at around five. And, it really doesn’t matter how many great
first basemen you have in your organization. You can always eventually trade
one for, oh, an established prospect catcher.
The problem with the movie was there was no mention
of then 26-year old SP Tim Hudson (15-9, 2.98, 1.25), 24-year old SP Barry Zito
(23-5, 2.5, 1.13), 24-year old SP Mark Mulder (19-7,
3.47, 1.14) and 28year old SS Miguel Tejada (34-HR,
131-RBI). You can spend three hours taking about Scott Hatteberg and David Justice, but these are the reasons this
team made the playoffs in 2002.
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