Zach Anderson
May 21, 2015
Moneyball Ten Years Later: A New Revolution
June 4, 2002, in a dark room underneath Oakland Coliseum, The Oakland Athletics’ General Manager, Billy Beane is about to change baseball forever. This is the day of Major League Baseball’s first year player draft, and with his first round pick, Beane will select Jeremy Brown, a nearly obese catcher from Alabama that the other 29 teams in the MLB felt wasn’t even good enough to waste a 50th round draft pick on. That Beane was selecting him with one of his highest picks, with so many talented players still available was so outrageous, that many started audibly laughing. This is but a microcosm of a phenomenon that Beane created, and that author Michael Lewis captured in his book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Beane realized that his team, the poorest in baseball would have to find a way of signing players that could help them compete with the richer clubs, while not having to pay the ever rising price for signing super-stars. So, he started a revolution. Beane broke baseball down into numbers. Every player had statistics that they could analyze and convert into runs produced, which in turn could be used to predict the number of wins that they would help the team get over the course of a season. They shunned the traditional method of evaluating talent, which mainly consisted of looking at a player and imagining the type of baseball player he could become, because this was inefficient. What he soon found is that there were so many players that teams didn’t want because they didn’t look like baseball players, that would help the A’s win at an incredible rate. So, Beane signed these unwanted players for cheap, and built one of the most successful teams of the early 21st century. Their success changed the face of baseball, soon every team in the Major Leagues used an analytics department and advanced statistics to find the best. This brings about the question, thirteen years after the revolution of Moneyball and it becoming common with every team, how can poor teams once again gain a competitive edge over the richer teams?
Thirteen years after the birth of Moneyball, the A’s are still poor. They have a total payroll of $88,681,781 (sportrac.com). To put that in perspective there are 46 active players in the Major Leagues with individual contracts greater than $90,000,000 (baseballreference.com). However, just as in 2002, when the A’s were the only team using analytics, they are still very successful. Last year, the A’s won 88 games and made it to the playoffs, as the did in 2012 and 2013 (MLB.com). So how do they keep winning? They don’t have an inside track in analytics now, most of the highest paid players in the league are also the highest rated by the advanced metrics. The answer lies at the heart of Billy Beane’s psyche, they flip their established players to other teams through trades, and in return, receive young prospects with small contracts. Then, when those prospects evolve into good players nearing the end of their contracts, they repeat the cycle. So, Oakland takes advantage of the first years of a player’s career while they aren’t making much money. This allows them to control players in the first years of their careers before they hit free agency and are signed by the bigger market clubs.
Other teams employ different tactics in hopes of getting the same result as Oakland. One of the poorest teams in baseball last year was the Kansas City Royals, as they were in the bottom third of all major league clubs (deadspin.com) yet they were a run away from winning the World Series. When one compares the Royals and the Athletics, there are many similarities in the two clubs, but it’s the differences that point to the many ways to build a winning ball club without money.
For years, the Royals were the model for poor teams to do the exact opposite of. A small market team that refused to use any type of advanced analytics, they were one of the worst teams in baseball for the first few years of the 21st century. In fact, according to Major League Baseball, from 2000 to 2012, the Royals lost more games than they won every season but one. Kansas City seemed stuck in a bygone era. The best way for a bad team to rebuild itself into a good team is through the draft. Because the worse a team was, the higher a draft pick it got, KC consistently had one of the first picks in the draft. With twelve of their fourteen first round draft picks since 2000, the Royals selected a player directly out of high school. This goes against all teachings of Moneyball, as time and time again, Billy Beane rants against drafting high school players, he believes that they aren’t ready mentally or physically for the Major League level. One only has to look at the A’s track record in the first round to see his philosophy go to work. Since 2000, the A’s have only selected two players out of high school. However, the Royals seem to have exposed a flaw in Billy Beane’s idea, seven of the twelve players that they have drafted out of high school since 2000 are at the Major League level, and six of them are stars, a remarkable percentage. Yet, for all of their draft picks, the Royals couldn’t seem to find a winning formula. After making several trades that, at the time, would have made Billy Beane vomit in disgust, the Royals continued their practice of of losing. However, the moves would eventually pay off for the beleaguered Royals team in a big way.
Fast forward to October 1, 2014 in Kansas City for the American League Wild Card game. The Royals had a remarkable run in the 2014 regular season and nabbed the last spot in the playoffs, earning them a one game, play in game that, if they won, would send them to the American League Division Series. The Royals had James Shields on the mound. Shields was a player that the Royals received in one of those ‘questionable’ trades. A true ace, with plenty of playoff experience, the Royals had given up their two best young players to get Shields for exactly this type of situation, and he had one job, win them their first playoff game in 26 years. But on the other side was the team that represented everything the Royals didn’t do for so many years, Billy Beane’s Oakland Athletics. It was fitting that the two teams would face off in a single elimination playoff game. The Royals were the opposite of Moneyball, they had the fewest home runs in the regular season, and they stole the most bases of any team, ever, a risky practice that Beanes abhors. They simply put the ball in play and hoped they got on base. They did, just barely enough. The Royals scored the fewest runs of any playoff team, and relied on their lights out bullpen of pitchers to keep a tight lead at the end of the game. In Moneyball, Beane makes it clear that in his eyes, good relief pitchers, like the ones in the Royals bullpen, are a dime a dozen, they’re not worth paying for. The Royals had demonstrated all year that that wasn’t particularly true. They got to the playoffs by giving up only one lead in the sixth inning and beyond all year long. Their bullpen allowed them to shorten a nine inning game to six innings. So, that’s two things that the Royals did better than anyone else that Beane overlooked. The Royals were also, by every measure known to man, the best fielding team in the Majors last year, another part of the game that Beane feels isn’t of paramount importance. What’s more, Beane famously hates the practice of bunting a runner over, as it didn’t allow the batter to get on base with any consistency. Of course, the Royals bunted a lot in 2014 too. All of this created a matchup of two teams that were polar opposites in all that they did. In the showdown between Moneyball and Small Ball, the Royals beat the Athletics, 7-6, mostly because of their bullpen, ability to steal bases, fielding, and bunting. Thus proving that while Moneyball is doubtless effective, there are other ways for small market teams to win.
This year, the Royals have the best record in baseball because they’ve stayed true to the same fundamentals. The A’s have the second worst record in baseball, mostly because they seem to have lost all sense of what their fundamentals are. Baseball has changed a lot in the last ten years, much of it due to Billy Beane’s Moneyball, but as richer teams start to adapt to the analytic world, it’s up to the poor teams to keep innovating and finding ways to make an unfair game work in their favor. The Kansas City Royals seem to be the latest team to do that. It would do the A’s well to follow suit very quickly, for as the 2014 Royals proved, speed is almost all that matters.
