Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, Oakland (Moneyball)

The Oakland Athletics have been a very successful franchise on the field, but the team I admire the most is the “Moneyball” A’s of the early 2000s. One of the reasons I admire them is that they changed the way the game is played, and even talked about, by their use of statistics. The stats nerd in me loves that, even though the baseball fan in me regrets some of the ways that good use of stats changed the game.

In 1998, the A’s hired a young (in his 30s) former player, Billy Beane, as their general manager, and made it clear to him that he was going to be working with a relatively low payroll, in part because they never drew many fans to their games.

As a player, Beane was the kind who looked like he should be a star – he could run well, hit for power, and so on – but never really panned out. He played 148 games in the majors over the course of six seasons, and was a below-average player. In other words, he looked like he should be good, in all the ways baseball scouts measured players, but he wasn’t, in the way that mattered most. He couldn’t help a team win.

As a general manager, Beane was spectacular. Knowing that he couldn’t compete with the payrolls of other teams, he tried to see where he could find an advantage, which meant finding players who were undervalued by other teams. Beane’s problem was to find a way to figure out what players were undervalued, and he turned to a wealth of statistical analyses that were beginning to appear among a certain type of nerdish fan, even though the teams were mostly ignoring them.

The resulting metamorphosis, which sounds arcane, was chronicled in a best-selling book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball, which was turned into a movie of the same name in which Brad Pitt played Beane (and was nominated for an Oscar).

In 1971, when I was in high school, a group founded a small (16 people) organization with a pretentious name, the Society for American Baseball Research. The group was partly interested in baseball history (they now research the history of baseball in the Orient and the Caribbean, making the “American” part of the name inaccurate), partly interested in statistical research. I’m interested in both, but it was the stats part that made me become a member just a few years later. SABR now has 7500 members, and the invented word “sabermetrics” refers to the use of statistics to analyze everything from baseball player performance and evaluation to in-game strategy.

How did the statistical analyses work? It often started with a simple question, like “Is trying to steal a base a good idea?” Then someone would sift through one, or two, or five years’ worth of in-game summaries to figure out a statistical answer. Incidentally, that did mean that you needed play by play, or even pitch by pitch, summaries of as many games as possible, so in the mid-1980s, I spent time watching games on fast-forward on cable to provide those for certain teams, before MLB realized they needed to generate those for every game.

What were the lessons from sabermetrics? Some of the early ones were about strategy.

·        Trying to steal a base is a good strategy only if you have more than a 70% chance of success, which means that many teams do no more than break even, statistically.

·       The sacrifice bunt, in which the batter taps the ball onto the infield grass, allowing the defense to throw him out at first, but advancing the runner by a base, is generally a bad play. A successful sacrifice bunt makes it more likely that your team will score one run in an inning, but less likely that you’ll score two or more, and

·       In most games, one team scores more runs in a single inning than the other team scores in the entire game. That’s been true of 12 of the 21 MLB games we’ve seen this year (I’m a SABR member at heart and I keep a scorebook), and in another five, the winning team scored the same number of runs in their biggest inning as the losing team did in the entire game. In other words, generating, or preventing, big innings is usually more important than one run here or there.

Others showed that traditional statistics, like batting average (number of times the batter gets a hit to reach base safely divided by the number of at-bats, not counting walks), or runs batted in (the number of times a batter does something to cause someone to score) are not good measures of how much a player helps a team win. In the first case, it turns out that getting a walk is usually as good as getting a hit. In the second, it’s obvious that it’s easier to drive runners in if there are runners on second or third base, so it doesn’t really document the player’s abilities. The best simple statistic is “OPS”, On-base percentage  Plus Slugging percentage, which values walks (on-base percentage) and values doubles, triples, and home runs more than singles (slugging percentage). And it turns out a strikeout isn’t much worse than any other out.  

Billy Beane was the first to make use of these insights in a big way. In particular, he went after players who were good at getting walks, something that other teams didn’t care about much. He also believed that high school and college statistics were valuable, particularly on things like walks. By 2002, Beane had put together a walk-oriented team that won 103 of 162 games with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball. The next year, Lewis wrote Moneyball, and soon other teams were looking at what Beane was doing. OPS and other stats like that are now shown on scoreboards at many MLB parks, although, ironically, Oakland shows only the very traditional numbers, as seen in the photo.

Of course, as other teams followed suit, the things that had been undervalued, like the ability to draw a walk, became highly valued, and Beane had to go after players who were undervalued for other reasons.

Traditional scouts, both within the Oakland organization and around MLB, were horrified by Beane’s ideas, which paid little attention to how good a player looked when he played. A few years later, I remember going to a Phoenix-area SABR meeting with one or two dozen other people, including a couple of retired scouts. One of the former scouts was particularly pleased to point out that Oakland was winning that year, and that they had a team that was using players who were exactly the opposite of the traditional Moneyball players, guys who hit a lot of home runs, but didn’t get a lot of walks. He said, “See, even Beane has given up on Moneyball.” I didn’t have the heart to point out that because all the other teams were trying to copy Beane, the type of players who had been undervalued before were now overvalued, and vice versa.

I’m a Billy Beane fan.

More A’s history

Since we’re not expecting to go to another A’s home game on our tour, it’s worth mentioning a little about the franchise’s history.

In one way, it’s a glorious history. Only two franchises, the Yankees and the Cardinals, have won more World Series than the A’s 10. But the A’s usually did them in bunches. They won three as the Philadelphia A’s between 1910 and 1913, three more 1929-1931, three as the Oakland A’s 1972-1974, and one more in 1989 (although they were the losers in the Series in 1988 and 1990).

In another way, it’s ugly. From nearly 50 years, from 1904 through 1952, there were 16 major league teams, the same 16 teams. Then teams started moving. The Philadelhia A’s were the third team to move, to Kansas City, in 1955, the westernmost city in the majors. But once the genie was out of the bottle, more teams started move, and MLB added some expansion teams. By now, there are a number of franchises that have been in two different cities, and two, the Braves (Boston, Milwaukee and Atlanta) and A’s, who have been in three. The A’s are about to move again, to a temporary home in Sacramento, before, presumably, settling for a while in Las Vegas. That will mean they will have been in five different cities, two more than the team in second, and three more than all of those in third. Can we just call them the “Nomadland Athletics?” I’m not aware of any other top-level pro franchises that have moved four times, although the Raiders and Rams of the NFL have each moved three (although each has been in one city twice).

The game (Blue Jays 7, A’s 0)

The story of the game was Blue Jays’ starting pitcher Kevin Gausmann, who pitched a complete game shutout. He struck out 10, and allowed five hits and one walk. Out of nearly 1000 games so far this season, only seven pitchers have pitched a complete game shutout, so it’s an accomplishment.

Meanwhile, Oakland’s starter was Luis Medina, whom we’d seen pitch for Las Vegas. He walked the bases loaded in the first, and gave up a run, then pitched well for the next three innings, allowing one hit and no runs. In the fifth, he gave up a leadoff homerun, got a couple of outs, then allowed three straight doubles and walked a batter. He was pulled at that point, but the new pitcher allowed the two runner still on base to score, and it was 6-0. The way Gausmann was pitching, it was all over.