The Winning Formula

With postseason baseball now in full swing, this is an opportune time for fans to see a really good baseball movie, Moneyball, based on the best selling novel.

The Oakland A’s were a terrible team. Picture in your mind the team from the movie, Major League.Remember Ricky ‘Wild Thing’ Vaughn? They were a poor team by baseball standards and the players were sub-par at best. The desperate owner hired Billy Beane to turn things around.

Beane, portrayed in the movie by Brad Pitt (lucky, I know), was a highly recruited athlete who turned down a football/baseball scholarship from Stanford to sign with the Mets. Beane never lived up to expectations and decided to enter the world of team management as the A’s assistant GM. When the A’s team owner died and the new owners took over, Beane was promoted to GM.The new owners informed him that the team’s budget would be greatly reduced. Big-name players bolted for more lucrative contracts, and the players left were not good. Being the fierce competitor he was, Beane decided he could put together a winning team regardless of salaries. He hired an assistant GM,Paul DePodesta,a Harvard grad statistics geek. (In the movie his character’s name is Paul Brand. DePodesta refused the use of his name or likeness) Together, Beane and DePodesta changed the manner of scouting in the baseball world.

Until that time, scouting was done by tobacco-chewing old timers who attended high school and college games with their clipboards. DePodesta advised Beane to trash conventional scouting for an unconventional method of plugging statistics into mathematical formulas he had developed for player evaluation. This system found value in players who were affordable and would have been overlooked by the old system.

This principle of sabermetrics has gone mainstream in baseball. Many clubs have hired analysts to put these principles into place for their teams. Herein lies the new problem for the Oakland A’s.

In 2002, the A’s put together a good team using sabermetrics. They had a spectacular season despite having the smallest payroll of any major league team. The fans were rewarded by their team’s appearance in postseason play. But times change and the A’s have gone back to their losing ways. Now that the baseball world knows about sabermetrics, they’re using it. It’s back to the competitive world of scouting but in a new era of analysis.

This year’s playoffs feature teams such as the Rays and the Diamondbacks who might be considered Cinderella teams but in reality are clubs who have done their homework. We now have some exciting players to watch and root for in October.

MARSHALL