not sure what you're trying to say; doesn't make it any less true
Braves in the mix for Cuban Shortstop
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not sure what you're trying to say; doesn't make it any less true
Billy Beane isn't the Final Authority. That's what he means.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
What Knucksie said. I'm not holding anything against Beane. I just find it hilarious that some people believe he invented baseball.
Back during my undergrad days at college, Syd Thrift was my favorite GM. Seemed like every move he made in Pittsburgh (drafting and trading) was intended to reduce payroll, while stockpiling young talent. That favorable impression turned out to correct, as it led to the Pirates made the NLCS in 3 straight years. Eventually, the game passed him by or he just got senile.
Billy Beane definitely has a sharp mind, but he's made his mistake, too. The book and movie enhances his stature, and, of course, he's seen as some sort of guru by amateur sabermetricians. Nevertheless, there's always been creative GM's in baseball.
zitothebrave
Connoisseur of Minors
Book was probably his biggest mistake, Made OBP a much bigger thing and took away his cheap goldmine faster than he anticipated I believe.
Not only that, but a larger part of the A's success, that year, was due to MVP perform of Tejada and Big 3 (Mulder, Hudson, Zito) starting pitchers. Those factors were barely acknowledged.
yeezus
It's OVER 5,000!
I agree with what you've said, but the book was about how he built a consistent winning ball club and the kind of GM he was, as well as the stat part. So while it mostly occurred in that specific season, the team's overall success that year was more underlying, to me.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
Well, he built a consistent winning ballclub by drafting and signing some quality guys that formed the core of the team and he should get credit for that, but I have never seen that the core of that team being built on the basis of the methodology that was outlined in the book. He took a flyer of Zito over Sheets (which was criticized at the time) that turned out right. Giambi fits the supposed Moneyball "type," but he was a 2nd round pick and he wouldn't have lasted the 2nd round if the A's had passed on him. Tejada was a great player in his prime. Hudson has been spectacular and Mulder was solid (at least as an A).
The thing that really makes me laugh is that he traded Carlos Pena and kept Scott Hatteberg (of course, he did get Ted Lilly in the Pena trade, but he did throw in Bonderman because he was probably still pissed at Grady Fuson for drafting him in the first place). Anyway, Beane is a good GM. His record speaks for itself, but the thing I found interesting is that this past summer, when asked about some changes in the way the A's have approached the game over the past decade, he said something to the effect "it all depends on who is on the team." I guess that's the approach a lot of us have adhered to when watching baseball. There's a lot of ways to win games offensively IF you have solid pitching and I think the approach advocated in Moneyball was as much about Michael Lewis' conjecture as it was about what the A's were doing. For the record, two years after the A's Moneyball draft, Lewis wrote a New York Times Magazine article that simply crucified the A's minor league instructional staff for not successfully developing the guys the A's had selected in that draft, specifically Steve Stanley.
Anyway, Beane has done a fantastic job of putting together a great young rotation through both drafts and trades so they may be around for awhile. And he's proven himself flexible and inventive. And in perhaps my strongest endorsement of him, it's my guess he would have never signed Uggla to the kind of extension Wren did even if he had the money lying around.
I guess my main beef when he is brought up is that those of us who have been baseball fans for 50-plus years are fully aware and support a lot of the common sense aspects of the Moneyball approach without having to throw in with the whole "rebel" part of the equation that Lewis seems intent on pushing. Good players are good players. They always are and they always will be. Risk always has to be balanced against reward and if you don't have a big budget, you can't assume much risk. You have to play at the margins, which you can do and still be successful if you have solid pitching.