Most small market teams are condemned to really hoping for the best throughout the season.

The A’s, becoming a small market team, instead of falling to that, Beane turned them around and using Sabermetrics and his own stuff, made them into one of the best team’s in baseball.

Like I’ve said, He proved them wrong they couldn’t be competitive.

Everyone thought they knew everything there was to know about baseball, until Beane came along with his A’s.

By the way, never once in Moneyball does it speak of taking a team and using them for the most Profit.

Tell me something how much do you HAVE to spend before not making or winning a WS makes you a failure?

Huh?

I mean how much HEADROOM for failure do you get for not spending money?

Every analyst, journalist, owner, fan thought the A’s were done following 2001 and following 1995. Once Beane came in in 1998, he proved them wrong, showing a small market team can be a perennial 90+ win team.

Then again in 2001, following losing thei core guys, they topped themselves in 2002.

He proved them all wrong, standing atop baseball not in the playoffs, but he showed everyone that there is more than just conventional baseball. Although they were not the MOST successful in the playoffs, they were one of the best teams in the game, and were of the smallest budgets.

By not stating what they were on top of you were infering they were on top of baseball…then did it again with this:

“Every analyst, journalist, owner, fan thought the A’s were done following 2001 and following 1995. Once Beane came in in 1998, he proved them wrong”

Wrong about what?

Every Analyst owner and fan thought they were done contending for a WS which is really all anyone but you moneyball guys take as a success!

Did Beane win one? Did he really prove them wrong?

No one said they were going to be the worst team in baseball!

And every year some team wins 90+ games. They don’t need moneyball to do that!
So it is a revolution or just a good attempt at trying to win something (obviously not a WS) without paying for it?

Smart Baseball?

Revolution?

The only thing revolutionary about Moneyball is the fact that it ignores BASEBALL success in favor of PROFIT!

Thats the ONLY revolution and it inspired the Marlins, Pirates and all the other moneyball teams to just throw cheap crap out there, winning be damned, I’m too busy counting my Money!

ON TOP OF WHAT?

The MLB? Or on top of teams that only spent 40 Million?
MAYBE you can say top of the AL WEST!

They were on top of that!

But on TOP of ALL TEAMS IN THE MLB?

Not even CLOSE!
And Never in the years they used Moneyball!

Owners aren’t going to just reinvest all of their money into the team. Of course the A’s owners will pocket SOME. But in Moneyball, it clearly states that under Alderson, when the new owners came in in 1995, they had very small pockets.

They did not retain La Russa as a manager because he was too expensive.

That was how the Oakland A’s were run from ownership, not Beane, and whether the owners HAD the money or did not in order to increase salary is a matter of opinion from our knowledge. We would have to know the A’s financial records to know that answer.

And regardless, many teams remain small market, like the Marlins, Rays, Padres and others. they tend not to be as successful once their drafted players walk. Beane managed to break that chain.

Then once Beane managed to do that, when he lost Giambi, Damon Isringhausen, everyone wrote them off for dead. He proved them wrong again by becoming an even better team in winning 103 games the following year.

Thats how he came out on top

lolololol, oh Metsie Metsie Metsie.

“Moneyball is more than just sabermetrics, the Oakland A’s or even baseball. Moneyball is the story of one man with an amazing, astounding new way that comes face-to-face with an entire social order, unchanged for over 150 years, facing countless critics and doubters along the way, and ultimately emerges on top.”

My first response was basically ON TOP OF WHAT!

And thats pretty much been the debate ever since.

Was it Moneyball that allowed Beane to find those good players?
Or did moneyball merely define WHERE he could look?

Wasn’t it the Analysis of players that made whatever success people seem to think ON TOP was?

Thats the point I have been making will continue to make and ON TOP is nothing more than a SUBJECTIVE view of success that only seems to apply to teams with a 40 Million dollar payroll while other teams have far surpassed those ACHIEVEMENTS without having to look where beane had to look.

If it is the SUCCESS story everyone wants to make it out to be then it should have actually succeeded DESPITE the money limitations.

Is Hobbling better than Running? TO a guy with one leg YES! To a healthy person NO!
They Hobbled themselves and people are celebrating that as a success.

I say hobbling yourself was a mistake!
A bad situation that Beane did about as good a job as he could under circumstances but did not succeed BECAUSE of the limitations imposed!

A success story should actually succeed in the end!

Would Cinderella be a success story if the prince didn’t try the slipper on her?

Or would have been just a one night stand?
Nice story, crappy ending!

No one ever said OBP was not usefull. Just not complete unless BA was taken into account to know how much of the OBP is actually a product of the batter and not the pitcher so it can be maintained no matter what a pitcher decided to do in a PA!

But until you graduate Kindergarten and move on from fingerpainting and playing with dolls, Graduate enough to learn math and advanced calculus to understand math probability and sustainable medians you really should just stay out of these things because your just proving yourself the fool!

Wow, Metsie, you just contradicted everything you’ve been arguing for for the seven or so months i’ve been on this thing.

You do realize you just demonstrated the importance of OBP don’t you? you friggin idiot. sooo pretty much you’re saying as soon as the rest of the league caught on to OBP, like Boston and the Yankees, Beane started losing his advantage. Thanks for proving the point that we sucessfully made a long long time ago but for some reason you are only coming to grips with now.

the funniest part about it is you changed your view on one argument to try to win this new argument lol. gahd you’re entertaining.

Budget constraints. The owners refused to give him more than $40 or so mil to spend and he had to stretch it. He did a tremendous job. If Beane was the GM of the Yankees, he’d have won five WS, too.

The problem with this whole entire debate (you included, Metsie) is that you’re all arguing pro or con Moneyball as if it’s a real thing. It’s not. It’s a book. It’s a good book, actually, but it’s a book. Everyone should read it. It takes you behind the scenes, into a draft strategy meeting, into phone calls between GMs about trades or whatnot. Any baseball fan should read it because you get insight to things you never get otherwise.

But that’s where it ends. This silly idea that Moneyball is a “philosophy” is so far from the truth, it sours BOTH sides. The closest thing to right in this whole 9,000-comment post is where Metsie said Moneyball is NOT sabermetrics. That’s right on the money. But Metsie went on to say that Moneyball as a philosophy is what kept Beane from spending money. That’s 100% false.

Everyone who made any point based on the premise that Moneyball was a philosophy was wrong, whether it was pro- or anti-sabermetrics.

The fact is, the reason the Yanks, Sox and Braves have been the most successful franchises over the last 15 years or so is because they use a good amount of sabermetrics to identify the good players, then use generous payrolls to buy them. They ALSO have top-notch scouting systems and minor-league instructors. When has either of those three teams rushed a prospect before he was ready? I honestly can’t remember one. I can’t remember one guy from any of those teams who came up and looked as lost as Tejada did, or couldn’t find the plate like Mejia did, or had such a drastic difference between his AA/AAA numbers and his Mets numbers like Duda has.

It’s just so immensely silly that this whole thing started because people take a STORY as gospel. And that goes for both sides, because the anti-saber crowd seem to feel Moneyball is a philosophy, same as the author of this post. Reading Moneyball and taking it as a philosophy is like watching Titanic and thinking every ocean liner is gonna hit a damn iceberg.

It was fine when me and Clayton were actually discussing it because we were at least being civil.

Bottomline on Moneyball IMO…

Beane did a great job of finding players in places you didn’t look before than.
He did a good job on statistical analysis (for the time) and I am willing to bet if the gloves were taken off he might have spent a little money and won quite a few WS over that course of time.

But he didn’t and for whatever reason he didn’t it showed one thing.

Moneyball in and of itself either forced upon or by belief in it’s method did not produce a World Series entrant since it’s invention.

Boston is the team that took SOME of the lessons which had little to do with spending money and looking for cheap and EVERYTHING to do with deep statistical analysis on EVERY player to try and find the best guys they could and it resulted in the SUCCESS as I have defined it!

Bottomline beane is a good GM and probably better than his current record has showed.

He did a good job but he hardly revolutionized baseball and has not come up with some holy grail that leads you to the path of success.

He had a pretty good run but no cigar and lots of other teams who used some other system did just as well…

INCLUDING the polar opposite Yankees who spent like crazy and won 5 of their 7 WS appearances.

THATS success! And Maybe it’s a revolution!
Or maybe as I tried to say it’s just that The Yankees do all the deep statistical analysis Beane did but don’t limit or throw out of the pool the BEST PLAYERS in their analysis due to money concerns.

You mean SUBJECTIVE, not OBJECTIVE…

My evaluation is OBJECTIVE! It is based on the appearances in the WS which is what every other team is judged by not just the ones who spent money! 17 out of 30 different teams SUCEEDED since the invention of Moneyball…Moneyball teams in that list? ZERO!

Here read the difference.
http://www.asdatoz.com/Documents/Website-%20Objective%20vs%20subjective%20ltr.pdf

In any objective analysis of the 2002 Oakland A’s a reasonable person couldn’t come to the conclusion that the A’s were a failure. You did. And the proof of this according to you is that they “could have signed players like the Phillies and Yankees did.” That’s ridiculous.

If you cannot appreciate how a small market team like the A’s was able to win 103 games, in a Division that included the 93 win Mariners and the 99 win Angels (who went on to win the World Series) AFTER losing three of their best players that cool.

As a lifelong NY Met Fan I can appreciate it and feel no need to run down their accomplishment. I understand that only winning the World Series would have been considered a success by you but not everyone else feels the same way. Not everyone else feels the need to make things up to butress their opinions either.

Considering that we have had the highest payroll in the Majors over the last 20 years and have only qualified for the playoffs three times, and only then when one of our Division rivals gives up, and gives us some of the best players in baseball, perhaps we could learn something that might improve our results rather than smirking at what the A’s were able to do while calling them a failure.

Personally I don’t think Met Fans have anything to smirk about when it comes to the results of our favorite team over the last two decades.