Our definitions of best differ and we won’t come to a conclusion – to you the champions of the WS is the best team, for me that is not necessarily true. Agree to disagee I suppose. I think we can both agree that the goal is to win the WS though!

The best teams don’t make the playoffs, look at Boston, They were 90-72 and so were the Cardinals.

The BEST team is the only that wins no matter how short a series is!

Does Luck Injury or other factors sometimes change that?
YES! But at the end of the day it is said the winner of the WS is the BEST TEAM in baseball and they don’t much mention the others after that!

The Bottomline here is they all have to go through the same games to be the champ!
And despite some team that is better on paper when push comes to shove they were not better when it counted!

Boston lost their way to 90-72 Cardinals WON their way to it!

Cards got in.
Boston did not!

Wins and losses are NOT the be all and end all of SUCCESS and neither is a division or playoff entry!
Cause you might have started out as the BEST team in baseball and in the end were the worst but won enough earlier to keep your lead!

It’s not about Wins and Losses alone…they determine your entry into the playoffs but you also have to play well during those playoffs to get the title BEST IN LEAGUE!

Oakland had 100+ Wins two years in a row, Impressive right? Or was it just that they did well when there was NO pressure and CHOKED when it counted!
Should we give them credit for not advancing past the first round of the playoffs?

I’m more interested in the title not what others think should or should not have been in the WS based on paper views of numbers!

The team that wins the WS are champions, but not necessarily the best team – if you catch my drift. For example, this year I’d say that the Yankees has a better team than the Tigers and if you would replay the series 10 times I think the Yanks yould win 6, 7 or 8 times. Going in to the play offs, would you have preferred to have the players of the Yankees or the Tigers on your team? (looking at skill only) Despite (at least in my eyes) an inferior team, the Tigers still have the chance to be champions, the Yankees don’t. I guess this could be called semantics, but to me there is a difference. There are no moral champions in sports, so when you build your team you try to create the best odds but sometimes you’ll loose despite having the better team.

But yes, I’d reather be champion than considered to be the best – but the probability to become champion is the highest if your are the best.

SHort series are convenient excuses for those who don’t win but at the end of the day whoever wins the WS is considered the BEST team in baseball that season!

And isn’t that WHY you build a team at all? To be the best?

I do however belive you emphasize too heavy on a WS-title to measue success. For sure, a title is the goal of every team but the probability that a worse team will win a five or seven game series over a better team is quite big compared to the probability that the worse team will finish ahead of a “better” team after 162 games. Thus is regular season records a much better indicator a teams’ quality than how they fared in the play offs since results there are much more random.

Well, that said, I think your article has valid points, such as we cannot today use the same “formula” as in the early 2000′s (since everyone is using deeper statistical analysis) but personally I don’t think Moneyball as a concept is dead since it is as you put it: Sabermetics with budget constraints which is the very reality for the Mets, more today than a few years back.

Did they trade wins from the start? You could say they did not!
But they did trade them AFTER they got the wins and continued to let the good players they found go instead of keeping them and then trying to find even more value to complement them and take it further!

One thing to build a good team with little money but after doing so why would you let all that hard work leave and set you back again?
They won a lot of games but never enough to win the WS and if they had they might have dug themselves OUT of the attendance hole that forced them to work that hard in the first place!

It is commendable to do a good job under difficult situations.
But once done the situation should not be difficult anymore to remove the limitations!

This was the fatal flaw of Moneyball!
Yes they did a good job of building the team but failed to maintain it either because they thought they were smarter than they were and could repeat their past success or wrongly concluded that their MONEYBALL SYSTEM was the key when other factors probably were more important to that success, Such as losing a lot (under .500 baseball between the years of 1993 and 1998) that allowed them to get better players in the draft due to higher draft placement that were cheap!

It all fell apart after the first 4 playoff appearances because they no longer had the draft placement to get to the top talent that saved them the money the first time around!

At the time it may have looked like the SYSTEM was working.
But I would suggest it wasn’t the system that did it (it helped for sure in evaluating players) but the system itself could not WORK without that ability to get the best kids in the draft and without that they needed to keep the good kids they already had because it was impossible for the SYSTEM to repeat what it did before!

The CONDITIONS changed and the system was invalid once they did!
They should have recognized the difference in situation but their EGO in thinking how great their system was got in the way!

Exactly!

However, I don’t think the A’s in the Moneyball era traded wins for money spent – they wanted to win but had budget constraints (at least not Beane et al, maybe the owners rather saved than won, but that’s not moneyball – it’s just greed).

Value is relative, I’d say it’s the players output relative to his cost. Since different clubs has different budget contraints, cost is also relative. $20 millions is much more for, say, the Royals than the Yankees.

As for the Red Sox example – the spent the money because they could. If the A’s could have, or if the Mets could, spend the same amounts they should and would.

When it comes to Reyes, I think a lot of people are happy to sign him for $20 million for the next season, but a sx or seven year contract for $20 million a year can hurt the team since it is very unlikely his preformances at that age will match his price.

Well last year you would have to say NONE he bought based on PAY not performance!
Pretty much the MONEYBALL without the Statistical analysis!

I don’t think he will continue that but then again this piece was never about what Alderson was GOING to do just what people here WANT him to do!

Later when he has narrowed down some of the needs to a more manageable few he may be able to target some guys based on his own philosophy but what is his philosophy? He’s said that infield dimensions are all the same in regard to defense yet has talked about needing to upgrade the defense here. He’s talked about his perfect player being Ricky Henderson. Combination of high OB and high SLG. Who could possibly disagree with that?

There is no question that during the last dozen years multiple off season moves have blown up in our faces and flat out caused us to have so many playoff less seasons.

Big money moves that played poorly or couldn’t stay on the field took money away from where it could have done some real good and prevented us from being able to get the right guy later as well and caused us to skimp on the draft and international free agency which just keeps us more dependent on “who can we can get.”

Less and less quality is hitting the type A free agent market as more and more teams are extending their own guys or working out trade and signs with teams who have solid prospects in the farm. That means increased competition, cost and too many years. Frequently it’s only a matter of months before you realize this is just one more guy we’re going to have to live with until we can dump him for salary relief or cut his ***.

Teams suddenly making some of their good players available in trades in order to sell high rather than being stuck with no seat when the music stops should be a warning sign, not a signal to go for broke.

Beefing up the Scouting Dept in all areas of amateur baseball, HS, college, Legion, fall, summer and spring leagues is vital for the draft. Being able to extract four good Major Leaguers each June gives you something for yourself, something to trade and something for depth.

Beefing up your International scouts and having GREAT relationships with trainers and the new prospect leagues springing up is even MORE vital. International free agents take on average 7 years before they get up here. That means your using a spot on the 40 man roster for a kid who can’t help you for 3 years or your exposing him to rule 5 poachers. That’s why QUALITY should be the name of the game internationally. The Jesus Montero or Gary Sanchez instead of the Francisco Pena but you have to have the contacts, resolve and the cash to get them and it has to be a consistent year in, year out effort, not a scattershot drive by every 3rd year or so.

Heavy duty scouting of other teams minor league systems is a neccessity. It allows you to find guys who may just be 2-3 years away at an area where a logjam and resulting roster problems make trading a guy advantageous for some other team. That’s the way to address future needs when the answers not already in your system. A swap of a position your heavy at for a position someone else is heavy at to at least bridge the gap until you come up with the right guy. When opportunity comes you’ll know what to ask for in every teams systems and can avoid the old “well who else were we going to get to play _________” used to defend yet another crippling free agent signing.

Your scouts will lead you to the players that make the difference. Become a scouting based organization and follow that up with ELITE prospect development. Get guys ready to hit the ground running when they get up here, not throw them into pennant races when they should be in AA or stick them in LF when they’ve had only three minor league games in the OF.

None of these things are sabermetric principles at all. There old school Lee Macphail, Brooklyn Dodger philosophies from the 40′s that transformed a perennial doormat into a solid consistent winner year after year.

If you then add in a little extended analysis to maker a better educated choice who cares. Our mistakes have been more along the lines of rushing in without doing enough thinking for over two decades now. Doing a little more of it can’t make things worse.

Oaklands limited run into the playoffs with no WS win in 17 years
Or the Yankees who have won a WS 5 times in 17 years? And made the Playoffs 16 times!
I said I would be happy to have only 3 WS wins in 15 years!
Because if that was the goal I am sure I would have a ton more playoff appearances than oakland did!

THATS why I said I would be happy with a WS win every 5 years, because a team that did that would probably be competing EVERY year not just 4 years before it all fell apart!

Well Swede, My piece is written in response to pieces posted here that seem to suggest different!
Reyes would fit into our projected 110 mil budget, yet they still say signing him will stop us from being successful.

So lets talk about VALUE for a minute?
What is VALUE?
Is it merely the price per production?
Is that the value? Does doing it cheaply get you a 2 game handicap into the Playoffs?
Isn’t value as much about HOW MUCH HE CONTRIBUTES to your team winning?
Did you really get Value if you took the 2Mil per year guy who did well in what you decided was the UNDERVALUED STAT over the 10 Mil per guy who was good in a lot more stats than just the undervalued one?

Sure he has a higher OBP (lets say for example sake) but the guy you passed on had 100 RBI, a .300 BA and a SLG of .450!
Did you get value? Did you even get a 5th of the contribution you might have gotten if you just paid the piper?

And It would appear you misinterpreted the phrase penny wise pound foolish. It was not the British Pound we are talking about.
In this case it is saying: “Overcareful about trivial things (MONEY) and undercareful about important ones (WINNING BALLGAMES!)”.

By making the goal about HOW MUCH SPENT you REPLACE the goal of Winning Baseball games!
Some teams HAVE to do this at times, the NY METS are not one of them!
There are no Market forces that COMPEL them to play moneyball!

Sabermetrics can do everything you believe MONEYBALL does! Because Moneyball when all is said and done is nothing more than Sabermetrics with budget contraints!
It is those Budget constraints that are the Achillies Heel of the philosophy!

Because that stops you from going after the 20 Million dollar player who IS worth the money when he is available! That doesn’t happen every year!

And if you close those option off merely based on money you will not be able to keep up with those teams that did NOT limit themselves to only buying players who make under a certain amount!

Like the Yankees…but even more like….the RED SOX!
They used Sabers, They paid money for who they thought would help them win games! And they did not handcuff themselves by limiting their acquired performance in favor of MONEY!

And if you had any reading comprehension at all you would have gotten that I wasn’t trasing the kid in the institution I was trashing the person who IGNORES them because they ARE ashamed of them!

But explaining the truth to you is like pulling teeth!
Your more interested in your COMPOSED Fantasy than ANY real discussion of facts!

Bottom line…half the amount of championships as before…..

I prefer not to “bash” any other comments on this site but for Metsie to prefer winning a World Series every 5 years instead of being in the playoffs every year is foolish. He’d sacrifice being a team that is in the thick of it constantly for one year of glory? 1986 was superb but the truth is that that team should have won more titles. We had the best young pitcher in baseball (Gooden) and one of the top stars (Strawberry) succumb to drug and alcohol problems and basically ruin their careers. That was the first sign of poor performance by ownership as Sterling/ Doubleday failed both Doc and Darryl.

If our team is built through player development and a few trades/ free agent signings it can be a force for a decade. It doesn’t always translate into World Series winners every year but it gives you a chance. What more can you want?

It is foolish for fans to think of baseball as the same game it was 40 years ago. We can still love it even with it have becoming all about money. If our injured players return healthy we will be much better. Hopefully, Sandy Alderson can resign Jose Reyes without crippling finances and if he has the freedom and the nerve can make a few trades to get us what we need most, some starting pitching! It may cost us a DaviD Wright.

“MONEYBALL no matter what methodology used to arrive at the goal is about NOT SPENDING MONEY or Spending as little as possible. The REASON for implementing it is varied:

* Not having the money to spend due to low fan attendance and revenues.
* Cheap Ownership who are more interested in profit than wins and force the GM to shop at Kmart.
* Blind stupidity that convinces you that minimizing your player options translates to more success. I call this the “penny wise, pound foolish” syndrome!”

There is a huge difference between the first two reasons and the third. In the two former cases, you have a GM who has a limited budget (as all GM’s do, only the size of the budget differs) and in the third case a conviction that less is more.

All, or at least nearly all, advocates of Moneyball appreciate Moneyball from the perspective of the two former cases. A GM should maximize value for his budget. I think very very few actually thinks that the less you spend the better the results. As you wrote yourself in a post above: “Two players whose stats are the same, the cheaper will always be desirable.”

After establishing what a GM should get is maximum value, comes the question of how to determine value – which is a whole other debate (OBP vs. AVG etc.)

I don’t think we will reach an agreement since you claim the A’s philosophy were that they didn’t want to spend money, I’d say that they couldn’t – since they didn’t have the money to spend.

So, what does Moneyball mean today? It teaches us that you can, by being more informed than your competitors make better decisions and thus win even if you can’t afford to spend as much as your competitors. As much as I want the Mets to resign Reyes, there is a limit where it is wise, where that limit is, is thankfully not my job to decide, but rather Sandy Alderson’s.

And your point is moot anyway…Colorade drew 2.9 mil last year too!
Was it ALSO a new Stadium?

Oakland was the lowest draw!
I wonder why?
could it be they are still trying to recover their fanbase after the GREAT EXPERIMENT?

I appreciate your efforts to drag me through the mud and try and claim that anything I say is remotely close to the above statement made by Metsie.

The fact is, having a different opinion is not insensitive or classless. Whenever some of us have differing views it turns into World War 3 because some people would rather yell and scream rather than talk and listen.

I’m not interested in having a pissing contest with you. At the end of the day, you see things differently than I and that’s fine. But I won’t stoop so low as to say things like

“They avoided it like the Retarded Sibling in the mental institution because they know they can’t really bring up any proof to defend against the reality”

and then claim victory when a response isn’t given. A response wasn’t given because you proven to me that you cannot debate or discuss like an adult.

I look forward to the next topic when I am sure you will make every attempt to justify your ridiculous statements.

In the case of oakland they found an undervalued stat because Sabers were still new and not many people knew about them. No one listed OBP WAR nor any of those stats we now associate with Sabers. So it was pretty damn easy to find a stat no one even knew about.

That same approach is probably true for ALL statistical analysis that has ever been done!
No one skips over a guy with the same numbers who costs less!
Two players whose stats are the same, the cheaper will always be desirable, But that cheaper may only be 2 mil of a 10-12 mil salary! It’s still VALUE but is that really what Oakland did?

Not really!
So they had the right idea but did not actually implement it the way they should have!
They skipped players their APPROACH said were BUYS all because they would command a high Salary! They let players they found with that approach go because they refused to keep them based on money!

In the cases where the Yankees being used it is not to suggest BIG SPENDING is the way to go it is merely used as an example to show those who are under the false belief that spending LESS leads to more success! It CAN provided your saving up for that rainy day in the way the Phillies have. But that is a long long road to take.
If we were in Atlanta or Philadelphia (one team towns) we might get away with that the way they did!

But this is NY!
SAVING money is not in the NY Blood! Hell we are where Wall Street lives!
And while it might make for a good decade of dominance if we lose for 12 years and build from scratch to save Wilpon money if tried here Sandy won’t make it past 2013!

So if the APPROACH is to SAVE money thats fine but if the approach is to simply have LOW SALARY (which is what has been suggested by so many of the Moneyballers who post here) then not only will it fail to succeed but it will only lead to a backlash once Sandy gets booted RIGHT BACK to what all those moneyballers hated about Omar!

Because for all the success people think Oakland had playing moneyball!
The Yankees have FAR SURPASSED!

Going on 15 years of ANNUAL PLAYOFF CONTENTION!
And they did it by doing the opposite of Oakland!
They did by not shying away from paying the best baseball players available!
And they have not lost money despite having the highest payroll in baseball PLUS the Luxury tax!

No Attendance issues!
No profit losing season!
No sub .500 seasons!
Just winning and spending to stay there! They haven’t had a sub .500 season since 1992!

I would not suggest we do that!
But you have to admit it sure has been a far better approach than what Oakland came up with!
And since we are in NY it makes more sense to do what they do than do what Oakland did!

But to LIMIT our choices based on MONEY is the path to failure!
Sure we might get a few false hope seasons…But never the WS glory!
And I would rather win one WS every 5 years than make the playoffs 5 straight years and then lose before I get to the LCS each time!