In 2003, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, a book written by Michael Lewis, sparked the interest of not only baseball fans, but also management and statistical scholars across the country. [1] Recently in 2011, this book was introduced as a sports drama movie starring Brad Pitt. Basically the storyline of the book encompasses how the main character Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, implemented a measurement and feedback system based [...]

Somewhere along the line baseball became more than just a game. Once upon a time, baseball was a simple game. The goal is to score more runs than your opponent. Each team is given 27 outs to score as many runs as they can. In order to score runs, a team’s players have to get on base. Once a player gets on base it was the other players’ jobs to drive them home to score runs. [...]

It’s September 4th, and the Orioles find themselves one game out of first place in the American League East. That statement, on it’s own, isn’t too ridiculous. It’s when you start looking at the stats that make that statement look ridiculous. The Orioles are not a good baseball team according to the stats. In fact, if you were to look at the league statistical rankings, before looking at the standings, you would think they stink. [...]

Moneyball is a ultimately a strategy that was developed by a small market team’s general manager in order to compete large market teams. When Billy Beane sat down and started to think about creative ways to stay competitive with large market teams, he didn’t write the word moneyball on a dry erase board, and tell everyone in the room that this was his new idea. Moneyball was a name, that was given by an author, [...]

The Mets currently have a front office in place that has earned them the nickname the “Moneyball Mets.” Mets G.M. Sandy Alderson was once Billy Beane’s mentor, and the Mets have also added a couple of other front office executives that once worked with Beane. As the Brady Bunch theme song goes – everyone sing along – that’s the way we became the Moneyball Mets. Does that mean the Mets are on pace to have the [...]

Having explained more precisely what the central GOAL of Moneyball is (Save Money) I thought it might be good to talk about what it actually says it did and why it did what it did from the Statistical Analysis point of view. Moneyball, as was stated previously, used Statistical analysis to find an UNDERVALUED METRIC that was then used to hunt for and create a MASTER LIST of players who exhibited that quality for consideration [...]

I think it is time to talk about what Moneyball ACTUALLY means and to show some of those who claim to have read the book what the book is all about. Apparently, reading doesn’t always lead to UNDERSTANDING. I have read the book, it was interesting to learn about the little known “behind the scenes” process of team building and how a front office operates. It is for THAT reason the book sold so well not because [...]

Since the hiring of Sandy Alderson there seems to be a an overwhelming sentiment among the fanbase that if you don’t 100% support everything Alderson and his front office do then you’re not a real fan of the New York Mets. Gone are the days when having a different opinion was acceptable. Today, Mets fans who disagree with the front office are labeled haters and trolls. They are singled out and attacked on sites like this one or social [...]

Moneyball tells the fascinating tale of Billy Beane’s ingenious use of statistical analysis in order to assemble a winning ballclub without the luxury of a large payroll. Through statistics such as OBP, SLG, and a slew of other stats, Beane was able to snatch ballplayers with “hidden virtues” up for a song, creating a team on a $35 million budget just as successful, if not better than the richest teams in the game. Beane’s A’s had become the very [...]

The purpose of Sabermetrics, in a nut shell, lay in its constant pursuit of finding the value of player’s most minute components. It’s a pure almost sanitized view of a player’s performance however like it is even admitted to in the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, in human behavior there was always uncertainty and risk. No matter how accurately you valued past performance, it was still an uncertain guide to future [...]