Matt Yglesias

Has “Moneyball” Failed, Or Succeeded?

I don’t really follow baseball in enough detail to know for sure if he’s wrong, but this Buzz Bissinger argument is wildly unconvincing:

Whatever happens in the National League and American League Championship series unfolding over the next week or so, one outcome has already been decided–the effective end of the theories of Moneyball as a viable way to build a playoff-caliber baseball team when you don’t have the money. That no doubt sounds like heresy to the millions who embraced Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, but all you need to do is keep in mind one number this postseason: 528,620,438. That’s the amount of money in payroll spent this season by the teams still in it–the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Moneyball? You bet it’s Moneyball, true Moneyball, like it always has been in baseball and always will be.

Bissinger goes on to diss Billy Beane across various modalities. But my impression watching from afar is that recent developments in baseball largely vindicate Beane’s work. Obviously, having a bigger payroll to work with is helpful to a general manager. But for a while, detailed attention to statistical work allowed Beane to exploit massive market inefficiencies and put together high-quality, low-payroll teams. But then other people noticed. Michael Lewis wrote a bestselling book about it! So the insights spread, and there are fewer inefficiencies to take care of. If it had somehow been possible to copyright on base percentage and force everyone else to keep relying on batting average, that would have been nice for the early adopters. But it’s not, and the broad outlines of statistical analysis of baseball performance are now pretty widely understood.

Steroids and the Hall of Fame

Ross Douthat says past steroid use shouldn’t keep you out of the Hall of Fame forever, but it should carry a penalty:

This isn’t to say that the steroid effect shouldn’t be considered in evaluating a player’s fitness for the Hall. I wouldn’t give A-Rod or Bonds the honor of a first-ballot induction, and I think that evidence of steroid use is a good reason for keeping borderline HoF candidates out. If you think a player wouldn’t have reached Hall-worthy numbers without cheating – as I suspect McGwire wouldn’t, for all his gifts – then don’t vote him in. But there’s no question that Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens would have made the Hall without the edge that steroids provided. And if you grant that premise, I think that they belong there, unless the sport is willing to take the plunge of banning them from the diamond permanently.

I think I’d go softer on McGwire than this. Maybe it’s true that absent the juice McGwire wouldn’t have been a good enough hitter to rack up HoF stats. But one of the problems a juiceless McGwire would have faced was the need to hit the pitches thrown by Roger Clemens. Suppose McGwire hadn’t had assistance and the pitchers against whom he played didn’t have it either—is there any reason to think it wouldn’t have all just evened-out in the end?

Baseball Fans, Perennially Losing Their Innocence

Can I say that as someone who doesn’t really follow baseball, I’ve been pretty surprised at all the gnashing of teeth over the revelation that Alex Rodriguez was using steroids back during the period when Major League Baseball had no real testing and sanctions policy for steroids. Haven’t we reached the point where we should just assume that back then all the players were using something? After all, what kind of big-time baseball star would willingly eschew a performance-enhancing substance whose use was widespread among his teammates and competitors and which there was no serious policy in place to prevent? It would have to be someone who wasn’t taking his baseball skills all that seriously.

At the end of the day, simply accepting this reality would, I think, wind up doing a lot to make people feel better about the game. The steroid era was an unfortunate episode, driven by bad policy decisions. But that’s what it was—the sports drug policy made near-universal use of performance enhancing substances essentially inevitable. There’s no reason to look on what players did during that period as grave personal ethical failings—they were following the logic of the system. It was a bad logic of a bad system, and that’s why change was necessary.

The Blank Rays

I’m not much of a baseball fan, but I follow sports in general enough that I like to think of myself as aware of all baseball traditions. For example, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are a bad team. My great aunt Dahlia lived in Tampa all her life, was a baseball fan, was very excited when the Devil Rays came to town, and then was disappointed by the fact that they sucked. There you have it. Tampa = Devil Rays = Bad.

Then I flip to this season’s post-season and what do I see? Not only has Tampa become good, they’re not the Devil Rays anymore. They’re just the “Rays.” Like a ray of sunshine. I suppose you can’t argue with success, but this strikes me as a much lamer name. It used to be that no matter how bad the team, you could at least say “well, we’re still named after a bad-ass fish.” Now once their good players are all poached by other, higher-payroll teams what are they going to have left? Nothing!

Meanwhile, I note that Alaska’s lack of big league sports franchises is a major advantage on the stump. Palin’s been in Florida the past two days congratulating local ralliers on the Devil Rays’ success and she’s able to really do it wholeheartedly; she’s got a background in sports commentary, and no divided loyalties based on an allegiance to a local team.