Quote:
Originally Posted by Amazin69
Yes, Moneyball (book and movie) was about Beane working within his budget by trusting stats over scouting. It's also a crock of ****, since what made the A's such a force in the early 2000s was developing three aces simultaneously (Hudson, Mulder, Zito) and having an offense driven by the distinctly low-walk offense of Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez, which is inconvenient to the narrative and thus was removed.
However, the quote in this thread that kicked off the whole "Moneyball is dead" discussion, was a snarky remark at the giant flop of the 2023 Mets despite the best efforts of Uncle Stevie and his Endless Payroll. "Moneyball" only in the sense of "try to buy a pennant", which is precisely the opposite fo the problems that Beane faced.
(See also the concurrent failings of the aptly-named Brian Cashman and his Bronx Bankrolls.)
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Yeah, this on the other hand is a pretty legitimate criticism of the book. Like buddy, let's not pretend for a second that your team's rise was built on the fact that you just plain drafted 3 great pitchers as well as a good collection of young talent, some of whom were classic "Moneyball" guys (Giambi springs to mind) and some of whom were not. Again, as noted before, the book itself was clear that the actual mechanism or stats used were not important - the idea of finding market inefficiencies was the important bit - but I 100% agree that Lewis completely glosses over things that don't really "count" as being part of the overall narrative and also, in the offing, highlights a few things that... I hate to say, the scouts might have been kind of right about (Jeremy Brown comes to mind - he was the guy the scouts laughed off because he wasn't in very good shape in college - who was drafted in the extra-picks part of the first round in 2002. He wound up being a minor bust, getting a grand total of 11 at-bats in the major leagues).
This was far from his worst book - I'd give that to Blind Side - and to be fair to the book itself it did get picked up by baseball people and there's a whole lot more statistical analysis done on the game as a result.