The commercial for the movie version of Moneyball is airing pretty regularly during baseball games this week. Seeing it reminded me how much I enjoyed the book. So I pulled it off my shelf to take a fresh look.
Moneyball tells the story of how the Oakland A’s were able to compete at a high level with the Yankees and Red Sox, despite a player payroll that was a fraction of theirs. A’s general manager Billy Beane developed strategies of finding traits in players that were undervalued and not wasting outs on the field.
Near the end of the book, Beane describes the impending playoffs as a crapshoot. Of his use of statistics to win games, he remarks, “My [method] doesn’t work in the playoffs.” Which got me to wondering: Why doesn’t Billy Beane’s method work in the regular season anymore, either?
Since that Moneyball season, the Oakland A’s have a record of 744–704. That record gets worse the further you get from the glory years. The last three seasons, including what’s happened so far in 2011, their record is 225–252. In the past five seasons, they have played .500 ball just once. They have made the playoffs only twice since Moneyball was written.
A quick internet search tells me a lot of other people are asking this same question. The hundreds of conjectures can be categorized in three ways:
• Beane isn’t really that good. He got lucky.
• On-base percentage stopped being undervalued.
• A great pitching staff fell apart.
There is merit to all of these, and some convincing arguments can be heard, but in very few places did I see any mention of the following, incontrovertible fact: The Oakland A’s offensive juggernaut was highly dependent on steroids.
In Moneyball, Michael Lewis summarizes the high-OBP strategy: Get guys on base and wait for a three-run home run. He also points out the A’s batting philosophy that all nine spots in the line-up should be home-run threats.
In the seven years prior to the 2002 Moneyball season, during which Beane made his unusual transition from fourth outfielder to head honcho, Baseball-Reference.com lists the following as the MVP of the A’s: Mark McGwire, McGwire, McGwire, Kenny Rogers, Jason Giambi, Giambi, and Giambi.
Now look at this list: 205, 176, 189, 155, 175, 171, 125, 135, 109. That’s the A’s home run total for each season, beginning in 2002. That’s a pretty clear trend. The high-OBP approach stopped working when they couldn’t depend on a three-run home run anymore.
Steroid testing started in 2003, but the first year wasn’t particularly important. MLB and the players’ union had worked out an agreement that the 2003 testing would be a dry run. If more than 5 percent of the 2003 samples showed steroid use, testing would start in earnest in 2004. (By the way, this was all supposed to be anonymous, which didn’t work out so well for A-Rod or David Ortiz after the results were leaked.)
In November of 2003, MLB announced that 5 to 7 percent of the samples showed steroids, so they would be implementing the full test policy. Experts believe that the testing program has been pretty successful and the game is a lot cleaner than it was. The numbers bear this out: Home-run production is down and overall slugging has dropped.
Now look at the cast of characters in Moneyball. It’s like the index to the Mitchell Report: Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Jason and Jeremy Giambi, and Miguel Tejada all make appearances.
Could the A’s front office have been ignorant about this? Widespread steroid use in MLB was at least tacitly condoned; the emphasis on power hitting even rewarded it. And Beane had played for the team in the same clubhouse.
Look, I liked Moneyball. It made me think. I would never have played on websites like Baseball-Reference or Baseball Prospectus without it. But in retrospect, the fact that steroids don’t get mentioned even once is pretty damning. Maybe the attitude was the one expressed by so many in the Mitchell Report: Every team had a problem.
The commercial for the movie adaptation looks good. I’m sure I’ll see it and I’m sure that I’ll enjoy the climactic Scott Hatteberg home run as much in the theater as I did in the book. But now the movie will feel incomplete unless a scene is added where a trainer or player injects Miggy Tejada with Winstrol.
A's under Beane = Occam's razor. He ain't anything close to a genius. Canseco, McGwire, Giambi, Tejada - none drafted/signed under Beane's watch as GM. In fact, Beane wasn't responsible for almost any of the players on the playoff teams from 2000-2003. Alderson and the rest of the scouting department were. The guys drafted right when Beane took over (Zito, Mulder, Ellis) were already on everyone's radar. Then Nick Swisher shows up at Ohio State and everyone knew he was a 1st rounder, possibly early 2nd in a doomsday scenario. Gee what foresight, maybe someone should write a book about it. Ben Fritz was an Oakland first-rounder in 2002, also. Who?
Exactly.
I thought Moneyball was a joke when it came out - raising this team and GM on a pedestal when there was absolutely zero<--- evidence that what they were doing under Beane was going to put them in the WS for years to come.
Results speak for themselves. To their credit, even the A's concede that they aren't as Moneyball as Moneyball said they were.
They should at least fire their scouting director, who got his job 8 years ago - guess how the team has done once his garbage started washing up on shore? Last and next-to-last finishes in 4 of the past 5 years.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Beane wasn't responsible for almost any of the players on the playoff teams from 2000-2003. Alderson and the rest of the scouting department were. "
You do realize that Alderson is actually the father of the Moneyball movement, not Beane, correct? Alderson was the first GM to start taking sabermetric stats seriously, and he passed that on to his disciple, Beane. It's also not fair to give Beane short shrift in the players that he did draft that contributed, nor for acquiring players like Hatteburg and Bradford whose value as players far exceeded their contracts.
Also, the sabermetric-scouting divide is highly overrated. No good organization is going to rely on one method over the other. The really good teams are able to blend good scouting with effective use of sabermetrics. It's not an either/or thing, as even the A's and Beane would acknowledge.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat the hell is the Moneyball "movement"? The godfather of modern statheads is Bill James, case closed.
Yeah, I know exactly what Alderson did. Beane hasn't been able to match it, have you noticed? Alderson has other excellent talents outside of number crunching that Beane does not have. That's why he worked for the commissioner’s office after the A's, where he had the respect of every team in baseball, it's why he still does work for MLB as a whole while employed by specific teams. If the book had been all about Alderson, fine. It wasn't.
Alderson as A's GM = 1 WS, 3 pennants.
Beane has been GM of the A's longer than Alderson and he has no WS, no pennants, only junk teams after his full control settled in.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAlderson isn't a 100% genius either, ya know. After all, isn't he running the Mets now?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFor pete's sake this is his first year with NY. Gonna be a while before you'll see the results of his work.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBeane has operated under 3 owners, while Alderson worked primarily for the deep-pocketed Haas family. Compare payrolls (relative to the rest of the league). Beane has had to let his best players leave (or trade them first for prospects) when they became arbitration (kaching!) eligible. Cut him some slack. Also, the facility has been a disaster since the Raiders moved back and added the Mount Davis monstrosity in center field. No money, terrible park, inconsistent ownership- and still they went .500 last year. Not bad. Just wait until they get their new park in San Jose (please!).
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSteroids is certainly a big source of the A's successes over the years (and the Red Sox, since Bill James's stats do everything but find dopers), but it's not the ultimate source of Oakland's recent decline--the real culprit is Billy Beane. Right after the A lost the 2006 ALCS Beane replaced manager Ken Macha with his best friend Bob Geren. If you've seen the charts of Oakland's wins per millions spent in payroll you can see a sharp decline from the 2007 season onwards.
Beane is a lucky man who knows how to get good press--Wikipedia says the team started using Sabremetrics after the new ownership took over in the 1990s, and their 10+ years of success was a result of Macha following the template of former manager Art Howe. But Beane's luck eventually runs out--he watched former 3rd Base coach Ron Washington coach the Texas Rangers to the 2010 World Series, and he watched Jeremy Bonderman out-duel Barry Zito in game 1 of the 2006 ALCS. Wait, the Jeremy Bonderman that made Beane throw a chair at a wall when he heard the scouts loved him for non Sabre-metrics reasons? Yes, that Bonderman.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse> On-base percentage stopped being undervalued.
Once teams like Boston started taking stats seriously AND spending 3-4 times as much money as Oakland there's wasn't a lot of inefficiency for Beane to take exploit. Now it's the rare MLB team that doesn't know modern stats inside and out. And Beane still doesn't have a big budget.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNeil- i think the more relevant factor is that the high-OBP strategy stopped working when they stopped having a high team OBP.
From 1999 through 2006, the A's ranked between 3rd and 5th in the league in OBP every year except 2003, when they ranked 10th, and 2006, when they ranked 7th. In every one of those years, they finished either 1st or 2nd in the west, and won more than 87 games (only twice did they win fewer than 90 games).
In the five seasons since 2006, their OBP ranks have been, respectively, 6th, 13th, 11th, 9th, and 12th. They have only won as many at 81 games once in that span. While OBP does not correlate perfectly with winning, it has the highest correlation with scoring runs of any single measure out there. While it may be true that the steroids crackdown has limited their ability to hit for power, the fact remains that the lack of cheap high-OBP guys in today's game relative to a decade ago is probably the most significant factor in the A's decline.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere was a quote from Beane in the book that, in retrospect, made me wonder if he was tacitly acknowledging the role steroids played in the game. He and Michael Lewis were discussing stats while sitting in Art Howe's office during a game. Beane was flipping through a stat book, comparing the performance of different players, and when they came to Barry Bonds, Beane mentioned that he was "at a level where even talent can't take you."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI may be misinterpreting, but I wondered if that was a nod to the influence PEDs were playing in the game at that time.
Oakland A's = most gassed up team in MLB history.
Proof: Eric "half the man I used to be" Chavez.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGlad you wrote this and went down this road... I have been seeing the previews of the movie Moneyball for weeks now portraying Beane as this quirky genius and I came to the same conclusion that you did. I came across this article by Googling "Moneyball steroids". The movie should be titled "Juiced"...
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