I have never been a fan of Moneyball. I thought the book was shallow and self-evident if you believed the implied premise that this approach to building a baseball team was transferable to each and every other situation in MLB. I tried to watch the movie and did not make it past the first 15 or 20 minutes. Billy Beane continues to receive the sort of accolades one usually associates with a true visionary. My problem is that true visionaries have successes at least once in a while.
The A’s last won a World Series in 1989; that happened before Beane was the GM in Oakland; if fact, that was before Beane was even hired as a scout in Oakland. The idea behind Moneyball is to find value in players such that the team can win without having an outrageously expensive payroll. As I said above, the premise is sort of self-evident. However, what Moneyball seems not to be able to address is this:
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Once you find a valuable player – or two or three – and the on field performance demonstrates that they are worthy of more than some sort of minimal salary, how does the team keep some of them as the foundation for building a team with other new “value discoveries” that the genius GM will uncover?
I assert that the A’s have not yet figured out how to do that simply because of the top-shelf players that they have had on their roster “on the cheap” and whom they traded away to other teams for lesser performance. I am not going to pretend here to have done hours upon hours of research to come up with these examples because I did not. I suspect that there are more examples – and better examples – of the point I want to make here but I have not had the time or inclination to do the work to uncover them. Nevertheless:
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The A’s had Josh Donaldson playing third base for them. Rather than face up to the fact that he was going to cost a lot more money in his next contract negotiation, they traded him away for an inferior third baseman, two pitchers that have yet to do anything in MLB and a prospect at shortstop who has yet to see action in MLB. They traded away performance and got little if any value in return.
The A’s had Ben Zobrist playing second base for them. They traded him away for a young pitcher who has a 4.68 ERA this year and another pitcher they traded away before he ever saw the parent club.
The A’s had Nelson Cruz in their minor league system for about 5 years and never found a way to see that he might be a major league hitter. They traded him to the Brewers in 2004; the Brewers traded him to the Rangers in 2006 and Cruz is still playing productively as a DH in 2016. Back in 2004, the A’s received an infielder who appeared in 51 games for them and batted .161.
The A’s had outfielder Yoenis Cespedes on their roster. Despite his All-Star level performance, they traded him to the Red Sox for John Lester – whom they failed to keep, he appeared in a total of 11 games for the A’s – and Jonny Gomes.
I am not trying to make the case that the A’s had tons of Hall of Fame quality players that they gave away for nothing; that is not the point. What they did have were solid MLB players or better and they got rid of them to save money and did not get any “Moneyball-value-players” in return. As of this morning, the A’s are 47-60 and are sitting comfortably in last place in the AL West. They have a run differential of minus-85 which is by far the worst in the AL. for the last 10 years (since 2006), the A’s cumulative record is 867-859. That is a winning percentage of .502.
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That winning percentage over a decade says “mediocrity” to me and not “visionary genius”.
Enough negativity for the day … There are two positive things that happened last week which I want to mention today. The Web.com Tour is sort of like the AAA affiliate of the PGA Tour; players on the Web.com Tour have not yet made it to the main tour and almost all of them aspire to do so. This “developmental tour” if you will, was originally known as the Ben Hogan Tour and most recently as the Nationwide Tour. Stephan Jaeger is one of the players on the Web.com Tour and last week all he did was to shoot a round of 58.
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To put that in perspective, this is only the third time in the history of pro golf that a player has carded a 58.
Moreover, this was not a mere flash-in-the-pan round where everything was dropping for him. In the other 3 rounds of the tournament, Jaeger shot 65,64,63 meaning that his total for the four rounds of the tournament was 250.
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The previous US record for low score in a 72-hole professional tournament was 254. Jaeger broke that record by 4 strokes.
The other positive happening from last week was an announcement by the NBPA saying that retired NBA players who had accumulated 3-years of tenure in the league will get health insurance provided by the NBPA. Open enrollment will begin in October 2016 and coverage will commence on Jan 1 2017. The vote to make this happen was passed unanimously by the players.
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Kudos to the NBA players and the NBPA for this classy move.
Finally, Brad Dickson had this comment in the Omaha World-Herald recently. It brings together the current political debates in the US with the world of sports.
“Democrats say they want to put an end to the rich getting richer on the backs of the middle and lower classes.
“In that case, they can start by investigating how the Golden State Warriors got Kevin Durant.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………