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I am not a big fan of reading, but I did happen to read the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which chronicled Billy Beane as the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. Beane was the first known GM to use and be successful at what famous baseball write Bill James coined as sabermetrics.
Essentially, sabermetrics is a way to statistically grade and categorize individual baseball players. More specifically, Beane hypothesized that a successful baseball team should concentrate on a stat known as on-base percentage, or the number of times a player reached base as a percentage of the number of plate appearances.
Beane is somewhat of a guru in not only building successful teams, but on a much smaller budget and building them in an era when big-market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox are grabbing players at hundreds of millions of dollars.
He would sign the majority of his team to developmental contracts. This means that Beane would sign high schoolers and offer them contracts that last six or seven years. They would also be offered six-figure sign-on bonuses, which to most high schoolers is big money. Naturally, the average major leaguer makes more than this, but most high schoolers don’t think that far into the future. By the time these players reached the majors, they would be making less than one million dollars salary (plenty of money for most people, but again not the average major leaguer).
His most prominent acquisition was probably Barry Zito who won the Cy Young in 2002 and was only make $750,000 for that year. Zito now makes $18 million per year with the San Francisco Giants. Consequently, he has not even been close to a Cy Young pitcher these days.
Other current General Managers who use sabermetrics are Theo Epstein (Boston Red Sox) and Sandy Alderson (New York Mets and Billy Beane’s former boss in Oakland).
Other stats that are watched are OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched), ISO (isolated power – slugging percentage minus batting average), and BABIP (batting average on balls in play – percentage of plate appearances where contact was made in-play, excluding homeruns) among others.
My personal opinion is that batters need to fill a certain role; hence, need to have good numbers in certain stats. For example, a lead-off batter needs to get on-base by any means necessary so he doesn’t necessarily need to have a good batting average, but a decent on-base percentage. The role of the second batter should be to advance the lead-off batter on base by any means necessary so he should have a decent BABIP and not necessarily a high batting average. I also believe that there should be backup role players within the batting lineup also. For instance, in an AL batting lineup, the #9 and #1 batters should be interchangeable.
As far as pitching goes, the only stat that really matters to me is ERA (earned run average). Naturally, the game is won and lost by the number of runs you score versus the amount of runs you give up. While a lot needs to go into producing runs, quality pitching is pretty black and white: either you give up runs or you don’t.
Mr. Epstein, you may have my number if you would like to know more.
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