Has Anyone Seen 'Moneyball'?

[White Noise]

I don't think it has come out over here yer bit if anyone has seen it abroad I wonder whether its worth a watch?

Also, what is the basic premise of the theory? I know its stats based but does it include picking up young players as Fulham are doing or is it mostly more experienced players?

[aussierod]

No idea what it is but my friend in Boston has said it was amazing so can only say it is good with no idea what it is :)

[jarv]

I read the book. Basically, it was about finding players with stats that were much better than the perception of their performance. Players released because they were considered not quite up to it.

The book is good but gets a bit bogged down with the stats in the middle. Michael Lewis tends to do that in order to explain in detail. LIARS POKER, a superb book, he did the same with that in the middle. (about Wall Street and the City of London).

[aussierod]

The use of stats in football is becoming more and more frequent though as the following article highlights. Seems Liverpool are following the Moneyball strategy and it will be something more and more managers look at, but stats are obviously not the be-all / end-all as attitude is just as, if not more, important
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/aug/10/opta-stats-premier-league

[MisfitKid]

It hasn't done much for them lately...   
I live across the Bay from them and not many people care.
They have a cheap owner and a POS stadium.
Unfortunately he owns my "soccer" team too...   :014:

[richie17]

Excellent book, read it a few times.

Lewis takes a number of stats theories but brings a storyteller's ear to things, thus bringing a 20 year old set of theories to the mainstream almost instantly.  He's a terrific non-fiction writer and I think most people would find something in the book to like.

[RidgeRider]

It hasn't done much for them lately...   
I live across the Bay from them and not many people care.
They have a cheap owner and a POS stadium.
Unfortunately he owns my "soccer" team too...   :014:

To be fair, the stadium sucks now because of what Oakland allowed Al Davis and the Raiders to do to it. Before that I quite liked it even though my attention is more focused on the side of the Bay you are on.

I still think Moneyball works but the A's were so good at it that every GM in the game started using it (ok not literally but many of them) and it has made it hard for the cheap owner to afford the cheap unappreciated talent which is no longer unappreciated because everybody wants the same thing.

[BillNRoc]

Sports Illustrated threw buckets of love at both the book/author and the movie/actors, so this is a must-see. I wonder if there is any application of the "search for market inefficiencies" principle in top-flight football? Oakland's breakthrough insight was baseball management's under-valuing of on-base percentage, reasoning that if more batters reach base it will give a team more chances to outscore its opponent(s). What would be a comparable metric for football, that (at least for a while) would give a modest-revenue team an opportunity to compete with the big spenders? SI points out that, when Boston uses the same insights as Oakland but spends lots more, Boston prevails.

[bmasar]

I don't think it has come out over here yer bit if anyone has seen it abroad I wonder whether its worth a watch?

Also, what is the basic premise of the theory? I know its stats based but does it include picking up young players as Fulham are doing or is it mostly more experienced players?

Major League Baseball works differently than the English FA when it comes to securing young players. The most common way to acquire an amateur baseball player is through the Amateur Draft, which all teams are included in on. Drafted players are controlled by their new team for the first six years of their career and almost all spend the first several years refining their game in the minor leagues.

If you don't already have the rights to a player, you must trade for them by offering presumed equal value. Players aren't usually bought with cash like in football unless they are playing in the Japanese leagues, where players are bound to play for a pre-determined amount of time before they can attempt to sign with an American team, unless a Japanese team decides to auction a player's rights. This is usually an auction that is too rich for many teams to afford.

The only way you can get around the Amateur Draft is to sign international talent when they are very young, and often for large sums considering the risks. The only established players you can "buy" from Latin America are Cuban defectors. The rest have been snapped up long, long before they reach maturity by other teams.

Baseball teams that want to compete cheaply do it with young, impact players with controlled contracts, and this relies on very good scouting and development, and takes a long time to pan out. A young player with talent that is comparable to a veteran player is valued much more highly in the MLB, due to cost. This means that going younger requires years of drafting, and cannot be done with money (although you do pay signing bonuses to draftees.)

Another difference I see between the PL and the MLB is that teams in the PL relying on young talent may be able to be fairly competitive, but don't really have a crack at winning the league. In the MLB, young, cheap teams frequently out-compete very expensive teams and have very real chances to win a World Series (the championship). It's more common for the expensive teams to win, but it doesn't always happen. One example was the Florida Marlins ($54 mil.) beating the New York Yankees ($164 mil.) in 2003.

TL;DR version: Going young is more likely to be effective in baseball than in the PL, but it takes a large, concerted effort from an entire organization of coaches and scouts to make it work. Good, young baseball players aren't cheap to acquire from another team. Great, young baseball players are made nearly off-limits by their teams.