7 ms·

Revisiting Moneyball

128 points by sebg 1y ago

readthenotes1 1y ago
Is it anti-labor to not over pay Superstars and instead hire the people that get the job done?
- tclancy 1y ago
  What are you on about and can you put your WNBA opinions back?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - readthenotes1 1y ago
    Huh?
- rtkwe 1y ago
  The whole point of the moneyball movie and system is to find players who are undervalued relative to their ability to produce runs and critically continue paying them low relative to their game utility to get a good, competitive team cheap. There's a market distortion from the rest/majority of teams incorrectly evaluating the players. Knowing that and taking advantage of it is underpaying if you believe in paying people their real worth instead of just what you can get away with paying them.
  - saurik 1y ago
    But like, is that "anti-labor"? The undervalued people who actually were important now being slightly more valued -- or, in the case of the storyline in the movie, having a job at all -- seems like it could even be pro-labor.
    - relaxing 1y ago
      It’s neither anti- nor pro-labor; it simply exists in the context of a strong players’ union and a league that enforces constraints on team payrolls in order to promote equity between large and small market teams.
      - saurik 1y ago
        And I agree with you; the reason to ask this question is because it is something that is quoted in the article (in a screenshot, so don't try to ctrl-F for it ;P) as part of the background zeitgeist opinion on the premise.
    - rtkwe 1y ago
      It's a mixed bag. Over time it's probably raised the salary of these kinds of players as teams change how they evaluate player worth but initially the first couple seasons effect is to underpay players vs the value they bring to the team and that's contrary to a long held pro-labor stance is workers should be paid more in line with the value they generate for the company rather than just what the companies do pay them.
hx8 1y ago
Moneyball is about identifying undervalued assets, and demonstrating that value in a highly compeitive arena. Luckily this was done in a popular avenue (baseball) so the lesson was spread across society.
rsync 1y ago
Any BJJ player will understand Moneyball. There are things that work with a very high percentage ...and there are things that are enormously satisfying and exciting to do. If you're interested in winning you will methodically do the "correct" things. The problem is it's just so much fun to do a firemans carry ... In the Moneyball narrative, the non-analytical scouts are branded as "stupid" or "thick" or even "bigoted". I see them as more human and less robotic. I bet they have more fun than Billy Beane (and the book suggests they do).
- DangitBobby 1y ago
  The trick is to make games where doing the thing that wins the game is also the most interesting thing to see and do.
  - parpfish 1y ago
    it's only a matter of time before some team owner instructs his analytics team to "build me the team that gets me the best ratings/sells the most tickets" rather than "build me the team that gets me a championship".
- laborcontract 1y ago
  The "highest expected value"-ification of MMA has made it uninteresting to me. Fighting styles have become so homogenized that I fight back tears of boredom, especially when my mind drifts back to the days of seeing random fighting styles like Art Jimmerson fighting Royce Gracie
- borroka 1y ago
  As someone who has practiced and followed sports before, during, and after the revolution in analytics and optimization, I can say that “back in the day,” sports were definitely more fun, interesting, and creative, whereas now they are more regimented and boring, but individual athletes and teams are much better at winning. There is no longer much room for eccentric, flamboyant characters, “geniuses,” or charismatic competitors who, thanks to their instincts and intuition, were able to make the winning move. But, as in business and personal relationships, finding what works best and putting it into practice tends to be more likely to succeed than simply hoping it will work--look at me, it has never been tried before!
thom 1y ago
As someone for whom Moneyball bought a nice house, I can say with some confidence that I have seen analytics elevate the smartest organisations to new heights, while burying the less sophisticated under their own confirmation bias. Many in the middle do good work that nevertheless gets ignored by the relevant decision makers. The mere existence of stats guarantees you absolutely nothing.
- noobly 1y ago
  Moneyball highlights an inefficiency that I would think would've stopped existing sometime in the 80-90's as data driven approaches have become standard.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    It was just after the 90s in 2002 so not too far off. Teams were collecting more data but looking at it wrong and now it's likely much less effective because it's been brought out into the open by both the book and the movie. Though small cap teams are still paying way less per win than the big boys like the Yankees who can pay almost 3x per win.
  - stockresearcher 1y ago
    One of the analytics leads for the Red Sox came to Harvard to give a presentation. I asked if he could quantify the effects analytics was having compared to the conventional wisdom developed over the course of 150 years of pro baseball. He thought that analytics was changing the probabilities of discrete events by single digits. Essentially, nobody was doing anything wrong, there were just optimizations that were/are available. Remember that the book/movie is about the A’s, who were eliminated in the first round of the baseball playoffs.
    - jghn 1y ago
      Before Moneyball there were other controversial stats, largely driven by Bill James. By and large they had the same footprint you're describing. In any particular game they were such a small effect as to be meaningless. But of the course of a season? That could be the difference between playoffs or not. The one that pops into mind offhand was putting the "cleanup hitter" as leadoff, even though at the time "leadoff hitter" was a very specific physical archetype as was the "cleanup hitter". Yet the latter was often the best hitter on the team, and by putting them top of the batting order they'd get more at bats over the course of a season.
ryukoposting 1y ago
If it were named anything else besides "moneyball," the take about it glorifying underpaying players wouldn't exist. I'm not old enough to remember a pre-moneyball world, but MLB has been mitigating the effects of the “three true outcomes” problem quite well over the last few years. The pitch clock is the best thing to happen to baseball since integration.
- dudinax 1y ago
  There's a pitch clock now? So much for the Jamie Moyer rule that "the game doesn't start til I start it."
  - ryukoposting 1y ago
    It's been around for a few years now. Games went from averaging around 3 hours to averaging 2.5. The long tail of 3.5-4.5 hour games were basically eliminated. The only time that happens now is if you get extra innings, high pitch counts, and lots of plate appearances that don't end in outs -- in other words, longer games are long because they're good! Occasionally an old head will grumble about it, but even the old guys tend to be pretty happy about the pitch clock.
timshell 1y ago
I think a common misconception of Moneyball is that it's about analytics. The broader lesson is that people need to systematically evaluate undervalued assets in sports/business etc. One of the interesting 'post-Moneyball' stories is when old-school scouting methods came back onto the scene. People started overvaluing the new popularized statistics, and the market advantage was to combine the analytics and traditional approach in a cost-efficient manner.
- voidfunc 1y ago
  Whether someone understands what moneyball is about is a great intelligence litmus test.
  - chistev 1y ago
    And let me guess, you pass that test, right?
- suzzer99 1y ago
  The 2014/2015 Royals capitalized on this to some degree, picking up players who didn't strike out or walk much, at a time when players who walked a lot were at a super premium. Some of the smarter teams in the NFL seem to be figuring out that maybe running backs aren't completely fungible, as has been the mantra for a while.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  Markets are a decentralized adaptive system, so the overall lesson is to have a process to identify what is under/over valued and adapt over time. There is no durable thing you can simply identify as your edge in metrics that you can stick to for years.
hhmc 1y ago
> Home runs, walks, and strikeouts now dominate baseball, with 35% of plate appearances ending without involving seven defensive players. This has reduced balls in play by 20% since 1980, creating longer games with less action Do baseball fans ever discuss potentially changing the rules or game setup to mitigate this?
- relaxing 1y ago
  Yes. In the past MLB lowered the pitcher’s mound and widened the strike zone to benefit hitters, and there’s been talk in recent years of doing it again, or moving back the mound. The league also recently instituted the pitch clock, which helped hitters a little.
  - LouisLazaris 1y ago
    A wider strike zone benefits pitchers, not hitters.
    - relaxing 1y ago
      You’re right of course, that was a brain fart on my part. The actual change was lowering the height of the strike zone (to help hitters.)
- edmundsauto 1y ago
  Yes, Joe Sheehan (among others) has been beating the drum for a while.
- anonymars 1y ago
  There were notable changes in 2023 > Nearly a quarter of the way into the 2023 regular season, the rule changes MLB implemented this year are continuing to have their intended effects -- namely, a quicker pace resulting in a significant reduction in overall time of games, more hits and more steal attempts. https://www.mlb.com/news/effect-of-new-rules-early-2023 https://www.mlb.com/news/effect-of-new-rules-early-2023
- BJones12 1y ago
johnnienaked 1y ago
Game theory. Iff you're the only one in town doing it, it's a competitive advantage. As it becomes well-known, the market gets more efficient at valuing players and this specific advantage erodes away.
- jghn 1y ago
  This was the issue with the common meme of "moneyball". It was never about optimizing the specific stats the A's originally used. The whole point was to zig when everyone else was zagging to save money.
  - lubujackson 1y ago
    A better example of this is Bill Belichick. He drafted multiple TEs when nobody valued the position, paid for top special teamers, like gunners (for pennies), switched to. 3-4 defense when every other team was 4-3, then back again when team copied him.
- bongripper 1y ago
  [dead]
xbar 1y ago
Who misinterprets Moneyball?
- cwyers 1y ago
  Basically everybody.
alexpotato 1y ago
Several years back I ended up making "moneyball for college paintball" largely inspired by a combination of Moneyball the book and Michael Lewis' article about Shane Battier [0]. That experience led me to have a couple thoughts: - Many people think that Moneyball was about On Base Percentage. Really, it was about how to use analytics to figure out what the undervalued metric is to focus on. - Moneyball is great on its own. When you try to do your own version of Moneyball in a sport you care deeply about, it's as if you find another "level" of the book. For example, this quote from the book (paraphrased): "You can't see the difference between a .275 and a .300 hitter. It's an extra hit every two weeks." You realize HOW MANY parts of sports are essentially invisible unless you take the stats and then analyze them. - Another example of the above is the quote "it's a system only a rich team could afford but only a poor team looking for an edge would buy". Having worked at a lot of startups (4), I've often told this story when people are deciding whether to pay for some 3rd party tool that will have a big impact. Sometimes it's not worth it but sometimes it can really change the outcome. - Going in to the whole process, I wasn't sure how well I could track stats in something as complicated as college level tournament paintball. I started with just a clipboard with some paper and a stopwatch. At the end of the day, that was really all I needed to get DEEP insights on how the game worked, game theory in different scenarios and which players were adding or taking away from our win percentage. A reminder of "you can just do things" - One unexpected outcome: I got to the point where I could watch a game and know exactly what the win probabilities were as the game went on. It was like watching the World Series of Poker where you see the odds of each hand. This was both great b/c I new the next game theory optimal call or play to do. It was terrible when I knew the odds of winning a big game went below 5% (although we did occasionally win some of those too) 0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html
- username135 1y ago
  I like the watching NFL. I started playing fantasy football a few years ago and I see a similar phenomenon. Once I got into the weeds on current and future player ability and stats, it was like a new dimension of the game opened up to me.
cainxinth 1y ago
> This randomness explains why sabermetricians often view regular-season performance as a more reliable indicator of a team's true quality than its playoff results. That makes sense statistically, but I think most fans would intuitively disagree. When your team plays great all season and chokes in the playoffs, you rarely come away feeling that the regular season was their “true quality.” Typically, such events are seen as revealing that the team wasn’t as good as it seemed, or at least not when it mattered most. There’s probably truth to both perspectives.

128 points by sebg 1y ago

readthenotes1 1y ago

Is it anti-labor to not over pay Superstars and instead hire the people that get the job done?

tclancy 1y ago
What are you on about and can you put your WNBA opinions back?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  Huh?
rtkwe 1y ago
The whole point of the moneyball movie and system is to find players who are undervalued relative to their ability to produce runs and critically continue paying them low relative to their game utility to get a good, competitive team cheap. There's a market distortion from the rest/majority of teams incorrectly evaluating the players. Knowing that and taking advantage of it is underpaying if you believe in paying people their real worth instead of just what you can get away with paying them.
- saurik 1y ago
  But like, is that "anti-labor"? The undervalued people who actually were important now being slightly more valued -- or, in the case of the storyline in the movie, having a job at all -- seems like it could even be pro-labor.
  - relaxing 1y ago
    It’s neither anti- nor pro-labor; it simply exists in the context of a strong players’ union and a league that enforces constraints on team payrolls in order to promote equity between large and small market teams.
    - saurik 1y ago
      And I agree with you; the reason to ask this question is because it is something that is quoted in the article (in a screenshot, so don't try to ctrl-F for it ;P) as part of the background zeitgeist opinion on the premise.
  - rtkwe 1y ago
    It's a mixed bag. Over time it's probably raised the salary of these kinds of players as teams change how they evaluate player worth but initially the first couple seasons effect is to underpay players vs the value they bring to the team and that's contrary to a long held pro-labor stance is workers should be paid more in line with the value they generate for the company rather than just what the companies do pay them.

hx8 1y ago

Moneyball is about identifying undervalued assets, and demonstrating that value in a highly compeitive arena. Luckily this was done in a popular avenue (baseball) so the lesson was spread across society.

rsync 1y ago

Any BJJ player will understand Moneyball. There are things that work with a very high percentage ...and there are things that are enormously satisfying and exciting to do. If you're interested in winning you will methodically do the "correct" things. The problem is it's just so much fun to do a firemans carry ... In the Moneyball narrative, the non-analytical scouts are branded as "stupid" or "thick" or even "bigoted". I see them as more human and less robotic. I bet they have more fun than Billy Beane (and the book suggests they do).

DangitBobby 1y ago
The trick is to make games where doing the thing that wins the game is also the most interesting thing to see and do.
- parpfish 1y ago
  it's only a matter of time before some team owner instructs his analytics team to "build me the team that gets me the best ratings/sells the most tickets" rather than "build me the team that gets me a championship".
laborcontract 1y ago
The "highest expected value"-ification of MMA has made it uninteresting to me. Fighting styles have become so homogenized that I fight back tears of boredom, especially when my mind drifts back to the days of seeing random fighting styles like Art Jimmerson fighting Royce Gracie
borroka 1y ago
As someone who has practiced and followed sports before, during, and after the revolution in analytics and optimization, I can say that “back in the day,” sports were definitely more fun, interesting, and creative, whereas now they are more regimented and boring, but individual athletes and teams are much better at winning. There is no longer much room for eccentric, flamboyant characters, “geniuses,” or charismatic competitors who, thanks to their instincts and intuition, were able to make the winning move. But, as in business and personal relationships, finding what works best and putting it into practice tends to be more likely to succeed than simply hoping it will work--look at me, it has never been tried before!

thom 1y ago

As someone for whom Moneyball bought a nice house, I can say with some confidence that I have seen analytics elevate the smartest organisations to new heights, while burying the less sophisticated under their own confirmation bias. Many in the middle do good work that nevertheless gets ignored by the relevant decision makers. The mere existence of stats guarantees you absolutely nothing.

noobly 1y ago
Moneyball highlights an inefficiency that I would think would've stopped existing sometime in the 80-90's as data driven approaches have become standard.
- rtkwe 1y ago
  It was just after the 90s in 2002 so not too far off. Teams were collecting more data but looking at it wrong and now it's likely much less effective because it's been brought out into the open by both the book and the movie. Though small cap teams are still paying way less per win than the big boys like the Yankees who can pay almost 3x per win.
- stockresearcher 1y ago
  One of the analytics leads for the Red Sox came to Harvard to give a presentation. I asked if he could quantify the effects analytics was having compared to the conventional wisdom developed over the course of 150 years of pro baseball. He thought that analytics was changing the probabilities of discrete events by single digits. Essentially, nobody was doing anything wrong, there were just optimizations that were/are available. Remember that the book/movie is about the A’s, who were eliminated in the first round of the baseball playoffs.
  - jghn 1y ago
    Before Moneyball there were other controversial stats, largely driven by Bill James. By and large they had the same footprint you're describing. In any particular game they were such a small effect as to be meaningless. But of the course of a season? That could be the difference between playoffs or not. The one that pops into mind offhand was putting the "cleanup hitter" as leadoff, even though at the time "leadoff hitter" was a very specific physical archetype as was the "cleanup hitter". Yet the latter was often the best hitter on the team, and by putting them top of the batting order they'd get more at bats over the course of a season.

ryukoposting 1y ago

If it were named anything else besides "moneyball," the take about it glorifying underpaying players wouldn't exist. I'm not old enough to remember a pre-moneyball world, but MLB has been mitigating the effects of the “three true outcomes” problem quite well over the last few years. The pitch clock is the best thing to happen to baseball since integration.

dudinax 1y ago
There's a pitch clock now? So much for the Jamie Moyer rule that "the game doesn't start til I start it."
- ryukoposting 1y ago
  It's been around for a few years now. Games went from averaging around 3 hours to averaging 2.5. The long tail of 3.5-4.5 hour games were basically eliminated. The only time that happens now is if you get extra innings, high pitch counts, and lots of plate appearances that don't end in outs -- in other words, longer games are long because they're good! Occasionally an old head will grumble about it, but even the old guys tend to be pretty happy about the pitch clock.

timshell 1y ago

I think a common misconception of Moneyball is that it's about analytics. The broader lesson is that people need to systematically evaluate undervalued assets in sports/business etc. One of the interesting 'post-Moneyball' stories is when old-school scouting methods came back onto the scene. People started overvaluing the new popularized statistics, and the market advantage was to combine the analytics and traditional approach in a cost-efficient manner.

voidfunc 1y ago
Whether someone understands what moneyball is about is a great intelligence litmus test.
- chistev 1y ago
  And let me guess, you pass that test, right?
suzzer99 1y ago
The 2014/2015 Royals capitalized on this to some degree, picking up players who didn't strike out or walk much, at a time when players who walked a lot were at a super premium. Some of the smarter teams in the NFL seem to be figuring out that maybe running backs aren't completely fungible, as has been the mantra for a while.
steveBK123 1y ago
Markets are a decentralized adaptive system, so the overall lesson is to have a process to identify what is under/over valued and adapt over time. There is no durable thing you can simply identify as your edge in metrics that you can stick to for years.

hhmc 1y ago

> Home runs, walks, and strikeouts now dominate baseball, with 35% of plate appearances ending without involving seven defensive players. This has reduced balls in play by 20% since 1980, creating longer games with less action Do baseball fans ever discuss potentially changing the rules or game setup to mitigate this?

relaxing 1y ago
Yes. In the past MLB lowered the pitcher’s mound and widened the strike zone to benefit hitters, and there’s been talk in recent years of doing it again, or moving back the mound. The league also recently instituted the pitch clock, which helped hitters a little.
- LouisLazaris 1y ago
  A wider strike zone benefits pitchers, not hitters.
  - relaxing 1y ago
    You’re right of course, that was a brain fart on my part. The actual change was lowering the height of the strike zone (to help hitters.)
edmundsauto 1y ago
Yes, Joe Sheehan (among others) has been beating the drum for a while.
anonymars 1y ago
There were notable changes in 2023 > Nearly a quarter of the way into the 2023 regular season, the rule changes MLB implemented this year are continuing to have their intended effects -- namely, a quicker pace resulting in a significant reduction in overall time of games, more hits and more steal attempts. https://www.mlb.com/news/effect-of-new-rules-early-2023 https://www.mlb.com/news/effect-of-new-rules-early-2023
BJones12 1y ago

johnnienaked 1y ago

Game theory. Iff you're the only one in town doing it, it's a competitive advantage. As it becomes well-known, the market gets more efficient at valuing players and this specific advantage erodes away.

jghn 1y ago
This was the issue with the common meme of "moneyball". It was never about optimizing the specific stats the A's originally used. The whole point was to zig when everyone else was zagging to save money.
- lubujackson 1y ago
  A better example of this is Bill Belichick. He drafted multiple TEs when nobody valued the position, paid for top special teamers, like gunners (for pennies), switched to. 3-4 defense when every other team was 4-3, then back again when team copied him.
bongripper 1y ago
[dead]

xbar 1y ago

Who misinterprets Moneyball?

cwyers 1y ago
Basically everybody.

alexpotato 1y ago

Several years back I ended up making "moneyball for college paintball" largely inspired by a combination of Moneyball the book and Michael Lewis' article about Shane Battier [0]. That experience led me to have a couple thoughts: - Many people think that Moneyball was about On Base Percentage. Really, it was about how to use analytics to figure out what the undervalued metric is to focus on. - Moneyball is great on its own. When you try to do your own version of Moneyball in a sport you care deeply about, it's as if you find another "level" of the book. For example, this quote from the book (paraphrased): "You can't see the difference between a .275 and a .300 hitter. It's an extra hit every two weeks." You realize HOW MANY parts of sports are essentially invisible unless you take the stats and then analyze them. - Another example of the above is the quote "it's a system only a rich team could afford but only a poor team looking for an edge would buy". Having worked at a lot of startups (4), I've often told this story when people are deciding whether to pay for some 3rd party tool that will have a big impact. Sometimes it's not worth it but sometimes it can really change the outcome. - Going in to the whole process, I wasn't sure how well I could track stats in something as complicated as college level tournament paintball. I started with just a clipboard with some paper and a stopwatch. At the end of the day, that was really all I needed to get DEEP insights on how the game worked, game theory in different scenarios and which players were adding or taking away from our win percentage. A reminder of "you can just do things" - One unexpected outcome: I got to the point where I could watch a game and know exactly what the win probabilities were as the game went on. It was like watching the World Series of Poker where you see the odds of each hand. This was both great b/c I new the next game theory optimal call or play to do. It was terrible when I knew the odds of winning a big game went below 5% (although we did occasionally win some of those too) 0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html

username135 1y ago
I like the watching NFL. I started playing fantasy football a few years ago and I see a similar phenomenon. Once I got into the weeds on current and future player ability and stats, it was like a new dimension of the game opened up to me.

cainxinth 1y ago

> This randomness explains why sabermetricians often view regular-season performance as a more reliable indicator of a team's true quality than its playoff results. That makes sense statistically, but I think most fans would intuitively disagree. When your team plays great all season and chokes in the playoffs, you rarely come away feeling that the regular season was their “true quality.” Typically, such events are seen as revealing that the team wasn’t as good as it seemed, or at least not when it mattered most. There’s probably truth to both perspectives.