Moneyball Summary Free Essay Example

When the Mets drafted Beane along with Strawberry, they believed that Beane was more ready to play, so they put him with the high level rookie team and Strawberry to the lower ranked leagues. In my opinion, I think every high school player should work their way up. Billy Beane was not used to failure, and never endured this in his career, and they were setting him up for it. Billy Beane determination of becoming a major leaguer star was to a point of half; he really wanted to go college first and play football, and in the other mind is to play baseball professionally.

Even his teammates and managers started to notice it, and Beane didn’t argue but knew it too. “Relief pitchers used to come down from the bullpen to watch Billy hit, just to see what he did when he struck out. ” He busted so many bats against so many walls that his teammates lost count. One time he destroyed the dugout toilet; another time, in a Triple-A game in Tacoma, he went after a fan in the stands, and proved, to everyone’s satisfaction, that fans, no matter what challenges they hollered from the safety of their seats, were better off not getting into fistfights with ballplayers.

Billy Beane’s downfall is that he could not simply hit. There was a point he went at bat 79 times, and did not draw a walk. He later changed his batting stance, and instead going for power, he went for contact.

Billy simply feared the batter’s box and changed him. If he goes 0 for 2, he’s already done for the night, and simply not batting against the pitcher, but himself. He played around legendary players and manager, and was on the bench in 2 world series wins, but never got to witness of being that guy.

Billy Beane is simply a superstar physically, but mentally a pure novice who doesn’t belong in that sport. In 1990, Billy was 27 years old, and noticed he’s not a boy anymore but a man, a guy who married and has a kid on the way. He knew the superstar was not meant to be or even being a major leaguer player, and went to front office of Oakland A’s and wanted to be a scout. This move by Beane was super questioning because at his age 27, is believed to be the prime of any athlete’s production due to the combination of mentally and physically to play.

Billy chose to retire. I cannot write the idea of dreaming and playing in a professional sports game, but Billy wanted to give a statement that he didn’t want to play ball professionally at 30 years old and at 17. Sandy Alderson, Oakland’s GM, hired him as a scout, as in there was nothing to lose. In 1991, the Oakland A’s actually had the highest payroll in all of baseball. The A’s had gone to the World Series three straight seasons from 1988 to 1990. Deferring to success became an untenable strategy in 1995, when Walter Haas died.

His estate sold the team to a pair of Bay Area real estate developers, Steve Schott and Ken Hofmann, who were, by instinct, more businessmen than philanthropists. Schott and Hofmann wanted Alderson to continue running the team but on a much tighter budget. “We had new owners who weren’t going to spend any money,” said Alderson. “They made it clear that this had to be a business Alderson had a background with Marine Corps and lawyer. He wanted the minor league organization well-disciplined, and viewed as a team rather than stars.

He had no idea what baseball was, but was a very smart man. The year they found out they had less money to spend on with new ownership, he had to focus which tool and invest on. It was simply on-base percentage, which means the only way not to get an out. To score in baseball, you simply have to reach home without getting 3 outs in an inning. Alderson made the rules clear to the minor leaguers, that getting to majors will be simply looked at you OBP. There was a weakness to the system, and that was limiting to the batter and limiting their bats.

The problem was that the middle manager, Tony La Russa, didn’t care for it because he notorious one of the all-time greats, and didn’t care what Alderson strategy, but the raw power of hitting the ball. The change in new management made Tony La Russa resigned to go to a new team with money, and gave Alderson to find a new manager to implement his ideas into the majors. Beane’s had guidance through Alderson and his principles to the game. He encouraged the principles of the art of the game as statistics to Beane. Bill James in 1977 wrote a book talking about baseball statistics of how the stats can mislead a player’s ability.

An example would be error, he said if you did something right but got recorded a mistake as in you were in the right place when the ball was hit. James questioned the baseball conventional wisdom. James was a passionate writer of believing stats is an abstract mindset, and analyzed every aspect of it. One of his books he published, The Hidden Game of Baseball, created a movement of all statisticians, economists, Wall Street analysts, and math wizards to use their brainpower to help change the dynamics of baseball for their passion or hobby not for money.

There was now such a thing as intellectually rigorous baseball analysts. James had given the field of study its name: sabermetrics. * The name derives from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research. In 2002, the society had about seven thousand members. One fact that I didn’t know is that in the old days before the 90s era, is that the company who keeps stats for the MLB kept the stats, and they didn’t release to public when asked for free. James deeply influenced Billy Beane.

Beane has read all twelve of James books of abstracts, and helped him to take more risk into his theory, in which none of the general managers would stick to the traditional way. James easily supported the idea of that college players are safer investment of high school players by a huge margin by looking the past data, and is puzzled of why scouters always ignore that fact. By the early 1990s it was clear that “sabermetrics,” the search for new baseball knowledge, was an activity that would take place mainly outside of baseball.

James had something to say specifically to Billy: you were on the receiving end of a false idea of what makes a successful baseball player. James also had something general to say to Billy, or any other general manager of a baseball team who had the guts, or the need, to listen: if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done On the long cafeteria table in front of Billy sat an invisible cash register, and inside it the $9. million his owner had given him to sign perhaps as many as thirty-five players. Billy’s strategy was to take the non-shiny players in the draft, and pay them cheaper as it would drafting a higher prospect, and would hide his strategy of going for them because they thought he was just saving money, in which he was, but wanted those players in the first place. Owners would call him to see who he was drafting, and he would give a player that he wasn’t going to draft just too strategically trick them, and let them draft them.

Billy Beane was always notorious for anger, and always demonstrated the anger when everything went wrong. He would be excited when draft day come, he would not sleep before draft day of the excitement. The one pick he really wanted to pick was Swisher, because it reminded one of his old roommate and teammate during with the Mets. Ironically the Mets, right before the A’s, were going to draft Swisher. During the draft, the Brewers took a player named Prince Fielder, and gave Mets the player they wanted to draft, and gave Beane’s dream pick, Nick Swisher. In that draft

Billy Beane was getting his entire players on his wish list, Blanton and Fritz who were the top 3 pitchers according to DePodesta. “We just got two of the three best right-handed pitchers in the country, and two of the four best position players,” says Paul. When in the seventh round Erik leans in and takes the last of these, an ambidextrous first baseman from the University of Pittsburgh named Brant Colamarino, Paul wears an expression of pure bliss. “No one else in baseball will agree,” he says, “but Colamarino might be the best hitter in the country. From their wish list of twenty they had nabbed, incredibly, thirteen players: four pitchers and nine hitters. They had drafted players dismissed by their own scouts as too short or too skinny or too fat or too slow. They had drafted pitchers who didn’t throw hard enough for the scouts and hitters who hadn’t enough power. They’d drafted kids in the first round who didn’t think they’d get drafted before the fifteenth round, and kids in lower rounds who didn’t think they’d get drafted at all. They had drafted ballplayers.

Billy Beane was a human arsenal built, inadvertently, by professional baseball to attack its customs and rituals. He thought himself to be fighting a war against subjective judgments, but he was doing something else, too. At one point Chris Pittaro said that the thing that struck him about Billy—what set him apart from most baseball insiders—was his desire to find players unlike himself. Billy Beane had gone looking for, and found, his antitheses. Young men who failed the first test of looking good in a uniform. Young men who couldn’t play anything but baseball.

Young men who had gone to college. Having won 87 games in 1999, the Oakland A’s went on to win 91 games in 2000, and an astonishing 102 games in 2001, and made the play-offs both years. Before the 2002 season, Paul DePodesta had reduced the coming six months to a math problem. He judged how many wins it would take to make the play-offs: 95. If they didn’t suffer an abnormally large number of injuries, he said, the team would score between 800 and 820 runs and give up between 650 and 670. They wound up scoring 800 and allowing 653.

Paul DePodesta had been hired by Billy Beane before the 1999 season, but well before that he had studied the question of why teams win. Not long after he’d graduated from Harvard, in the mid-nineties, he’d plugged the statistics of every baseball team from the twentieth century into an equation and tested which of them correlated most closely with winning percentage. He’d found only two, both offensive statistics, inextricably linked to baseball success: on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Everything else was far less important.

The most important stats were OBP and Slugging percentage. OBP is simply On Base Percentage, in which the percentage of getting on base, through hit, BB, or error. You can simply say of an OBP of 1000, which means infinite runs. Slugging percentage is simply total bases by number at bats. Another stat is OPS, on base plus slugging. Adding both the OBP and Slugging is much better indicator of scoring, I mean why not work together for better. Highly trained mathematicians and statisticians would make a killing in the old days in which were easier to do in the old days.

Mauriello and Armbruster’s goal was to value the events that occurred on a baseball field more accurately than they ever had been valued. In 1994, they stopped analyzing derivatives and formed a company to analyze baseball players, called AVM Systems. The AVM system was a more advanced system, and analyzing data. The original stats were too hard to judge, as in saying hitting a routine fly ball, and a slow outfielder couldn’t catch up to it, and the batter is awarded with a hit and RBI’s, and while the pitcher did his correctly gets punished with his ERA going up.

The system then carved up what happened in every baseball play into countless tiny, meaningful fragments. Derivatives It ignored all conventional baseball statistics. The system replaced the game seen by the ordinary fan with an abstraction. In AVM’s computers the game became a collection of derivatives, a parallel world in which baseball players could be evaluated more accurately than they were evaluated in the real world. Not long after Billy Beane had hired Paul DePodesta, in 1998, Paul persuaded Billy to hire AVM Systems.

Paul used this system to see the significance of replacing Johnny Damon. Damon was easy to replace on offense, but his contributions on defense was a big part of their 2001 season success. They had a decision to keep Damon, but financially it was limiting the idea of keeping Damon. It was a stat they know that would hurt them on defense and to win ball games, but they understood of what it means to let him go. The AVM system had a flaw, and is simply that it calculates by past data. It doesn’t take the factor of injuries, divorce, being drunk, or other factors that wasn’t in the past data.

It wasn’t hard to see what Billy had seen in Paul when he’d hired him: an antidote to himself. Jason Giambi was a big piece to their success, and to their whole strategy. He was a Home Run machine and get on base by drawing walks. The only problem was that he was too expensive. They had to replace him, but no one can replace a stature like him. They lived with the idea, and knew they get a player 30 percent of him, but people can always be replaced. They had to replace the big 3 offense players who OBP- Giambi 1B, Damon OF, Saenz DH.

They replaced those players that were listed as defective, in which means that the teams don’t need them anymore. David Justice was a once highly hitter and star, but was 36 and in his declining years which led him a cheap contract. Paul was simply using him as an experiment to see if age loses skill, and wanted to record his stats. The whole thing was an experiment on a big league level. Billy Beane was an unorthodox style of being an general manager. He would be in the weight room or somewhere else rather than being in the luxury suite for GMs.

Beane presence in the clubhouse was common, in which GM’s of baseball barely interact with players in the clubhouse. Beane was the one who ran the whole show, by deciding signs of plays or who sits out in the game. Beane would tell Art Howe, manager or known as coach in baseball, of how to run the team. One of the players named anonymously, said It didn’t mattered if Art got fired, because Beane ran the show from the weight room. Beane would not watch a game live basically because of his anger issues, and become a danger to the team.

Even though he didn’t watch, he looked at a pager which gave live baseball scores. Sometimes he did watch it on TV in Art’s office, but when he did he always see flaws he didn’t like and wanted to complain to coaches. The 2002 playoff game between the Yankees and A’s was devastating. The game was described simply David vs. Goliath, and it was but David almost pulled a miracle but the calls didn’t let them win. There were 2 baserunners, and Jason Giambi, once A’s now a Yankee, was there to bat.

The pitcher threw a routine inside corner strike, but the power of being a 100+ million team and big fan base was the umpire calling a ball. In my opinion, I hate all kinds of referees and umpires who I can compare as old school scouts while we have the technology to make it more precise game in sports. Giambi then later would hit a double and drive in 2 runs, and basically ending the underdog story of one of the low budget team beating the highest Billy Beane had a favorite saying, which he’d borrowed from the Wall Street investor Warren Buffett: the hardest thing to find is a good investment..