bke1984
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Another way to look at this is they’ve won one playoff game in ten years.
Moneyball and GT Football
- Thread starter Jim Prather
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There's a few candidates. We gonna start the '2 men enter, 1 man leave' trials soon...
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Since you wanted to look at the last 10 years, the Texas Rangers spend above average.
| Rk | Team | Total |
1 | Los Angeles Dodgers | $277,108,333 |
2 | New York Mets | $253,119,999 |
3 | New York Yankees | $240,290,714 |
4 | Philadelphia Phillies | $221,738,462 |
5 | San Diego Padres | $208,772,618 |
6 | Boston Red Sox | $195,166,000 |
7 | Chicago White Sox | $181,660,734 |
8 | Atlanta Braves | $173,935,000 |
9 | Los Angeles Angels | $169,413,094 |
10 | Toronto Blue Jays | $168,070,905 |
11 | Houston Astros | $163,939,599 |
12 | St. Louis Cardinals | $150,746,666 |
13 | San Francisco Giants | $142,292,500 |
14 | Texas Rangers | $134,961,333 |
| League Average | $134,492,108 | |
15 | Chicago Cubs | $130,560,000 |
16 | Colorado Rockies | $129,452,166 |
17 | Milwaukee Brewers | $122,281,128 |
18 | Detroit Tigers | $116,040,000 |
19 | Washington Nationals | $114,623,095 |
20 | Minnesota Twins | $110,859,524 |
21 | Cincinnati Reds | $99,580,000 |
22 | Seattle Mariners | $92,745,714 |
23 | Arizona Diamondbacks | $75,993,333 |
24 | Tampa Bay Rays | $75,347,813 |
25 | Kansas City Royals | $74,110,000 |
26 | Miami Marlins | $69,000,000 |
27 | Cleveland Guardians | $42,310,000 |
28 | Pittsburgh Pirates | $37,875,000 |
29 | Oakland Athletics | $32,548,334 |
30 | Baltimore Orioles | $30,221,166 |
Here's what they've done in the past 10 years:
| SEASON | ROUND | OPPONENT | SERIES RESULT |
| 2016 | League Divisional Series | Toronto Blue Jays | L 0-3 |
| 2015 | League Divisional Series | Toronto Blue Jays | L 2-3 |
Two wins and five fewer appearances, despite spending over four times as much per year.
Maybe Moneyball still works for Oakland and maybe they're more worth watching than bigger spending teams.
What's the best way to win? Be the Dodgers and spend a ton of money.
What if you don't have the insane money that LA and New York have? Then do something different.
leatherneckjacket
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Let's look at Tampa Bay over the past 15 years, which is 24th on your list and almost always at the bottom of the payroll ranking.
| SEASON | ROUND | OPPONENT | SERIES RESULT |
| 2022 | League Wild Card | Cleveland Indians | L 0-1 |
| 2021 | League Divisional Series | Boston Red Sox | L 1-3 |
| 2020 | World Series | Las Angeles Dodgers | L 2-4 |
| 2020 | League Championship Series | Houston Astros | W 4-3 |
| 2020 | League Divisional Series | New York Yankees | W 3-2 |
| 2020 | League Wild Card | Toronto Blue Jays | W 1-0 |
| 2019 | League Divisional Series | Houston Astros | L 2-3 |
| 2019 | League Wild Card | Oakland A's | W 1-0 |
| 2013 | League Divisional Series | Boston Red Sox | L 1-3 |
| 2013 | League Wild Card | Cleveland Indians | W 1-0 |
| 2011 | League Divisional Series | Texas Rangers | L 1-3 |
| 2010 | League Divisional Series | Texas Rangers | L 2-3 |
| 2008 | World Series | Philadelphia Phillies | L 1-4 |
| 2008 | League Championship Series | Boston Red Sox | W 3-2 |
| 2008 | League Divisional Series | Chicago White Sox | W 3-1 |
So, a 26-31 record with two WS appearances and seven playoff appearances in the toughest division in baseball That is pretty good for a bottom feeder.
Squints
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No that is hopefully the end result. Moneyball was about using analytics to identify undervalued and overvalued assets in the market and take advantages of the inefficiencies that exist as a result. Everyone gets fixated on the analytics part and overlooks what they were used for which was the whole point. Just being different isn't moneyball, it's being different in a specific way. Which is why a moneyball model doesn't really apply to college sports. The teams can't transact with each other. There is no market to exploit.
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I agree with the above
I disagree with this portion.
While there was some portion of the book that looked at trades, scouting and the draft were key areas. That fits in very well with high school recruiting and the transfer portal.
There is a market. There's the entire recruiting base of high school, plus the addition of the transfer portal in the last few years, plus the addition of NIL. It's far more of a market now than ever before, and it was enough of a market decades ago.
Billy Beane's perspective of focusing on college players in the draft mirrors teams adding more emphasis on the transfer portal compared to high school recruiting--you have an additional year or two to evaluate a player and reduce your misses.
forensicbuzz
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yet
cpf2001
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I think scouting/drafting is still hampered by two things: football is more of a team game, there’s less repeatable, well-understood and observable 1-on-1 interactions like an at bat; and you don’t have the minors vs majors roster distinction to stash a bunch of prospects to develop with regular playing time.
I think if you figured out the right video machine learning model you could probably scale up the amount of looking for diamonds in the rough a lot better than humans can do but probably less so than baseball due to more outside factors.
I think if you figured out the right video machine learning model you could probably scale up the amount of looking for diamonds in the rough a lot better than humans can do but probably less so than baseball due to more outside factors.
Roswellgoldmember
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They can't transact with each other but Isn't there a market though with the portal and NIL? I would assume everyone has an NIL budget that they want to maximize with a significant number of players changing teams each year. Wouldn't an NFL type GM with roster management and budget become increasingly important and traditional salesmanship recruiting being devalued? That's how I see it playing out.
ibeattetris
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Yes. Baseball is such an independent sport that stats like WAR can almost exclusively remove the "team" component (this is not 100% true as things like batting order might affect WAR aka being protected by a good batter behind you). It is hard to attribute a specific WAR to a running back because his offensive line is going to have almost as much of an impact that individual effort (which is where broken talkes, yards after contact might come in to play).
I think all of these issues can be worked around and come to some fuzzy solutions, but the problem is hard.
bke1984
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Maybe. But part of the problem with money ball is that if your budget is that much lower than the rest of the league you might have a morale problem. If they’re winning they’re happy…if not then they’re frustrated by cheap management that makes them pay for soda and could have bad attitudes.
Squints
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The market you're describing does not fit well at all with high school recruiting and the transfer portal. The players have all the leverage and it's more akin to free agency then what they were doing in Moneyball. If another team has a player with a skillset that is more valuable then the team realizes you can't just go and acquire that player. Best you can do is hope they decide to transfer and then you have to hope they decide to come to you over everyone else. The control organizations have over players before they hit FA as an asset that can be moved between teams was a major factor, if not the the major factor, in the ability to exploit the market inefficiencies the analytics found. That doesn't exist at the college level.
Beane focused on college players simply because they were too much money for too much risk. I didn't have to do with evaluation time. He eventually flipped on this as other teams realized the same thing and college players became more expensive in the draft. That whole conversation became moot when they added slot values to draft picks.
Squints
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There will be a market as you describe and that market is more similar to free agency which is a market the A's couldn't compete in and pushed them to pursue their Moneyball strategy.
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Some players have a lot of leverage. Some players have some leverage. But it’s a minority of players in the portal that have any leverage.
And thanks to the portal, high school recruits have a lot less leverage. Even we’re seeing that as we’re eyeing players in the portal over high school recruits.
On this forum, people mix the phrase “moneyball” with a lot of other concepts, like using disruptive or unconventional schemes. They can be related, but they’re not the same thing, and you can have one without the other. They do get used together sometimes because if you use smaller slot backs or heavier fullback-type players, you’ll take advantage of market inefficiencies (how many teams are looking for fullbacks?).
In the vein of not following the herd in order to open up more possibilities: On defense, the 4-2-5 is the most popular defense right now. If you run a 3-4 or a 3-3-5, you’re going to be looking for a different kind of linebacker than most teams prize (though a lot of teams are looking for “edge” players). It’s not even that unconventional a defense, but it allows you to avoid going toe-to-toe with everybody else. There are other schemes that can be disruptive, but also have the advantage that they allow you to take advantage of less prized players. The 3-4 isn’t moneyball, but it works well with a moneyball strategy. When everyone runs a 3-4, you lose the market advantage.
Also, while moneyball uses analytics, that doesn’t mean that using analytics == moneyball. For the A’s, the idea of moneyball was that scouts were missing value and focusing on the wrong players. “The central premise of Moneyball is that the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is outdated, subjective, and often flawed.” In the case of the A’s, they thought AT THE TIME there was too much emphasis on stolen bases and too little on on base percentage.
The key is that you’re finding a niche where you have an advantage because everyone else is following the herd. The other guy is investing based on the wrong things.
There’s always a marketplace of players, and when there’s a marketplace there are going to be players overvalued and undervalued. That’s going to happen even if you’re playing the game the same way everyone else is, but if you play the game differently than others do then you can find even more advantages.
Now, if we are going to go for a purer moneyball view of things and get people riled up by bringing up the flexbone, it’s a good example of moneyball. Most fans, when they look at offense, think that total yards or total points are the measures of how good an offense is. The way we used to play the flexbone was with a focus on efficiency, or on EPA/play. Hold on to the ball, get first downs, have a high success rate. Our A-backs weren’t a traditional slot receiver or a traditional RB, but they got yards for us (and TDs). We just weren’t that inventive on defense. But, I think if you focus on the right stats (like success rate, in this case), you can say that the collective wisdom of football insiders is wrong and we should focus more on success rate for our offensive and defensive schemes and the players we recruit.
That involves using our players differently, and possibly focusing on “possession receivers” above the players with the right height/weight/speed profile. For example, It’s possible that Collins overemphasized speed vs. “good hands” because long TDs show up on the highlights, but lots of 5-yard receptions win ball games.