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.
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).
It’s true in boxing, too. I almost never enjoy a Floyd Mayweather bout because he plays for points better than anyone. It’s effective but not entertaining.
This is a postmodernist, market fundamentalist, meta narrative that has basically nothing to do with reality.
As if there is some kind of no-arbitrage condition arbitrage, to be made between humans playing baseball.
This is nothing new though. Baseball is America's pastime in a very deep way. I collected baseball cards in the 80s like I was trading stocks in another bullshit, market fundamentalist delusion.
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.
I won the Premier League's first analytics hackathon (at Man City, 2016, IIRC), and all we did was some regression using some data that nobody had really looked at in detail before.
Back then, it was relatively easy to just look around and prod relatively available data and find new angles if you went in eyes open. If you were trying to justify spending all that money on that kid who isn't working out with you, the approach lets you dig the hole you want.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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)
> 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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadThere 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).
As if there is some kind of no-arbitrage condition arbitrage, to be made between humans playing baseball.
This is nothing new though. Baseball is America's pastime in a very deep way. I collected baseball cards in the 80s like I was trading stocks in another bullshit, market fundamentalist delusion.
Back then, it was relatively easy to just look around and prod relatively available data and find new angles if you went in eyes open. If you were trying to justify spending all that money on that kid who isn't working out with you, the approach lets you dig the hole you want.
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.
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.
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.
There is no durable thing you can simply identify as your edge in metrics that you can stick to for years.
Do baseball fans ever discuss potentially changing the rules or game setup to mitigate this?
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
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.