from Amazon
Sunday, March 13, 2011
I’ll wait until I read the book, but…
Here is an article by one of the co-authors of the book, The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball. I have it on order from Amazon.
And here is an excerpt from the article:
Believers in sabermetrics permeate the media and, increasingly, the front offices of major league teams. The catalyst was Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ best-selling book that describes how, in the early 2000s, the Oakland A’s thrived because their General Manager, Billy Beane, employed insights culled from sabermetrics.
As we show at length in The Beauty of Short Hops, the basic premise of Moneyball is fallacious. Oakland, which crashed and burned shortly after publication of Moneyball, succeeded primarily because Beane was fortunate enough to land three terrific starting pitchers. When those three departed, he apparently became a lot less smart.
Just as Moneyball’s central conceit collapses upon scrutiny, ditto many of its specific claims, ranging from the best ways to scout players to the proper statistics for evaluating pitchers. These and many other sabermetric “insights” are demonstrably silly.
The first sentence is ridiculous. Once again, a definitive statement by someone who apparently knows little about sabermetrics, its history and evolution, both in an out of MLB. (One of the authors is a professor of legal studies and the other is as doctor.) Moneyball was the catalyst for the sabermetric revolution in the media and MLB front offices? Hardly. It really didn’t even make a dent. Sans Moneyball, I don’t think we would see anything noticeably different in the media or MLB with respect to sabermetrics. That is a far cry from being a catalyst.
And the last two paragraphs quoted above are beyond ridiculous. It sounds like this book is “demonstrably silly,” but I’ll reserve further judgment until I actually RTFB, although after going to the book’s web site, I think I just wasted 20 bucks…
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