Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Buzz Bissinger wrote a post for The New Republic yesterday entitled “Against ‘Moneyball’” in which he attempts to make the case that the Moneyball philosophy is not all it was cracked up to be. His lead off argument is the fact that the teams that are currently still standing – the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers – spent a combined $528,620,438 on payroll this year. In Bissinger’s mind that proves that the Moneyball philosophy doesn’t work.  Bissinger suggests that the teams still in the game spent a ton of money to get there and spending money is what you need to do to win the big prize. I don’t disagree with him there. However, I do disagree with his implication that Moneyball has failed because getting to the playoffs and the World Series is still seemingly determined by the size of a team’s payroll.

It occurs to me that at this juncture I should take a brief respite from railing on Bissinger’s post to explain to you non-moneyballers out there what the Moneyball philosophy really is. Essentially the Moneyball philosophy suggests that some players are undervalued because baseball teams and scouts aren’t looking at the right stats.  One of the key stats, as used by Billy Beane in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, was on base percentage (or OBP). High OBPs meant players got on base. Beane’s argument was simply this: who cares if they get on base because of a hit or a walk? Good point. Beane found payers with high OBP that didn’t have stellar stats elsewhere on their baseball cards and this helped Beane get these players on the cheap. The high OBP then translated into more wins for Beane’s Oakland A’s than if he had targeted players based on overly exploited stats like batting average.

Now, back to Bissinger’s argument.

In his post in the New Republic, Bissinger seems to be arguing that winning overall pennants will be the only thing that shows Moneyball works. Since Beane, for example, has never won a World Series, has only made the playoffs in two of the last seven seasons and has had teams fall under the .500 mark for the past few seasons shows, in Bissinger’s eyes, that Moneyball doesn’t work.

While I appreciate the heart of Bissinger’s argument – that baseball needs something other than Moneyball (perhaps a salary cap) to right its issue with big spending teams always winning – I think he isn’t looking at the right things.

Sure, we can all agree that Beane, with a $62mm payroll, is probably never going to beat the Yankees, who paid out $201.5mm this year. No hidden stat that can save Beane money on players is going to overcome that. However, I am not sure even Beane himself would suggest that he could get the A’s to the promised land on statistical analysis alone.  All he can do is optimize his wins per dollar spent ratio.

I can’t take credit for thinking of this quick metric.  My Dad suggested it after reading Bissinger’s article.  I went ahead and did the quick analysis per my Dad’s suggestion.  Here is is:

As you can see, I ranked the teams by their “cost per win” from the lowest to the highest. I also kept their payroll ranking (1 being the highest) to the left of the team name so it would be somewhat easier to see the correlation (I would have made a nice visualization of this data but I am simply too tired…).

Let’s look at Beane’s A’s. Not too bad: 26/30 in payroll but 8/30 in cost per win.  That means the A’s are being pretty efficient with their dollars and that is all Moneyball can be expected to help with. (That said, they were not as efficient as they could have been. They should have been somewhere around 4 or 5/30 in cost per win.)

Another missing piece from Bissinger’s article is that once certain stats like OBP begin to be picked up by other teams, as it has been, the effectiveness of those stats to find players at a good value diminishes. In economic terms: the market becomes “efficient” and new stats need to be found to create a new advantage for the team that finds them.

Lastly, I should mention that Bissinger’s argument is partly tied up in giving Lewis’ book a hard time for only focusing on the good things that Moneyball did for the A’s while leaving out a lot of the not-so-great players that the Moneyball philosophy dug up.  Let’s be honest, Lewis is a writer trying to come up with an engaging story and to make a point.  Bissinger should probably realize that no one, even Lewis himself, really expected “Moneyball” to be academically rigorous.

At the end of the day I think Bissinger may just be fed up with the ridiculous uncapped salary situation in Major League Baseball (I am with him there) and he decided to take that frustration out on Moneyball. However, his tough stance on Moneyball is unwarranted. The Moneyball philosophy was never meant to make a small payroll team into a World Series Champion nor did anyone in their right mind think it ever would. It was simply meant to keep the teams that can’t spend the big bucks at least somewhat competitive and it seems to be doing just that.

Side note: I absolutely think the MLB needs a salary cap and fast. The fact that the MLB doesn’t have one is simply ridiculous and it is causing the game to become less fun with each passing year.  Contrast that with the NFL where any team can win on any given Sunday. That is a much more compelling proposition to fans across the country. I mean really, if you are an Oakland A’s fan, why do you even bother getting excited on opening day knowing that you don’t have a chance of winning a pennant? That’s a big problem for the MLB and it will come to a head sooner or later.