What "Moneyball" Misses About Baseball

Over the last decade mathematicians have overrun the world of sports. Experts now scoff at conventional statistics like win-lose records, passer ratings, and batting average.

These long standing methods of following sports are being replaced by complex formulas and statistics. No sport has been more affected by this shift than baseball.

The mammoth best seller Moneyball revolutionized baseball, a sport already obsessed with statistics. Until the recently published, em>T<he Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball, by Sheldon and Alan Hirsch, no writer had taken on Michael Lewis and Bill James.

Thankfully, the Hirsch brothers provided the first sensible rebuttal to the Moneyball approach. After summarising Moneyball in the opening chapter, the authors begin to pick apart Michael Lewis’s arguments with relish.

Lewis follows Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, using him as an example of a stat-obsessed executive who has turned a small budget club into an annual contender (keep in mind Moneyball was written when the A’s were still a relevant team in Major League baseball).

Lewis chronicles the Oakland Athletics draft, which is meant to provide an example of Beane’s brilliance. Beane drafts unique and seemingly unimpressive prospects who have been overlooked by the non-stat obsessed teams.

The Hirsch brothers revisit that “brilliant draft” and one of the key players from it, Arizona state catcher Jeremy Brown. A pudgy, unauthentic, and untalented player, Brown was drafted by the A’s and was made a key example of Beane's -- and sabermetricians' -- belief that on-base percentage is the “Holy Grail” of baseball. Beane believed he outsmarted the scouts by using stats that the scouts overlooked.

As the authors point out, however, “the scouts were right.”

Brown retired from major league baseball after six years and 10 at-bats in the major leagues. He was not as, Lewis had suggested, the next Babe Ruth.

The authors go on to catalogue Moneyball’s many other imaginative leaps and oversights. For instance, Lewis overlooks the importance of starting pitching, luck, and the importance of stars to a team.

By the end of the first chapter the authors have almost entirely discredited the entire Moneyball thesis. And then the Hirsches move onto sabermetrics: They go after several notable sabermatricians, arguing, “no one can ever quantify a player’s value with precision.”

They point out that leading sabermetrician James Click once wrote that “Ricky Henderson’s base running was a virtual wash” and the great Bill James concluded that the Hall of Famer’s record breaking 1982 season produced “a net gain of just 4.5 runs for Oakland.” No one who truly followed baseball would ever in their right mind say such things.

After pointing out the flaws with Billy Beane, James, and sabermetrics, the authors move on to what makes baseball great: it’s sheer unpredictability.

They pick out several bizarre moments from the 2009 season and point out the “non-quantifiable qualities that saber metrics fail to capture, and worse, tend to block out.”

The authors compare a base-running gaffe in a Mets-Nationals game to the famous 1960 world series; a game delayed 52 minutes because of a swarm of bees; baseballs hidden in Wrigley Field's famous ivy; and many other anecdotes which remind us why we love baseball -- and its unpredictable nature.

With so many ways for us to interpret baseball now, the beauty of the game has been somewhat lost amid the algorithms and actuarial tables. Instead of watching the games, we are scanning the box scores and punching the numbers into complex and unreliable formulas.

Sheldon and Alan Hirsch remind us that baseball games are not won by the team with more statistics but by a lucky bounce, an unexpected hot streak, or just pure luck.