Write On Sports LLC - "In an Imperfect World" by Andrew Berg

In an Imperfect World

2006-12-08 00:14:49 | By: Andrew Berg

Anyone who read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball could identify the recurring idea that Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s liked the notion of pursuing players with high OBPs, often sacrificing glove work and batting average to get them. What many readers missed, though, was the fact that Beane never advocated this strategy ad nauseum, only as long as the rest of the Major League marketplace lagged behind that form of roster construction. Instead, as anyone this side of Joe Morgan should have realized, Beane simply borrowed a very basic financial principle- find any inefficiencies in the market, then exploit them until the rest of the market realizes that it is being fleeced. Today, enough of Major League Baseball understands the importance of On-Base Percentage- partially due to the spreading of Beane’s executorial seed through both leagues- that smart GMs have found other ways to stay ahead of the curve. The A’s, for instance, have spent the last two years stockpiling multitudinous versatile arms and batters who can get on base reasonably well while almost never striking out. The days of Scott Hatteberg and Jeremy Giambi are gone like the wind, and other teams have similarly found alternate means of value.

In a market as bullish as the current one, GMs have to stretch their imaginations to fill holes with whichever players are left over after the New Yorks, Chicagos, LAs, and Boston fill their plates at the buffet table. Today, I will examine a few of the strategies employed by the future-minded among us, the themes already finding their ways into roster constructions around the league.

Trades

If I told you that today’s free agent market is not a great value, would you have trouble believing me? I think it is safe to say that anyone outside of Puxatawny (sp?) Phil realizes that there are better ways of nabbing impact players at this point in the off-season than mortgaging a generation of the team’s payroll and roster flexibility. Look no further than the burgeoning market for Manny Ramirez. Whether a deal happens or not, the fact that teams started showing interest in a temperamental, gloveless, aging corner man with 4 years and $80 million on the table (accounting for the options his new team would most likely pick up) demonstrates that the market has shifted drastically. The truth is that Manny’s contract no longer looks so bad because this particular off-season has shifted the context of contract length and value, and the short-term focus of most front offices makes the player look relatively more employable.

In this case, staying ahead of the curve and exploiting the market inefficiencies extends beyond simply trading instead of signing free agents. Forward-thinking general managers will notice that pre-arbitration players became a lot more valuable in the last few weeks. I hate to fall into the trap of deifying Billy Beane- who certainly has his shortcomings-, but the rumors surrounding the A’s front office during the winter meetings exemplify exactly this theme. While the Harden-to-the-Mets deal floated around the internet, none of the packages the A’s were rumored to get back approximated Harden’s value here and now. Instead, players like Phil Humber, Aaron Heilman, and Lastings Milledge would give the A’s value, collectively, for much longer than Harden. Since Harden has burned up an unfortunate amount of his pre-arb time on the DL, he has lost some of his value to the A’s, and may be more useful to a team that could retain his services long-term, like the Mets. Therefore, the Mets would be willing to send back players with higher peaks and less certainty of realizing it.

If the A’s talk sends you screaming away from baseball message boards, then consider Kenny Williams and his distinctly un-sabermetric philosophy. He identified that the free agent market for starting pitching made his disproportionately deep pitching staff an overvalued commodity. He sold high, sending free-agents-to-be Jon Garland and Freddy Garcia to panicky teams in need, getting back a gaggle of talented prospects who could approach their predecessors value in the short term while lasting for much longer at a tremendous discount.

On a larger level, look at the teams scrambling to acquire established starting pitchers, like the Cubs, Phillies, and Royals- these are not the teams efficiently contending for championships. All of them have either wasted a lot of money or lost a lot of games in the recent past. Only teams that are accustomed to throwing money at their problems- Los Angeles, New York, Boston- have both recently won and pursued this inefficient solution to their problems.

Defense

The conventional wisdom on defense gave Derek Jeter three straight Gold Gloves. Suffice to say, not everybody who knows baseball has found a way to measure defensive performance in a consistent or statistically demonstrable way. I believe that there is a great deal of value to be gleaned the fledgling methods of defensive analysis that utilize technology that has not been utilized before. For instance, some teams have started using dozens of cameras placed strategically around the stadium to measure trajectory and velocity of balls as they leave the bat and travel across the field. Rather than using a subjective (and often biased) scorer to judge whether a player should or should not have made a play, the physics can make an objective judgment on exactly where the ball went and when.

I think that some of the curious signings we have seen by particularly progressive teams in the last two or three years may go back to their defensive calculations and the consequential belief that the market will miss some of a player’s value. Consider Boston’s signing of Alex Gonzalez last winter, a player whose vanishingly low on-base percentage seemed totally out of line with the organizational philosophy. Even though he showed up a little better in hitter-friendly Fenway, he was by no means the best possible option, especially as players like Wilson Betemit and Julio Lugo became available midway through the season. Nonetheless, the Red Sox ran Gonzalez out to short every day, and I believe they saw more defensive value than anyone else did. Obviously, I cannot dismiss the possibility of the Sox not wanting to take on additional cost while forcing Gonzalez to the bench, and I cannot prove that Gonzalez has additional defensive value without looking at Boston’s proprietary metrics. Still, I think Boston is one of many teams pioneering new ground with defensive analysis, and I think that any team that does it well will help itself out tremendously.

International Development

What do Albert Pujols, Johan Santana, Pedro Martinez, Vlad Guerrero, and Miguel Tejada have in common? Besides being potential starters on an all-decade team, all of these players come from outside of the U.S., and none of them came through the Amateur Draft. To date, many of the biggest and best international free agent signings have gone to the big-budget teams in the Majors, as they have more money in general, and therefore more money to plug into international development. As MLB invests more time and energy in developing additional international sites, more teams may have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Just like the Twins have a channel to Venezuela, an entrepreneurial team might be able to become the preeminent MLB developer in South Korea or South Africa. I know little of the specific factors which could contribute to turning a baseball blank slate into a hot spot for scouting, though whichever team makes these inroads first by correctly identifying developmental factors will have a huge leg up on everyone else, and first dibs on the next Albert Pujols.

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