The Age has done a review on the book. It took long enough, and it has to be said that apart from the non-understanding of baseball stats, it even misunderstood the people portrayed:
Beane and DePodesta and the society made several important discoveries about baseball success. First, hitting power was a vastly overrated (sic); more important was the ability to "get on base", which could be achieved by inducing the pitcher to throw poorly and get a walk to first base.No, power is important. As is contact. But Batting Average as a stat was over-rated. This 'discovery' was made by Branch Rickey in a long-gone era, but was committed to writing by baseball writer Bill James in the early 1980s. In fact, it's a central tenet of 'sabermetrics' and has been for a good 15-20 years. It was the fact that the Oakland Athletics in the time of Sandy Alderson were the first to take it up as policy in developing their minor league talent that made it 'revolutionary' in some ways because he did on a cue from Bill James' writings. What is radical about Beane and DePodesta's approach that they found a market inefficiency in the fact that On-Base-Percentage was overlooked by almost all the rival clubs and so gained an advantage in getting cheap players who were long on plate discipline. Apart from that Beane concluded that plate discipline was not a skill that could not be taught, but a talent and so went after established players with a high OBP at various levels of development.
Second, the existing statistic measuring pitchers' performances was muddied because it included the full play. Good or bad fielding could alter the result of a play and influence a pitcher's stats, so Beane and Depodesto stripped them out.This is crap. It was legal clerk Voros McCracken who devised DIPS (Defense Independent Pitching Statistics), and promptly got a job with the Boston Red Sox at the beginning of the 2003 season. Yes, he made his announcement at SABR (Society for American Baseball Research), but Beane and DePodesta had nothing to do with this discovery. Makes you wonder if Matthew Ricketson actually understood what he has read.
Third, recruiting scouts focused too much on a player's potential, and placed too much faith in the major league club's ability to eradicate flaws or improve weaknesses. Beane and Depodesto (sic) put more store in what prospective recruits had actually done.Again, it was Bill James who showed that you could project players future performances by their track record, adjusting for the league. James did this work in the early 80s and was promptly ignored by all baseball organisations. In the case of Beane and DePodesta, they decided to adopt this approach in order to be 'risk-averse'.
Apart from that, it's probably a good thing 'Moneyball' is getting an airing in Australia.
Tore up my Knee
playing baseball yesterday. I went for 2 walks and a double, scoring 2 runs and after that I tore up my knee in a collision play at 3B so my batting order registered an out. My season OBP is .500, so Beane and DePodesta would've been proud. Apart from that, I'm crawling around the floor, dragging my butt along the carpet. It's a miserable experience.
- Art Neuro