The Beauty of Short Hops

In 2002, Oakland GM Billy Beane decided he needed to try a new approach to keep the team competitive with clubs whose payrolls dwarfed them. Working with statistician Bill James, be came up with the Moneyball approach. He drafted players based not on scouts' assessment of their athleticism, but on their OBP. A walk is as good as a hit, so he just needed guys who can draw walks. He signed similarly undervalued free agents to replace the studs he couldn't afford. And then, despite their payroll disadvantage, the A's made the playoffs.

That success led to the popularity of sabermetrics and a new way of thinking about baseball as something easy to quantity. Look at the data and it will tell you what you should do. Look at the data and it will tell you who is better.

The problem is, while “Moneyball is a great movie, the book, movie, and overall philosophy is a lie. Oakland won not because Scott Hatteberg drew walks, but because the team had the best pitching staff in baseball, led by Zito, Hudson, and Mulder. That pitching helped them win despite having a bad offense.

This book painstakingly looks at all of the assumptions that sabermetics makes, such as a walk is as good as a hit, you shouldn't risk being thrown out attempting a steal, you shouldn't bunt, etc. and points out their many flaws. Even the attempt to take two players and use metrics to determine who is better or who is more valuable for his team is impossible. Sabermetics always fail for the same reason: There are simply too many variables for the data to be significant.

The first half of the book gives great detail about those variables and why they confound the attempts to quantify baseball. The second half of the book is a love letter to the unpredictable nature of baseball.

The book makes a convincing argument, but the second half is a drag. I got the point a few pages in and didn't need the rest. Still, it's a quick read and good for anyone interested in the subject.