Analysis & Case On Use Of Business Analytics Framework

This project investigates how salary and performance of offensive players in Major League Baseball are linked. We believe this is an interesting problem because it is traditionally believed that professional athletes play with hopes of earning a high salary, yet it often seems a batter’s performance is not linked to their salary (Jensen). Therefore, it seems as if the link between a player’s performance and their salary is different than their true performance. Performing a statistical analysis of this conundrum will give us great insight as to if it is accurate to say that performance changes salary drastically. Studies that prior statisticians have done differ from this study because their studies focus on salary and team performance rather than on the performance of individual players (Jane). Our study focuses on salary and individual performance in the current season. While there is extensive data on both game performances in the MLB and salaries, we can contribute to the statistical community by comparing how salaries are affected by different performance indicators for randomly selected individual players. Essentially, our hypothesis is an examination into how a batter 's game performance affects salary. We expect that the better a player’s statistics are, the higher their salary will be.

Nothing can just be focused on one thing. Michael Lewis shows this through his constant talk about financial plans the teams make, the spending they have to do. For example, Lewis states that, “the problem is that the Athletics have $40 million to spend on twenty-five players and the Yankees have $126 million. Beane argues that it would be wrong to try to do what the Yankees are doing because latter has three times the money to spend.” Thats just confusing to some including myself. Understanding its a part of baseball that every team has to do, but the interruption of constant money this, money that, lets spend this much on this guy, but give up that guy because of his statistics, its just unbearable. No one wants to read about how the MLB spends their money, people want to read about the fantastic sport of

The book Moneyball by Michael Lewis is about a former major league baseball player who became the manager of the Oakland A’s. It tells the story of how he led the team to success despite their low budget by using computer based analytics to draft players. With the help of Bill James, the Oakland A’s came up with a new plan based on statistics to draft players. He went after players nobody wanted due to their low budget and his new plan. Billy led the Oakland Athletics to a successive win seasons by changing the way he measured players. He abandoned the traditional 5 “tool” the other scouts used and adopted empirical analytics. The abandonment of the traditional assessment of

MLB teams are finding new innovative ways to use analytics, one way is to use the statistics for a more effective way to evaluate free agents. “Astros employed an analysis based on the TrackMan system to acquire an unaccomplished pitcher called Collin McHugh, because of his fast-spinning curveball” (“Every Step They”). “They then told him to throw that pitch far more often during the next season, and he blossomed into a star” (“Every Step They”). General Managers and coaches can use these analytics to scout areas they have never scouted before. Analytics gives teams more resources and more assistance to evaluate players. “For example, by comparing the number of strikes called for a catcher in relation to every other catcher in the league, the data can illustrate how good any one catcher is at getting umpires to call strikes” (Nadler). “Additionally, general managers and scouts can use

Baseball statistics are meant to be a representation of a player’s talent. Since baseball’s inception around the mid-19th century, statistics have been used to interpret the talent level of any given player, however, the statistics that have been traditionally used to define talent are often times misleading. At a fundamental level, baseball, like any game, is about winning. To win games, teams have to score runs; to score runs, players have to get on base any way they can. All the while, the pitcher and the defense are supposed to prevent runs from scoring. As simplistic as this view sounds, the statistics being used to evaluate individual players were extremely flawed. In an attempt to develop more

Billy Bean was a young athletic kid that came from a military family. He grew to be six foot four inches at the age of eighteen. Billy was tested for his arm strength, speed, hitting, and fielding in front of major league scouts. Billy was not the suitable runner to the major leagues scouts. They looked at him and thought he too tall and lengthy for an outfielder. “He’s probably real slow,” they would say. Billy did not listen to them, he did not have a care in the world besides performing perfectly in front of the scouts and fans. He was then set to run the 60 yard dash. “Gillick drops his hand. Five born athletes lift up and push off. They’re at full tilt after just a few steps. It’s all over inside of seven seconds. Billy Beane has made all the others look slow,” (Lewis 5). Things are not always what they seem to be. Billy was a tall white kid that is not suppose to beat a sprinter who was already signed to UCLA on a football scholarship as a wide receiver. Scouts ask for a re-run, and yet again Billy kills them. Billy was undervalued as a runner and he proved them wrong by killing everyone in the

Jayson Stark, ESPN columnist, presents an interesting argument of the downfall of baseball after free agency. He uses sarcasm and slight humor to introduce the reader to the topic of free agency and uses the argument style of comparison and contrast to predict what today might have held had there been no free agency. But within his column, player agent Tom Reich states, “The people who criticize free agency to easily today don’t realize how bad baseball was twenty-five years ago” (Stark). It is Stark who realizes that the talent of the game has improved, but the overall passion in each player may have decreased.

Therefore Billy Beane decides to set an unconventional strategy in order to be able to compete with other wealthy teams “out there”. His goal setting is based on the strategy he sets for his game in what he calls “an unfair game”. Manager Billy knows that decreasing cost is the main concern of the top executives of his team. The main shareholders and stakeholders have set their goals based on their conservative approaches. To be more specific, the top manager of Oakland Athletic is not willing to take any risk in order to pay more money to recruit better players.

The film showed how with the black Sox scandal that there is no way to regulate the player on the teams that they needed to create a governing body that will decide if a player is eligible to play professional baseball, based on the actin that the committed. The very first commissioner of baseball was Kenesaw Mountain Landis who came into power because of the Black Sox scandal. The commissioner was given absolute power so his decision was final without any dispute. He decided that with the players that participated and new of the fixed games was not going to be eligible to play professional baseball anymore and to this day that ruling still stands. Even though the player were removed of all charges in relation to accepting money to throw games,

1. Based on the “Billy Beane: Changing the Game” case, explain how and why the Oakland A’s economic situation after 1995 shaped its:

The new film chronicling the rise of Jackie Robinson,42, was released to positive reviews but mediocre box office results. The film kicks off with a scene of Robinson lighting a fire under the Negro Leagues as a member of the Kansas City Monarchs. With Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey looking to put people in the seats with a pennant-contender taking the field, he breaks baseball's color barrier and selects Robinson to be the vessel for social change, making sure he realizes the gravity of his circumstances before agreeing. The film is half-heartedly kind to baseball history, portraying events accurately, but only to the degree it chose to portray them, but the issue lies within the lack of courage of writer and director Brian Helgeland, who

The A's recent success is attributed to the innovative approach taken by Billy Beane in assembling a baseball team with a very limited amount of financial resources. Billy Beane has built a successful ball club because he has found an efficient and cost effective way of measuring baseball talent thus essentially creating a loophole in this unfair game because winning percentage is a result of talent not

George et al.,(2007) provide the importance of an authentic leadership. A key focus of the article is that the leader should not only understand his values, but practice them as well. One of the most interesting values described by Billy Beane is his value of education. Major League Baseball would recognize him as one of the top high school talents in the country during his youth. He valued education so much, that he informed all Major League Baseball teams that he would not sign any professional contract so that he could attend Stanford. Even upon being convinced to sign with the New York Mets, he made his intentions of taking classes in the off season quite clear. This may have been his undoing as a player, as he did not value where his natural talents could take him in baseball. This would lead him to develop values regarding life decisions. He swore after that sequence of events he would never make a decision based on money ever again. This is a value he has stayed true to, as he turned down the opportunity to be the highest paid

Based on the “Billy Beane: Changing the Game” case, explain how and why the Oakland A’s economic situation after 1995 shaped its:

“At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it