Commentary on Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

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.

Thus is the nature of baseball, a fickle game wrought with tradition, the foremost of which is the iron clad law mandating that the game is cruel and will take away as freely as it gives. My father always told me, “Baseball is a game of errors - the best hitters fail seven out of ten times - the key to success is knowing how to deal with the failure.” It is this aspect of the game, its want to frustrate and demoralize the player, that I think has driven most of my

The new approach helped the Oakland A’s succeed because it was ethical. Billy Beane used numbers to evaluate the players. Numbers matter but can be misleading. By looking closely and understanding what he was doing Billy made good decisions based on numbers. The old approach was unethical because it misjudged the players. In the “old fashion statistics of the players some key important factors were left out. For instance the old statistics did not mention the number of walks a batter earned. This left out information misleads coach’s judgments and resulted in scouts undervaluing players.

Baseball has always been a part of America’s pastime. From Babe Ruth calling his shot to Cy Young winning 511 games, baseball has always been a sport of chance. Baseball is a sport where one has to give the other team an opportunity to win. A team cannot run the clock down until the game is over; the other team always has a chance to win the game. The fate of a team always lies in their own hands. The same chance for success was given to Jackie Robinson when Branch Rickey brought him into the major leagues. If Robinson could put up respectable statistics and play with class and dignity he could win the heart of a country. In Rubinstein’s article it states, “Following Rickey’s lead, some Major League clubs were quick to integrate” (“Rubinstein” 25). Jackie’s perseverance lead to a huge wave of Negro players into Major League baseball. Players like Willie Stargell, Joe Morgan, and Willie Mays became stars of the league all because of Robinson. As stated in Rubinstein’s article “By the

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

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.

In 1839 Americas soon to be favorite past time was invented right here in New York, Baseball. Baseball whether you like the game or not, has weaved itself deeply into our culture and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. There are countless movies, articles, songs, playing cards, bobble heads, merchandise and books all made about baseball. The players are often idolized by children and adults alike. Baseball in our country was and still is a huge topic of discussion, whose batting average is higher, which team is better, is someone cheating. Troy Maxson like many American’s knows a lot about baseball like how striking out is bad and homeruns are how you win but there are things about baseball that Troy doesn’t know. The article, Walking Around the Fences: Troy Maxson and the Ideology of “Going Down Swinging”, written by David Letzler. Letzler Delves into the ideology of batting and walks in baseball in explanation of the main character Troy Maxson of August Willison’s play Fences, and his thought process of going down swinging and Troy’s thoughts on some of the major league players of that time.

to old to play in the Major Leagues.” This, while insignificant on the surface, implies a startling

As a four-year varsity-starting catcher for his high school, Steve was destined for greatness as soon as he stepped onto the field. His coach John Martin described the 6’2” 210 pound player as “the greatest athlete he’s ever had the pleasure to coach,” and that Steve was a “unique physical specimen.” Whenever he set foot on the diamond Steve was always at least two or three steps ahead of the competition. Whether it was always knowing where to make the play before it even came to him, or positioning his teammates in a way

I hope that we can all agree that Baseball is a sport. We can? Great! Now let’s analyze something very similar between the two sports, Baseball and Golf, and that is the swing. Now, what does a good batter’s stance look like? It looks like knees, bent at a 25 degree angle. It looks like a firm grasp on the bat’s handle, gaze permanently affixed on the ball. And the swing, careful, calculated, with a practiced turn at the hips to deliver power in order to send the ball flying. Let’s compare to a good golf stance. It looks like knees, bent at a 25 degree angle. It looks like a firm grasp on the clubs’s handle, gaze permanently affixed on the ball. And the swing, careful, calculated, with a practiced turn at the hips to deliver power in order to send the ball flying. It’s almost as if Baseball is just Air Golfing. Now, let’s look at some numbers, because numbers are fun talk about. “But these two events have no numbers in common,” one might say and to that I say poppycock! Why we can compare the accuracy of the athletes for the respective candidates! But for this comparison we need some subjects, so let's pull two gentleman from history. And of course, they have to be the best in their field, and they are, by the numbers, the best. The two gentlemen being referred to are Tiger Woods and Babe Ruth. If neither of those names ring a bell in your mind, stop reading here, google them and then come back and continue reading. Of course the resource list at the end of the paper might be helpful for that task. Now, Golf is the easy one, they give a percentage staight up, Between the number of fairways hit to the number possible. Tiger wood’s Driving Accuracy Percentage is 55.75% (Tiger). Now Baseball is a bit harder, as a player’s batting average is a decimal. Babe

In the article “ Jackie Robinson : Justice at Last,” it tells the reader a lot about a MLB player who broke the color barrier. Jackie Robinson was a tremendous athlete, intelligent, sensitive, calm, and skillful, perfect for the job. Jackie Robinson agreed to play on the MLB team The Dodgers. He had to agree to many things to play, and he did. He agreed to take abuse, avoid fighting, and be brave. Jackie Robinson was the right man to complete the job.

Bean is convince with the fact that "a young player is not what he looks like, or what he might become, but what he has done. The bottomline is what the player has produced in college. Bean and DePodesta believed that they could forecast future performance of college players more effectively than high school ones.

Billy Beane was once considered to be one of the greatest baseball prospects of all time. He was selected in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft, but he did not find very much success playing the game. After a very short time playing in the league, Beane found his true success by becoming a recruiter for the Oakland Athletics’. Beane has since then become a part owner of the A’s and has become one of the most well-known names to be associated with the sport of baseball due to his use of sabermetrics and running his organization. (G. Schneider, Manager still thinking out-of-the-box)

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