Moneyball Unfair

The “New York Yankees” is the baseball team that has won 18 division titles, 40 AL pennants, and 27 World Series championships, all of which are Major League Baseball records. It makes great records and great success each year. And the impact it has on the global economy is huge. Major League Baseball is an oligopoly dominated by a few firms.

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.

Teams with large payrolls routinely win at a higher rate than teams who cannot afford to spend the massive amounts of money other teams do. For example, in the last fifteen years the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, two teams which regularly are among the highest spending teams in baseball, won on average 94.7 and 86.8 games respectively. By comparison, the San Diego Padres and the Kansas City Royals, two teams who are not able to compete financially with teams with deeper pockets, won an average of 77.1 and 71.6 games respectively in that same time span (Major League Baseball). This disparity in season wins is a direct cause of Major League Baseball’s lack of a salary cap. Over the course of a 162 game season, teams with higher payrolls, and therefore better talent on their roster, will prevail more often than

He states, "This is not about stupidity, it is about what is fair in baseball, and what is not. It is about the overall appeal of the national pastime. It is about caring, interest, and most of all, competition. Right now, there is very little of any of these components outside of the 212 area code." Most importantly, he explains why baseball needs a salary cap by saying "it is the only way to put constraints on what the Yankees are doing and to return the sport to the interesting and suspenseful form of sporting entertainment it once used to be." The Yankees are at an unfair advantage all across the league, and nobody, not Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, or perhaps even Los Angeles, can acquire talent the way they can. The only way to prevent them from doing so is to put a cap on how much they can pay their entire team.

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.

Gambling in professional sports is an ethical dilemma that needs to be examined from all angles before making a decision on whether to bet or not. Gambling has been a part our society for thousands of years, dating back to the original Olympic Games in Greece. Depending on where you live, there will be different laws regarding the rules of gambling. The story of Pete Rose shows a good example of what can happen to a sports manager that bets on his own team and others in his sport. In this case, there will be a situation where someone is faced with an ethical dilemma and they must go over all options before making a decision. Before betting on a sports team, one must look at all alternatives to betting and the consequences that come with each one. After this, a choice must be made regarding the ethical dilemma. This decision must be looked at from the legal side of things, as well as your own gut feelings towards your choice. You also must ask yourself how you would feel about it if you told the world what your decision is. The code of ethics of sports managers can also play a role in the decision making process. An ethical theory called utilitarianism will also be a way of looking at how and why the decision was made. By covering all these topics, it will assist in making the decision for an ethical dilemma.

They could not afford to outbid other teams for established players. Under the farm system, the Cardinals bought minor-league franchises and hired young players. The farm clubs provided the players with experience. The best players then moved up to play with the Cardinals” (Sports Champions, 1). This quote shows how teams with less money can get good baseball players without having

Every sports team/organization operates the same when it comes to salaries some players get paid more than others and salaries fluctuate based on the economy. In the 1920s the average monthly salary for a Negro baseball player was about $230 which is about $2,760 annually. Whereas in the 1920s the average annual salary for a major league player was about $5,000 to $6,000. Then the dreaded 1930s hit the decade of depression. Despite the failing economy baseball was and is America's pastime and is always popular among the people. People would always manage to go see a baseball game every now and then. This would allow for an average annual salary increase of about $1000 from about $5000-$6000 to $7000. It obviously made sense that as the economy is failing salaries would start to decrease. Of course they did Negro baseball players monthly salary went down from $230 to $170. Which would be $2,040 annually about $720 less than the previous

Just because a team has the money to go out and pay the high price free agents, does that mean that they are going to be successful? Not necessarily, as the Baltimore Orioles have shown, they have one of the higher team payrolls in the majors but they are at the bottom of their division. So maybe it is what you do with the money that matters. And in the Minnesota Twin's case this year, who are a small-market team, they got the best out of their relatively unknown players. But the thing that eventually hurt them was their inability to go out and get a key player before the trading deadline.

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

Free agents demand for very high compensation and this takes away major chunk of available salary. Every team has to come up with good balance of rookies and veterans to meet salary cap.

Moneyball Kia Sawler 100135060 a) a brief description of the plot of the film (2pts) The movie Moneyball is based on a true story that took place in 2002, about a major league baseball player, Billy Beane and his later career. Billy was scouted by the Oakland Athletics baseball team when he was just finishing high school. After Billy had a discussion with his parents and the Oakland Athletic coaches, he decided to go play for them. Billy made a huge decision to go play; in turning down his scholarship to university because he could not do both school and baseball.

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

The movie MoneyBall first aired in 2011 as an American sports drama film. It is based on the Oakland Athletics Baseball Team in 2002’s season. After loosing to the New York Yankees (2001) and loosing three top players to free agency Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager, and the assistant general manager, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) build a competitive team in 2002 with the franchise’s limited budget for players. Math is vividly used in the new approach for creating a competitive team with undervalued talent. Beane and Brand use math by taking a sophisticated saber metric (baseball statistics that measure in-game activity), approach towards scouting and analyzing players. Brand being a Yale economics graduate selects players based almost exclusively

Major League Baseball is known as America’s favorite pastime, and MLB teams spend an extensive amount of money in the excess of a billion dollars with the ultimate goal to win the World Series. This learning team’s focus throughout this descriptive statistics paper is the MLB players’ performances, salaries, salary caps, and winning percentages. Though salaries will by no means be a trade for wins, the goal is to use the less experienced players and pay them a lower salary. Research has been done on whether or not player’s salaries and wins are connected.