Player Recruitment Process In Michael Lewis's Moneyball

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.

Another impressive aspect of Rogosin’s book is the way he ties the hardships that African American’s faced and baseball together in a seemingly smooth connection. Rogosin realized that although he was writing a book on The Negro Leagues, he also couldn’t neglect the background information that came along with that time period. Rogosin includes stories of how teams remained afloat by scheduling exhibition games whenever possible to make money for the team. Rogosin goes on to say “it was pure economics: white people had more money.”2 Another aspect that is appealing in the book is Rogosin often draws comparisons to The Major Leagues on how the leagues differed and how they were similar. The disparities between the leagues really shocks the reader, and challenges their perspective of the time period the book acknowledges.

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.

Camden Selig’s road to success in college athletics hasn’t been a traditional one. He started off at Washington and Lee University majoring in psychology. He tried out for the baseball team but sadly got cut. During his time there he was a sports photographer for the yearbook and dabbled around sports on a small scale. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and went on to Ohio University to get his masters in sports management. After he graduated, he didn’t quite know what he wanted to do. At first he thought he wanted to get into baseball. He had a passion for it and enjoyed the thought of having

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

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

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

The game of baseball evolved immensely during the 1900’s. There were new rules and rule changes, new teams in new states, and then there was Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson was a true legend from the day he was born in 1919. Baseball had it all in the first half of the 1900’s, fans filled the stadiums day after day, even during the war times. There was a big-name player on almost every team, children and adults admired these professional baseball players. The only thing professional baseball didn’t have during these times were African American players. Learning about the hardships that he had to overcome as a young boy, and the accomplishments he made from his college days at UCLA, to becoming the first African American professional baseball player, Jackie made it known that he was an American hero.

As a little background on Rickey, some say he was baseball’s first scientist. He had a reputation for intelligent design. He devised new and effective ways to instruct players and sharpen their skills; invented training devices, like base-sliding pits and batting tees that are commonplace today but were unheard of then; and pioneered the use of complex statistical measures to evaluate performance. He created what came to be known as the farm system, a network of minor-league teams under the control of the major-league team, where young players could be placed, taught, developed, and evaluated, eventually providing a “harvest” of fresh talent for the parent club (Glasser).

There have been many famous figures that have made a significant impact in the sport industry. One person, who was hired in 2002 at the age of 28, is one of those people. Theo Epstein has made monumental waves in the sport industry since he became the general manager of the Boston Red Sox in 2002. Since then, Epstein has gone on to revolutionize baseball in hiring young, educated, talented minds with knowledge and understanding of sabermetrics to lead their organizations. Epstein was one of the first general managers to receive the title who had no professional baseball playing experience. As a model of success, other Major League Baseball franchises have begun hiring young intellectuals like Epstein to run their teams.

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.

The game of baseball has been argued to be the number one game in America and also around the world. Respectively the game is also known as “America’s pastime” had over 14 million people in the U.S. alone watching the World Series in 20151. Due to the growing popularity of baseball throughout the world the players of Major League Baseball (MLB) have become more diverse. Since 1950 when baseball started to grow in popularity the attendance per game has risen over 40%2.

Additionally, under Beane's watch, Oakland players garnered numerous individual awards: Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada were named AL Most Value Players in 2000 and 2002, respectively; Barry Zito was named an AL Cy Young Award winner in 2002; and Bobby Crosby and Huston Street earned back-to-back AL Rookie of the Year awards in 2004 and 2005, respectively. Before Billy Beane’s fame, he played 5 years in the show as an outfielder. He inspired the 2003 book and 2011 film “Moneyball.” Billy transformed baseball from a typical “scout and projection” recruitment style into a statistical analysis of predicting how players might perform relative to their past statistical history. The thing is, he used it with one of the lowest payrolls in the MLB.

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

In other words, BIlly tells the scouts that if they do not change their way of doing business, they will not be able to compete. Billy continues to states, “If we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there” (Moneyball). Consequently, Billy innovates and changes the way scouts have created teams for 150 years (Moneyball). He finds a strategy, a way of doing business, that is more productive and cost effective. Henry, the Boston Red Sox’s coach, claims, “It's threatening their livelihoods, jobs, the way they do things… anyone who is not tearing their team down right now and rebuilding using your model they’re dinosaurs” (Moneyball).