Economist wants pokertracker database hands

[Jordan Olsommer]

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it's frustrating that he hasn't taken the time to educate himself about the current state of the art in the field.

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Again, all the arguments against what he says about Moneyball have been stated something along the lines of "he just doesn't understand baseball statistics and analysis." Well, that just doesn't cut it for someone who wants to learn more about the world. He posed an interesting question: if these people are on to something that huge, firstly they wouldn't publish it (doesn't matter if the statistics are available to all; if you notice a market inefficiency, you have an enormous informational asymmetry advantage, and you're not going to give that up for a tiny cut of the authors' tiny cut of a books' proceeds), and secondly, why are the A's not nearly as good anymore (to the best of my knowledge)?

anyway, here's a good snippet of what he said he wasn't trying to prove:

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To save people who are going to post comments time, let me also make clear what I am not arguing:

1)I am not denying the A's have been remarkably successful in the recent years.

2)I am not denying that their success is even more remarkable given their limited budget, especially in the early years.

3) I am not denying that they were innovators in using statistics to evaluate performance.

4) I am not denying that Moneyball was a fun book to read.

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[ceczar]

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He posed an interesting question: if these people are on to something that huge, firstly they wouldn't publish it (doesn't matter if the statistics are available to all; if you notice a market inefficiency, you have an enormous informational asymmetry advantage, and you're not going to give that up for a tiny cut of the authors' tiny cut of a books' proceeds)

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That's not an interesting question. The fact that OBP had been undervalued by a lot of baseball teams had been written about ad nauseum (sp?) by a variety of sources. It's like fish and public availability of 2+2 and the books. They really are that stupid, and they will continue to be so. The fact that the A's thought there were inefficiencies in the scouting market is not information by itself. they have very complex evaluation and projection tools, and i imagine they are still quite secret.

but i already said that in my last post, and you still brought it up as if i hadn't. maybe you'll ask someone to address this a third time.

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and secondly, why are the A's not nearly as good anymore (to the best of my knowledge)

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they're underperforming this year because their hitters are underperforming reasonable projections of their performance. you can have good ideas on how to build a team, not overpaying for overvalued skills and whatever else, but still your players have to perform. and when your best player plays like crap for 2 months, your record will suffer. when you have to let league MVPs bolt to free agency, you will have to rebuild through younger players, which takes longer and is more volatile. when they traded away their best pitchers last year, they were making decisions based on the long term, and may in fact have made themselves worse for this year for the sake of the ability to compete in the future.

again, this discussion started because some people noted their annoyance with Levitt over his baseball comments, and some others countering that they were being unfair to him, as his comments are reasonable. i'm not trying to educate you on sabermetrics, just trying to explain the source of the annoyance, that he brought up annoying questions that were a bit naive but in a totally arrogant know-it-all way. i'm sure you can make your own poker analogy. it's a waste of everyone's time for anyone here to try to argue against Steve's claims, because that's not really the point.

[Jordan Olsommer]

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they're underperforming this year because their hitters are underperforming reasonable projections of their performance. you can have good ideas on how to build a team, not overpaying for overvalued skills and whatever else, but still your players have to perform. and when your best player plays like crap for 2 months, your record will suffer.

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Levitt posted a list of five AL teams' stats from 2000-2004, all of which were nearly indistinguishable and one of which were the stats of the Oakland A's. So it hardly seems to me to be just a 'bad run'

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Team.......HR.....AVG......OBP.....SLG......OPS... ....R.....SO.......BB
Team A...200...0.276...0.348...0.454...0.802...867...10 45...591
Team B...222...0.271....0.351...0.450...0.801...865...1 022...638
Team C...202...0.264...0.343...0.436...0.778...838...10 29...633
Team D...193...0.269...0.341...0.437....0.778...829...1 041...575
Team E...159...0.275....0.349..0.422....0.771...828...1 022...619

So two questions for baseball fans:

1) One of these five teams is Oakland. Which one?

2) When you compare these statistics, do you really feel comfortable suggesting that the reason that Oakland has been so incredibly successful can be attributed to the fact that they are following a different offensive strategy than other teams that have achieved roughly the same measure of success (as measured by runs generated)?

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but i already said that in my previous posts, and you still brought it up as if i hadn't. maybe you'll ask someone to address this a third time. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[ceczar]

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Levitt posted a list of five AL teams' stats from 2000-2004, all of which were nearly indistinguishable and one of which were the stats of the Oakland A's. So it hardly seems to me to be just a 'bad run'

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i think you're a bit confused here. they were really good from 2000-03. the fact that they had stats that were quite similar to other teams was supposed to be a point against OBP being a primary cause of their success. it wasn't supposed to be an example of their ineptitude. over the last X years Oakland has the most or second or third most wins in baseball, and the wins per dollar spent on payroll is what they are trying to be measured against. the whole point of moneyball was money. by taking money out of the chart levitt has constructed a strawman. when i saw that chart i was neither surprised nor interested. it was a misplaced attack.

this is what levitt says:

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When you compare these statistics, do you really feel comfortable suggesting that the reason that Oakland has been so incredibly successful can be attributed to the fact that they are following a different offensive strategy than other teams that have achieved roughly the same measure of success (as measured by runs generated)?

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i don't think anyone is claiming that. maybe the sportswriters who were reading about this stuff for the first time made that claim. the whole point of the story was the beane tried to go against conventional wisdom to find undervalued skills. the fact that high-obp, low BA players were undervalued was just one facet of that. but it's not at all obvious that a team which favors a certain skill would actually have more of that skill, because of payroll constraints.

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but i already said that in my previous posts, and you still brought it up as if i hadn't. maybe you'll ask someone to address this a third time

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i have tried to say this already. i wasn't trying to disprove levitt's claim. it's possible he's making a relevant claim. but the very way he (and you) talk about the book make his biases and background quite clear, yet he still presents his point in arrogant and all-knowing tone.

is it possible that there has become some sort of "conventional wisdom" within the sabermetric community that should be challenged further? of course. and levitt would love to be the guy who does just that. but it seems that his greatest advantage is in attacking fields or ideas with quantitative methods where they have not been used before, He thus can uncover new relationships, etc and is able to make contributions even though he doesn't have a real background in the field in question. but he will have trouble doing that with baseball, as too many people have already been doing just that for many years.

criticizing moneyball and beane is the way that conventional people criticize sabermetrics in general. if he had something real to add, he would realize that his problem is not with beane but Lewis for his sensationalistic writing, or he would pick a specific issue that has reached conventional wisdom status among the stat community and show why it's wrong.

[DesertCat]

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Levitt posted a list of five AL teams' stats from 2000-2004, all of which were nearly indistinguishable and one of which were the stats of the Oakland A's. So it hardly seems to me to be just a 'bad run'

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You (and Levitt originally, until he backed off when shown his absurdity) are missing the most important point about his table of stats. The A's were not only below below the league median payroll, but all of the rest of the AL West was above it.

Payroll (2000-2004)
Texas $422M
Seattle $383M
Anaheim $339M
Median MLB $327M
Oakland $215M

Oakland trailed the average MLB team by $100M ($20M per year) in payroll during this stretch. Oakland's average yearly payroll was $43M, their competition in the AL West (where they play most of their games) averaged $76M, almost double! Oakland's competition had one WS winner, one team that won 116 regular season games, and multiple 100 win seasons during this stretch.

What Levitt actually demonstrated is that Moneyball's core contention is correct, that Billy Beane is doing something very special. To have similar offensive performance to teams outspending you almost 2-1 is amazing.

Oakland's wins per dollar of salary is outstanding. Minnesota does almost as well, but in a division that's been devoid of any good teams.

As far as your other comments. Moneyball is a fun book, but it's a mishmash of anecodotes and old, well known sabremetric principles. It describes "market inefficiencies" that were discovered and debated in the 80's and 90's. Billy Beane isn't telling anyone what inefficiencies still exist that Oakland exploits, if any. Due to the number of teams hiring sabremetric analysts, the market may be too efficient now. Oakland may not have much of an edge going forward.

As far as this years team goes, it's horribly underperformed on offense. Levitt and others predicted it would fail on defense, because Beane traded his top pitchers. But that's not true, their pitching has actually been close to average, and looks to get much better as the new young pitchers mature.

And if you've followed them this week, you can see that the offense has finally come around. It may be too late for them to make a run, given their young pitching staff, but they will clearly score more for the remainder of the year. All of their key offensive players are near their primes and have career OPS's 15-20% higher than their 2005 performance to date, i.e. in poker lingo they've been running cold.

And Levitt has admitted in his arrogant backhand manner to making most of the mistakes I've detailed here, but he still acts like an abnoxious tool.