Blue Jay Moneyball Players

The Brewers were looking for starting pitching (an area they were weak in) and were trading prospects for starters. They essentially emptied the farm for starting pitching by acquiring Greinke and Marcum.

I think also, that Lawrie was blocked position wise in Milwaukee. They already had Weeks at 2B, McGehee at 3B (although, looking back now, McGehee is replaceable, but at the start of the season, he was their guy at 3B), Hart in RF, and Braun in LF. There really wasn’t a position for him, unless they thought he could play CF or moved him or someone else to 1B when Fielder leaves. They had the position players, they needed the starter, therefore Marcum for Lawrie. Good starting pitching is always hard to get and you have to give up quality prospects to get it. Why not trade a blocked prospect for a good starter?

While I agree Yunel for Gonzalez was an awesome trade last year, after a year and a half, I think I see why some of the Braves may not have liked him.

I say this with all due respect and affection for his talent and his performance, but I often feel like he acts like a whiny little b-word a lot of the time. It seems like half of the games I watch, he’s throwing a hissy fit over something or other. Some of them may be justified, and it doesn’t bother me at all because he’s a great player (I’d say top 4 or 5 SS in the AL), but I could see why that might rub coaches and teammates the wrong way.

On the other hand, the Jays seem like a team where everyone is allowed to just be themselves instead of having to fit into a certain mold, which is probably the point of the whole post.

You summed up the most important part of the whole Moneyball discussion in the first 2 sentences of your seventh paragraph (note that I don’t know how to do block quotes and am in too much of a rush to learn now):

The point of Moneyball wasn’t ‘the way to win is to sign slow, fat guys’. It was that to compete with less money you have to go about it differently.

The Moneyball A’s were successful first and foremost because of skill. They hired smart guys who could see through noise and rhetoric and figure out which players actually contributed to a team’s wins instead of people just thinking they did. But they were also somewhat lucky in that the market for baseball players was SO inefficient that the statistic that correlated most with wins was also extremely undervalued. If baseball people hadn’t been so stodgy up until the late 90’s and teams had realized the value of OBP prior to the free agency era, it’s possible that no small market team like the A’s would have been able to find a significant enough inefficiency to compete as well as they did.

Its the different processes that AA has brought to life, as well as the different aspects within them.

1) Obviously the players who have been de-valued in other locations. As in any M&A deal, you try not to pay for the “synergies” acquired. So we gave up the talent the value of the player at their respective locations.

He’s done this in so many different ways. Get rid of big salaries (Vernon), Get Younger (Marcum, A-Gon), and try to exploit the value difference we have for certain pieces (Relievers for Rasmus), and ultimately consolidate our talent into individuals instead of groups.

2) Draft picks. Learned from the Rays, draft picks have been the recent Moneyball-esque market in-efficiency.

He’s also done this in more than one way.

Acquire more (through letting type A/type B players walk), Pay them more (take advantage of the market inefficiency of “signability”), and buy them (Miguel Olivo).

3) I saw Moneyball about 2 weeks ago at the pre-screening. I’ve always been a huge fan of Sorkin (watching The West Wing series for the third time), and I actually didn’t know he wrote it, until I realized it about 15 minutes in. But I’d say it doesn’t fail at what its trying to show, and it has enough for the non-baseball and baseball fan to be happy IMO.

Good points all.

Plus what AA did with the draft. I’m sure we could have used guys like Snakeface and even KG in the BP this year, but I like the extra picks in what is supposed to be a really deep draft.

Landing 4-6 probable (if not for circumstances like injuries or commitment to school, etc) 1st round draft picks in one year is a pretty good haul.

Another huge factor is that since AA has taken over, the Jays have not been in “Win Now” mode. They have never characterized the process as a rebuild and they have fielded competetive teams the past two seasons, but they can afford to take risks on players because they have room on the 40 man roster. Once you decide to go for it, you can’t afford to trade for guys who are underperforming. This is not to take credit away from AA. In fact, both he and Beeston deserve credit for selling ownership on a slow, patient approach to sustainable winning.

I’ve never liked the term ‘market inefficiencies’ to wrap up Moneyball. Anyone who’s successful in a market where they lack resources to compete head to head does so by identifying undervalued elements and capitalizing on that fact. And as the market catches up, it means evolving your patterns to continue to identify those opportunities as they exist.

If anything separates the approach in ‘Moneyball’, it’s the fact that Beane was willing to use completely different tools in order to identify those undervalued elements and see the corresponding return. So in my mind, ‘Moneyball’ is about tools and methodologies, and which teams are developing new ways to evaluate, collect and develop talent to deliver to their big league club.