Callis says the Dodgers out-drafted the Oakland A's, despite what Moneyball says.
Paul DePodesta
Aaron Schatz: “this league-wide rush to statistical analysis has created a problem for those optimistic that sabermetrics would have a leveling effect: Rich teams are discovering that they can play the sabermetric game, too. In the short-term, this is actually worsening the gap between some rich and poor teams, as rich teams with sabermetric approaches extend their advantage over poor teams without them. And, in the long-term, once everyone is using sabermetrics, every team will correctly value players, and there won't be any more inefficiencies to exploit. Suddenly major league baseball will be right back where it started: With the richest teams buying up the best players, and the poorer teams settling for the dregs.”
A vignette in Moneyball (p. 38 for those who have their copy handy) shows that this was already predicted.
"This is a cutting-edge approach we're taking this year," says Eric [Kubota], whose job, it is increasingly clear, is to stand between Billy [Beane] and the old scouts, and reconcile the one to the other. "Five years from now everyone might be doing it this way."
"I hope not," says Paul. He doesn't mean it in the way that the old scouts would like him to mean it.
Schatz goes on to say that Paul DePodesta, because he has “more resources to maximize” in Los Angeles although more resources also means more pressure to succeed. At one point in the book—and rather than say it was DePodesta, I would appreciate someone reminding me who said it, because there is no index to the book (!) and I couldn't flag down the passage—but one of the key managers of the A's is on record as saying that because salaries are low, expectations are low. If they failed in their experiments, then they can't be blamed because they didn't have much to begin with anyway. The A's correctly expected other people to expect them to lose more games than they won, which placed them in a situation where if the expectations weren't met, then that means they were doing something right. The Dodgers are playing in a big media market (not as big as New York or Chicago, but big), and expectations are high. (Some believe that the high expectations might be pretty close to realistic now that the Dodgers are making good moves even if one ignores the DePodesta hiring.)
There is more disagreement with the Schatz article: JC says that Scatz gets sabermetrics and its signficance wrong. Baseball Musings says there are multiple ways to win in baseball and that Moneyball is about finding undervalued players, and when the undervalued players become overvalued, others will step in and also be undervalued. In other words, there will always be inefficiencies: since the location of inefficiencies changes, the trick is to find out where they are.
So in other words: blah blah blah Moneyball blah blah Paul DePodesta blah blah blah Billy Beane etc.
Peter Merholz: “As DePodesta points out, he had an advantage over people immersed in baseball because he knew "absolutely nothing" about it. He could approach baseball with a fresh pair of eyes, and see that the way it was valued didn't really make sense.”
After a seminar on technical writing and how it related to marketing (and vice versa), I approached one of the speakers, and my only goal was to introduce myself as the administrator of Vancouver Webloggers, to put a face to the site and also since I had asked him, during question time, about how weblogs could be used in helping communicate between and among the technical writing and the marketing department. He wondered what drew me to the seminar, and my response was that it was just to see whether technical writing was a career worth pursuing. After that, I mumbled something about being "unencumbered by experience", since in the formal sense of the word experience, it's true. (I've done technical writing, if that's what you can call it, on my computer technology weblog, so at least I have evidence of knowledge and writing ability; I leave it up to the reader to decide whether that evidence is good evidence.) As Peter notes, Paul DePodesta, once the assistant general manager of the Oakland athletics, was also says he knew "absolutely nothing". While it's true that he was going in without being a baseball insider, he still had the experience of college, and had to convince people that the things he did while in college related to the positions he applied for. That's why I've been busying myself with putting some of my college papers online, because there are a few that I'm really proud of, and they can add to an already existing writing portfolio, which at the moment consists of weblogs.
Using the phrase "unencumbered by experience" was more an attempt to show that wasn't full of myself and that I have a sense of humour about something that people usually whine about. The guy I talked to told me I should send him my resume, which actually surprised me a little, since that wasn't my goal when I went up to talk to him. I'm all about the weak ties these days, and every bit helps. When I read Betsy Devine's tips for getting hired by an Alpha, I initially thought she was saying "you must be an Alpha in order to get hired by an Alpha". But getting hired by an Alpha means (among other things, surely) not merely making a good first impression but making good first impressions to as many people as possible and then following up on them. The people who are not only smart but have an ability to learn something quickly—who may or may not be unencumbered by experience—seem to be prized over the ones who are experienced in something but can't learn or adapt to a new situation. (I happen think that while there's truth to that, a lot of it is hype, and having experience matters a great deal more that people say it does.)
DePodesta did well by not only learning the requirements for a new position very quickly but also by figuring out that the way things were being done were, while on the surface, successful, had many problems in the system that needed attention. He joined the A's because he saw it as a startup as compared to the Indians, and therefore the A's organization had a better chance of changing direction, since if they had another losing season, at least he wouldn't be criticized for it happening after the type of success that the Indians were having. But saying that DePodesta knew "absolutely nothing", or that he was unencumbered by experience would be an exaggeration. He's "merely" a very smart guy who not only knows how to learn fast, but knows where the system can be improved to benefit the organization he's working for. And how much more can you ask these days?
Oakland Athletics' Assistant General Manager Paul DePodesta: “I was in Las Vegas for a weekend playing blackjack. A person at the table to my right had 17 and said they wanted a hit. The whole table stopped and even the dealer asked if he was sure he wanted a hit. Finally he said he wanted a hit. The dealer deals the card and of course it was a four. What did the dealer say? “Nice hit.” But I'm thinking, you're kidding me. It was a terrible hit. Even though it ended up working out, it wasn't a good decision.”
He doesn't explicitly connect the dots, but in the speech DePodesta talks about "being the house", in that an organization needs to figure out the probabilities that a certain way of doing business will be successful. In the annecdote, he seems to be suggesting that it is in the best interests of the house to not only know the probabilities, but to encourage (or at least not discourage) competitors' view that the way they are doing things is the correct way when in reality the probabilities of success are low.
Management by Baseball has more detailed coverage of the speech, and has promised more in the near future.
