Will the Real Billy Beane Please Stand Up!?

My contention is that the secret to Oakland’s success has little to do with the things described in Moneyball, such as the emphasis on finding the skills in baseball that are good at producing runs, but not properly valued by the market.

Billy Beane’s devotees (who have been quite vocal in response to my past postings) would have you think that the way Oakland’s offense generate runs is very different from the way other teams generate runs. As usual, my view is that we should let the data speak. I have assembled the average yearly offensive statistics for five American League teams over the period 2000-2004. The statistics are as follows:

Team…….HR…..AVG……OBP…..SLG……OPS…….R…..SO…….BB
Team A…200…0.276…0.348…0.454…0.802…867…1045…591
Team B…222…0.271….0.351…0.450…0.801…865…1022…638
Team C…202…0.264…0.343…0.436…0.778…838…1029…633
Team D…193…0.269…0.341…0.437….0.778…829…1041…575
Team E…159…0.275….0.349..0.422….0.771…828…1022…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)?

The fact is that all of these teams are generating runs in almost exactly the same way. Oakland has been successful because they have great pitchers and because they have had good hitters (who look a whole lot like the good hitters on other good teams). Billy Beane may have done it with a smaller budget, but that is not the point that is in contention. Lot’s of general managers do well with small budgets and don’t get best-selling books written about them. The story in Moneyball was how Billy Beane did it, and that story just isn’t an important part of the true explanation when it comes to generating runs.