THT: The triumph of Moneyball

We’re not throwing chairs here!  Good stuff from Pizza Cutter.

One of the oft-parroted (and oft-misunderstood) lessons of Moneyball was that on-base percentage (OBP) was the statistic by which to rate a player. In fact, Moneyball made the case that the A’s success was built on an understanding that OBP had two properties. It was a more effective way than batting average to rate players, and OBP was inefficiently priced in the free agency market. Detractors charged that chicks dig the long ball, but nerds dig the walk. But something interesting happened. A few more teams publicly embraced Sabermetrics within their front offices, with a few hiring well-known Sabermetricians to be in-house stat-heads. While this wasn’t a majority of teams, it was a notable minority. Still, traditionalists scoffed and wondered why none of these teams (meaning Oakland) had yet won a World Series.

Did Moneyball really have an effect outside of Oakland and the handful of teams that embraced Sabermetrics in the following years? Were the lessons of Moneyball taken to heart league-wide? The surprising answer is “Yes, and in a much more powerful way than you might expect.” The way to tell whether a man believes something is if he’s willing to “put his money where his mouth is.” In baseball, that’s rather literal. Teams buy the service of players in a (mostly) open market. How much money they are willing to commit to a player tells a lot about what they think of him. And what drives those salaries tells a lot about what the market as a whole thinks about what makes a player valuable.

I took 11 years worth of data, 1997-2007, which corresponds to five years before the release of Moneyball in 2002 to five years after. What I wanted to find was what statistics appeared to be driving the salary market during those years. I selected all hitters who had more than six years of MLB service (as dated from their debut year) during the season in question. This weeds out the players who under the new labor contract were in the “slave labor” years of their careers, prior to when they could file for free agency. (The old agreement didn’t have the same structure, but the nice thing about six years in the majors is that it makes everyone in the study a well-known quantity.)