True Blue L.A.: Sabermetrics Are Dead

Bring out your dead!
[BRARP]
Bring out your dead!
[BRARP]

The problem is that there’s too much information out there now. 10 years ago if you wanted to find something like expected BABIP you would have to hire and independent stat provider and do all the calculations around it yourself. Now, any jerk with a blog can go to The Hardball Times, plug four numbers into a spreadsheet and get an answer in seconds for free. Want to know the league leader in line drives allowed last year? Give Baseball Prospectus 30 bucks and find out the answer. This has lead to some great things. People out there can take this information, produce new and interesting studies, and give it away all for free. But when you can get all of this for the cost of a Baseball Prospectus subscription and a couple of books, why bother hiring someone to do the same thing?

If you consider someone like me a replacement level stats guy, how many more wins can you get by paying someone several hundred thousand dollars a year to do the same thing? You might have access to better defensive models, or better projection systems, but how much better? How many wins can you get out of being able to rate defense five percent better than anyone else? I don’t know the exact answer, but it’s certainly is a lot less than the advantage you could get back when the other teams didn’t understand that on base percentage leads to run scoring. Investing in statistical research these days just seems like a case of diminishing returns. Sure by hiring the best and the brightest stat guys, you can get something of an edge, but it’s a lot of effort for what won’t result in a huge advantage.

...Sabermetrics became too effective own good. Now that everyone is doing it, any big advantages you could have gained from it are gone. If the message a team took away from Moneyball is that “stat based analysis is the one true way” then your team end up becoming just as irrelevant as Billy Beane thought his scouting department was. But that wasn’t the point of Moneyball. The real lesson to be learned was “think different”. The teams that continue to look for new ways to evaluate players are the ones that will continue to thrive in the end.