Moneyball

"When we started, our philosophy was born out of necessity. The A’s were a team with very few resources. We didn’t have access to players who were obviously great ... We couldn’t afford those types of players. So we had to figure out a way of cobbling together players into a team that might be competitive. We started looking into various ways of analyzing players and trying to find where the value was. If you had told me 15 years ago that television broadcasts would have OPS on them, I would’ve said there’s no way!"

​​​​​​​Paul DePodesta, Nautilus

"The first Moneyball revolution would be finding undervalued talent that's because the market at the time wasn't compensating correctly for on-base percentage and it was giving inflated salaries to RBI [Runs Batted In] or pitcher ERA (Earned Run Average)."

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​Katie Krall, Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University and member of SABR Analytics Curriculum Committee, student conducted interview

"Hiring my assistant at the time, assistant general Paul DePodesta, normally wasn’t the type of front office executive that teams hired he was a Harvard economics major, really smart guy who normally guys with that skill set in that college went Wall Street or went to work somewhere else and then went to business school. In some sense hiring of Paul had a big impact on where the sport ended up going as much as anything."

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Billy Beane, former general manager of the Oakland Athletics that led the Moneyball era, student conducted interview

"As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. ("Bud") Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A's success "an aberration," but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how'd they do it? What was their secret? How did the second poorest team in baseball, opposing ever greater mountains of cash, stand even the faintest chance of success, much less the ability to win more regular season games than all but one of the other twenty-nine teams?"

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​Moneyball, Michael Lewis

"In effect, the A’s were able to purchase a successful team less expensively by focusing on players with a higher on-base percentage, chiefly players who excelled at receiving walks. ... A team of disciplined hitters is rewarded in several ways. More walks occur, raising on-base percentage." 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​Jahn K. Hakes and Raymond D. Sauer, An Economic Evaluation of the Moneyball Hypothesis 

"Since 2002, sabermetrics has changed the way baseball teams are constructed, pushing away old techniques of assessing talents through eye tests and intuition. Sabermetrics and the Moneyball experiment started the analytics movement by promoting two important but undervalued statistics, on-base percentage (OBP) and on-base plus slugging (OPS). OBP is the measure of how often a batter reaches base."

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Jacob Moorefield, The Oakland Athletics use of sabermetrics and the rise of big data analytics in business 

“[Paul DePodesta] emphasized the importance of on-base percentage and the value it had to a team. Simply put, if you led the league in on-base percentage as a team, you were probably going to lead the league in runs scored. ... The advantage we had from an A’s standpoint was that it was a skill and a statistic that wasn’t being properly valued. Teams weren’t paying for it because many of the players who had that skill didn’t necessarily pass the eye test. ... On-base percentage was a great example of displaying the skill of a baseball player, not necessarily pure athleticism.”

​​​​​​​Billy Beane, former general manager of the Oakland Athletics that led the Moneyball era, student conducted interview

"The Oakland A’s approach was based on the work of Bill James (Pythagorean Winning Percentage). James’ formula for expected wins, which is based on runs scored and runs allowed, formed the basis for Beane’s roster construction.

​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​Michael de la Maza, Runs, Walks, and Predictive Models: The Sports Analytics Behind the 2002 Oakland A's Moneyball

"Oakland A’s success in fielding great teams with low salaries comes from understanding that walks are underrated, and stolen bases overrated." ​​​​​​​

Steve Galbraith, By the Numbers

"What the 2002 MLB Draft is most remembered for is the way Billy Beane's Oakland A's, with a tight budget and seven first-round picks, applied their algorithms to what had been an entirely scout-oriented endeavor and used every single one of their first 17 picks on college players."

​​​​​​​An oral history of the 'Moneyball' Draft, 2017, MLB

"For more than a decade the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly. ... The raw disparities meant that only the rich teams could afford the best players. A poor team could afford only the maimed and the inept, and was almost certain to fail. Or so argued the people who ran baseball." ​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​Moneyball, Michael Lewis

“Even more of a big-data buzzword is ‘moneyball,’ originally the title of an acclaimed book [by Michael Lewis] and movie that recount how the Oakland Athletics baseball team succeeded, despite financial weakness, by embracing novel performance statistics as well as scouts’ judgments when making player decisions. ... moneyball then became a general label for an emphasis on measurable quantities over subjective opinions when making organizational decisions. At least in baseball, where hundreds of millions of dollars can depend on the performance of one individual, the teams that most rapidly and effectively blended these two disparate cultures have indeed experienced the better records.” ​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​John Thorn, The Medium

"At the time, there was a lot of fake controversy that was constructed about scouts vs. statheads debate and there were certain things in the media during the time … but I just really didn’t see that personally. There were a couple people who weren’t on board, but this idea that there was a fundamental conflict and people yelling at each other, I just really didn’t see that. I don’t think a lot of that really occurred and it was more gradual."

​​​​​​​Benjamin Baumer, former statistical analyst of the New York Mets between 2004-2012, student conducted interview

"Over the past three years the Oakland A's had paid about half a million dollars per win. The only other team in six figures was the Minnesota Twins, at $675,000 per win. The most profligate rich franchises—the Baltimore Orioles, for instance, or the Texas Rangers—paid nearly $3 million for each win, or more than six times what Oakland paid. Oakland seemed to be playing a different game than everyone else. In any ordinary industry the Oakland A's would have long since acquired most other baseball teams, and built an empire. But this was baseball, so they could only embarrass other, richer teams on the field, and leave it at that."

Michael Lewis, Moneyball