As if blogging wasn't nerdy enough, I also post on baseball message boards. Someone made a post about Moneyball, and I decided to respond (long and boringly) to one guy. I'll put the excerpts of his post in bold.
-While most of Sabermetric concepts are undoubtedly applicable longitudinally, and over the course of a 162 game season, when you get inside of a short series, I personally don't feel the concepts translate universally. In fact, and I'm not sure if it's in the book or Beane was just quoted as saying it once, but he has said that he can almost guarantee a playoff birth, but he can't promise anything once the team gets there.
They mention it in the book, with Beane saying that luck and pitching pretty much takes over in a short series (ie: the playoffs). In fact, even though his A's lost the series that year, they had a higher runs scored average than during their regular season. The problem was their pitching gave up way more runs than their season average. The actually mathematically quantified the importance of luck during games (a bad hop, a botched play, a ball falling just out of glove's reach, etc). Over the course of a 162 games, luck will balance itself out. Look at last year's Yankees for an example. Started off with a horrible record, yet they were scoring a ton more runs than they gave up. The reason was they were losing a bunch of 1 and 2 run games in large part due to their shoddy bullpen and bad luck. Eventually they went on a tear because the pendulum swung back the other way. For a look at the opposite, check out the O's being in first place back in 2005 (forgive me if I got the year wrong) being in first place for half the season. Their run differential was almost 1-1 with them giving up nearly as many runs as they scored. This eventually came back to bite them on the butts. Same thing happened to the Nationals that year. Last year's Diamonbacks are the rare exception to the case. There usually isn't enough time for this phenomenon to take place during the playoffs.
-Also, it is a misnomer that Batting Average should be replaced by OBP... When was the last time you saw someone score from second on a walk? OPS does somewhat fill this void, though.
The book actually proves the value of OBP over OPS when looking at it mathematically. OPS inaccurately assumes that OBP and Slugging % are on equal footing and therefore can be mashed together. This assumption is wrong. If you have a 1.000 OBP, the maximum amount of runs you can score is infinite because you never make any outs. You're ALWAYS on base. Your maximum run total with a 1.000 slugging % is not infinite because your highest SLG % is 4.000. The book makes the case that judging on this analysis, the argument can be made that OBP is 3 times more valuable than SLG % when evaluating a player's offensive prowess.
As a batter, other than maybe a homer, getting on base is the most important thing you can do because you're not making an out. Billy Beane didn't like "speedsters" because if you're not stealing bases successfully 70% or higher, then you're being a detriment to your team. A low budget team like the A's can't afford to make unnecessary outs because they don't have the money to buy talent to cover up their mistakes (like the Yankees). It's why they hated the sacrifice bunt, because even though you're moving a player over one base you're creating an out when you could be trying to draw a walk or even get a hit.
Either way, I don't know why I typed all of that. No one's reading this. So let me just say: I invented childhood obesity to thin out the population and create hilarity. Success.
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