Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

DePodesta is Beane’s assistant general manager at the A’s. He is the one who really implements the system of sabermetrics. While Beane embraces it wholeheartedly, he doesn’t have the knowledge of statistics to fully utilize it. DePodesta, on the other hand, has no Major League Baseball experience but does have a degree in economics from Harvard University. Just out of college, he interned with the Cleveland Browns, where he met a couple of former Wall Street workers who were early adopters of the use of statistics in baseball. They had created a system called AVM that analyzed game data which they tried to sell to teams. DePodesta immediately saw the value of their methods.

When Beane hired him a couple of years later, he copied the AVM system to use with the A’s and became the numbers man and statistical guru to Beane. Whenever a statistic was needed to analyze a player, DePodesta was there with his computer. He helped determine which “no name” player would benefit the team. He also pushed for drafting more college players, unlike the baseball insiders and scouts who often favored players right out of high school. They used their instincts to spot the kind of player they felt had the skills and the potential to be molded into a major leaguer. DePodesta, on the other hand, wanted to see a track record provided by college ball. From those numbers, he could determine the statistics that he thought told the true story of their value. Beane agreed. He himself had been one of the flashy high school kids and from his own experience that players were unlikely to be as formed at that age as the insiders thought.

James is the person most responsible for the Oakland A’s approach to baseball described in the book, even though he was not affiliated with the team and his work was done a quarter century earlier. While he was working as a security guard for a canning factory in the 1970s, he began analyzing baseball statistics in his free time and putting out a yearly publication called Baseball Abstract in which he discussed his ideas. He concluded that much of the prevailing thought in professional baseball was off base and grounded in little evidence and lots of instinct. Even some of the statistics the baseball world did use he determined to be of little use or based on erroneous data.

In James’s view, such faulty information had the effect of rendering useless decisions based on it, and he thought that success could be much better predicted. He proposed alternative ways of evaluating teams and players based on data he had compiled and formulas he had devised, calling his system “sabermetrics.” Through the 1980s, he created a small but dedicated group of followers. Though he discontinued his Abstract in the late 1980s, his ideas hung around through fans and in small pockets of the league; they reached Billy Beane when he became assistant general manager of the A’s in the 1990s.