Amazin' Avenue Book Club: Moneyball, Chapter Ten

The beautiful thing about the Bradford story was how his father had had a stroke, and could not raise his arm above his shoulder. Still, his father would go out and play catch with his son, throwing the ball back to Chad Bradford with the side arm motion… Which was eventually emulated by his son.

Oliver wasn’t as good during the year he pitched for the Mets as I’d originally thought, after considering his inflated 1.44 HR/9 rate (although granted his HR/FB was disproportionately high) and the aid of a .242 BABIP. Bradford had the far better year, with a better K/BB ratio and an eye-catching 0.15 HR/9. From a pure statistical standpoint, if you were to ask me after 2006 which one I would rather keep if I could only have one, Bradford, being four years younger and more effective at that time, would have been a no-brainer. However, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that Bradford was only able to maintain his ultra-low HR rate for one more season before things started to catch up to him. He last appeared in the bigs in 2009, and I’m assuming he started battling injuries as well sometime after leaving the Mets. Looking back at Oliver though, that HR/9 rate has come down every year since he left the Mets, and if he decides to pitch in 2012, he’ll probably be the best lefty reliever available in free agency this offseason. Statistically, I don’t think there’s any way we could have foreseen based on his 2006 performance what Oliver would accomplish from 2007-present. Of course Omar, in his infinite wisdom, wound up passing on both of these guys, which is cool I guess since the 2007 NL East title was as good as in the bag. Ouch.

2. Oliver. Bradford seemed primed to make a fair amount of money so I didn’t have a problem of letting him go in theory.
3. 50/50.
4. It’s funny that the guy who was the slam-dunk #2 overall pick winded up having the most troubles. There’s a traditionalist/scouting joke to be made here.

By 2005, only Zito was still there and they still won 88 games that season and 93 in 2006. Even in 2004 when they won 91 games, Mulder and Zito basically had league average ERA’s.

2 out of 5 ain't bad

I had more success explaining to my dog.

I was introduced to DIPS when it appeared on BPro, back in the day. My older brother was a math major at the time (now an actuary), and they used to look at this stuff in class. I was in high school when BPro first came out – it was basically a blog before their were blogs. It was nothing like it is now – it was a bunch of brilliant people arguing with each other all the time, and the stuff they were looking at hadnt been dissected to death yet. Half of the people into this stuff, including my brother and I, were just trying to get an edge in their roto leagues.

People bought in to a degree – it was an interesting data point – but the big counter argument was Gregg Maddux, who was a real hero to the stat crowd back then (kind of the opposite of now). Everyone knew that Maddux could control balls in play with his pitching mastery, so this theory couldnt be 100% true…. but it was true for mortal pitchers. That was conventional wisdom.

Voros McCracken would chat all day on the Baseball Primer forums – now BTF. The guy was a troll. Not like the AA trolls who are usually metsblog or wfan holdovers, McCracken was a brilliant guy, but he would flame the board constantly and get into personal fights every time anyone disagreed with something he said.

As for now, I use xfip as my main reference point, but I would love to see something that incorporates GB/FB/LD (its probably out there but I dont know).

The original BPro crew – Papas, Law, Huckabay, Chirs (not yet Christina) Kahrl, Jazayerli, even Sheehan and Davenport, man they were incredible writers. I used to look forward to those columns the way I now look forward to Posnanski. Havent been on BPro for years though, not since the likes of Will Carroll held it hostage.

To place a premium on velocity for its own sake was like placing a premium on a big vocabulary for its own sake.

“Here was this guy who was telling me that at least eighty percent of what baseball announcers told me was complete bullshit, and then explained very convincingly why it was.”

What happened next bolsters one’s faith in the American educational system: Voros McCracken set out to prove himself wrong.

“The problem with major league baseball,” (Voros) said, “is that it’s a self-populating institution. Knowledge is institutionalized. The people involved with baseball who aren’t players are ex-players. In their defense, their structure is not set up along corporate lines. They aren’t equipped to evaluate their own systems. They don’t have the mechanism to let in the good and get rid of the bad. They either keep everything or get rid of everything, and they rarely do the latter.”