The Return of the Big Market Clubs

In 1977, Bill James released his Baseball Abstract, tearing down the house built on BA-HR-RBI and W-L records. He demonstrated empirically how inadequate those measures were in player evaluation, ushering in an era of discernible -- and exploitable -- market inefficiencies.

The exploding capabilities of the PC and the rise of the Internet multiplied the power of James's observations and allowed low-revenue baseball teams -- starting with the Oakland A's -- to compete with the big boys.

The Internet also paved the way for athletes to become famous wherever they played, allowing LeBron James in Cleveland, Stephen Curry in Oakland and Bryce Harper in Washington to emerge as global brands.

That significantly leveled the playing field and removed the nearly insurmountable advantage enjoyed in MLB by the Yankees, who had money, market and intangibles on their side in the 90s and 2000s. They won largely by throwing money at all the best players and managing them wisely.

Money Matters Again
That formula doesn't work anymore, but a new one does. The Yankees still have the largest market and the most money, as do the Dodgers and Cubs in the NL. Instead of investing in free agents, they have invested in the best baseball operations people, in player development and in the secret formula that small market teams were riding to success -- statistical analysis.

Forty years after Bill James threw a hand grenade into baseball's intelligentsia, his wisdom is finally received in total. The big market clubs are taking their reduced advantage in disposable income and leveraging it to raise the best young players. 

Investing in Management Rather Than Labor
Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez Greg Bird, Luis Severino and Aaron Hicks are not an accident or serendipity. They are products of  a well-capitalized player development plan. They teach Baby Bombers to play smart defense, become students of the game, learn patience at the plate, stay even-keeled when behind, and so on.

The fleecing of the White Sox to procure the services of Tommy Kahnle, David Robertson and Todd Frazier was not simply good fortune. Top dollar buys the best front office too. Brian Cashman has done this before in his career, such as when he stole Bobby Abreu from the Phillies for Cory Lidle in 2006. Abreu added 7 WAR to their playoff-run efforts in a little more than two seasons.

The Dodgers have used smart analytics and the power of the purse to build the deepest team in baseball, one that delivers quality well beyond the 25-man roster. So when L.A. suffered a string of injuries this season, a wily front office employed the disabled list to stash pitchers between starts to stretch the roster and then dipped into a pungent minor league system to promote MLB-ready replacements.

And so here we are, back to the 70s when NY and LA dominated the World Series. 

It's Could Be Horrible for the Game
It could be horrible for the game that a few big market clubs make regular playoff visits because it's could be horrible for fans in Cleveland and Milwaukee and Minneapolis and, well, almost everywhere else. It was boring, frankly, to see the same teams win every year, unless you were fans of those teams.

Watching the Yankees ascend within a game of the World Series and knowing that they will soon sign Bryce Harper and a host of other young free agents and dominate the American League again makes me miserable. It should make you miserable too unless you happen to be a Yankee fan. 

But it's the new reality. Now that the playing field has returned to level with respect to intelligence, money matters again.

6,930,001

The post-MVP vote storm has subsided and few minds have been expanded. Miguel Cabrera, a better MVP candidate than everyone in the American League -- by Prince Fielder's waistline -- except for Mike Trout, won the award. 

There are two simple conclusions to draw: 

1. The optimist's: a player with an MVP-quality season was so honored. The result was far from the travesty sometimes reported.
2. And the pessimist's: the MVP didn't get the hardware. The fight for knowledge is incomplete.

The "traditionalists" who focused on the Triple Crown and a playoff berth, previously debunked here and so many elsewheres that a Google search of Mike Trout MVP yields 6,930,0000 returns, have attempted to demonstrate that 59 is more than 76. (Their respective offensive runs against replacement.) That dog won't hunt, but if you don't hunt, and you've never had a dog, it's hard to understand. To the rest of us, the argument is transparently false.

On the other hand, 59 is more than 53 and 49 and every other number in the league. So there's that.

Cry not for Mike Trout. He's 21. He'd be well-advised to lease a gigantic trophy case. 

As for the writers and their fellow travelers, hey, it's only been 33 years since Bill James's first Baseball Abstract. Give them time to adjust.

Thirty-five Years and Counting

There's a scene in Moneyball when Brad Pitt, playing Oakland GM Billy Beane, tells A's players that they should not bunt, and if the other team bunts they should just pick up the ball and throw to second for the out. "If your enemy is making mistakes, don't interrupt him," Beane says.

"I always wondered about that," exclaimed the sweet, blond wife who brings a book to the ballpark, on those rare occasions when she accompanies me to one. "Why do teams purposely make an out?"

And with that, my wife leaped over thousands of professional sportswriters and sports talk show hosts who are still thinking and talking about the game as if it were 1923. Simply by dint of watching this flawed and sometimes apocryphal movie, millions of Americans will know more about baseball than, say Mike Greenberg and Mike Golick, hosts of the most popular national sports radio show, or a Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote an article two years ago for my local paper about the struggles of Jeff Francoeur without ever mentioning walks or on base percentage.

Now that the calendar has flipped, we've moved another year clear of 1977, the year Bill James first published his Baseball Abstract debunking many of the myths that no longer permeate Major League Baseball's backrooms but remain hallmarks of baseball reportage. Writers, announcers and fans who still exalt batting average and RBIs, pitching wins and saves, chemistry and clutch hitting are now 35 years behind the times, and counting.

They are the equivalent of a political reporter who speculates who's going to face President Carter in the next election. (It couldn't have been Sarah Palin; she started junior high school that year.) They are the Catholic Church condemning Copernicus's (and then Galileo's) proof of heliocentrism, before finally acknowledging its truth more than 300 years later. They are my neighbors in South Carolina who still can't bring themselves, 151 years later, to recognize that the Civil War was fought over slavery. The people charged with informing us about baseball know less about the soul of the game than my thoroughly apathetic bride.

I've noted before that the demonizing of scouts and dismissal of defensive value are unforgivably narrow-minded turns in the book and movie. And I've questioned -- just a few posts ago -- Billy Beane's endless rebuilding for a nebulous future. But those who continue to deny the revolution in baseball analysis are on the wrong side of history. Even my wife can tell them that.

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