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The Science of Baseball

$450 million, $426 million, and $270 million. All amounts spent on some of the biggest

names in professional sports within the last 5 years. Names like Patrick Mahomes, Mike Trout,

Connor McDavid, Aaron Judge, and Josh Allen are the first to come to mind. Every year an

absurd, almost unimaginable amount of money is spent by professional sports franchises on stars

and lesser-known players alike. While many of these contracts guarantee an amount of money

unfathomable to the regular person, it essentially becomes almost like Monopoly money:

difficult to fathom with dollar values so enormous. General managers of these teams look at and

consider massive amounts of information when making negotiation decisions. Information

including market prices, scouting reports, statistical output, and age all go into an attempt to

represent a player’s value in one dollar amount. These decisions and approximations are made

constantly across all sports and they are what lead to players earning $50, $45, and $40 million a

year. General managers and scouts have determined these players to be worth every cent of this

money. But what gives them this value? What stats do they look at and how heavily do they

weigh them? What factor plays the largest role when coming to this determination? All of these

are questions I have asked myself when seeing news of yet another record-breaking free agent

signing.

Flashback to a chilly October night in 2011. The crisp fall air brushes against my cheek

as I bound joyfully into a movie theater with my family following close behind. My parents

finally granted my brother and I our wish to see the new baseball movie Moneyball. The rich

smell of buttery popcorn and sweet chocolates filled the warm air. Our eyes were glued open as

the ending of the 2001 American League Divisional Series (ALDS) between the Yankees and

A’s pooped up on the big screen. The following 2 hours took us on a deep dive into the risks and

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innovations made by then Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, during the 2002 rebuild of

his team. Beane, along with assistant Paul DePodesta (Peter Brand in the film), took an

unconventional approach in his method of valuing players and it allowed him to find “hidden

gems”. I walked out of that theater with a new curiosity, a curiosity that has stuck with me ever

since. What is the right way to value professional athletes in their specific sports? Professional

sports franchises ask themselves this constantly and are perpetually changing their techniques

due to that. I wanted to research this process and understand how these sports are constantly

evolving hence my research question: Why are professional baseball franchises adopting

advanced analytical approaches to scouting, and to what degree will this impact the future of

their sport?

Baseball has a problem. To quote the movie, “there are rich teams and there are poor

teams, then there’s fifty feet of crap, then there’s [the Oakland A’s]” (Miller). MLB teams spend

vastly different amounts on their team depending on the market, the wealth of the owner, and the

willingness of that owner to spend his money. Commissioner of the league, Rob Manfred, even

admitted it; “We do have a disparity issue in the game on the revenue side and consequently on

the ability to spend on players” (Wagner). Big market teams such as the Boston Red Sox and

New York Yankees rake in huge amounts of revenue from ticket sales, concessions, etc. relative

to their smaller market counterparts. They then invest this money back into the players on the

field, buying up stars with lucrative contracts. James Wagner from the New York Times adds

extra context to this issue, saying “Most teams’ finances are not public, and M.L.B. is the only

one of the major North American men’s professional sports leagues without a hard salary cap”

(Wagner). We do not know exactly how much the teams have, and there is no salary cap to

inhibit spending and create some equity among the franchises. This creates an unfair game. A

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game where the poorer teams become feeder teams for the rich. In the opening scene of the film,

in between clips of the 2001 ALDS, a graphic pops up on the screen reading “New York

Yankees $114,457,768 vs. Oakland Athletics $39,722,689” (Miller). David vs. Goliath. Oakland

had to face a team that had a payroll three times the size of theirs. Baseball was not fair.

Billy Beane, an ex-professional baseball player himself and current general manager of

the A’s, just watched his team lose in the final game of that 2001 series. During that offseason,

the Athletics lost Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen, all crucial pieces of the

Oakland roster, in free agency to larger teams (“The Man”). Beane wanted to change up his

approach in a way that would allow him to compete with the teams with significantly deeper

pockets. In search of this revolutionary approach, Billy found Bill James.

Bill James was a security guard at a canning factory in Kansas. In the late 1970s, he

began to write some of his thoughts on a plethora of topics (Lockard). Eventually, the topics

narrowed to just one, baseball. James was enthralled with baseball and it consumed his thoughts.

In 1977 he published his first book, Baseball Abstract, where he dove into the statistics of

baseball and the stories they told. He would end up releasing a new Baseball Abstract annually

for the next 11 years (Lewis 65). James wanted to utilize statistics to objectively understand the

game of baseball and dispel the biases of the past. In 1859, Henry Chadwick created the modern

boxscore as we know it, the only issue being he was born in Great Britain and therefore the only

sport he had to reference was cricket (Lewis 69). Chadwick’s box score had some inherent flaws

in the way it recorded stats. James wanted to cut right through that, he wrote, “baseball statistics

are not pure accomplishments of men against other men, which is what we are in the habit of

seeing them as. They are accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances…

The many little injustices and misunderstandings embedded in the game’s records spawned

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exotic inefficiencies. Baseball strategies were often wrongheaded and baseball players were

systematically misunderstood” (Lewis 71). To counter these injustices, Bill looked for repeatable

formulas that could predict offensive output in order to determine which statistics were in fact

most valuable. He could then use this to get a more accurate picture of what is really happening

in the game. In one of his abstracts, regarding this topic James mentioned, “The fact that the

formulas work with the accuracy that they do is a way of saying there are essentially stable

relationships between batting average, home runs, walks, other offensive elements-and runs”

(Lewis 78). He found that baseball could be broken down systematically, far more precisely than

Chadwick had managed a century earlier.

Billy Beane read every Baseball Abstract that James had published and fully bought into

this concept. This was Billy’s approach that would help him compete against the wealthier

teams. What Beane was taking advantage of was the “old guard” of professional baseball. He

was challenging traditional wisdom that had been passed down from generation to generation

from Henry Chadwick’s time to 2002. The inherent injustices that Bill James had written about

that led people to overvalue statistics such as batting average and runs batted in (RBIs). Using

analytics allowed Billy and the Oakland A’s to cut through that “wisdom” and the biases in

scouting the “feel” of a prospect. This would allow them to find players that no one else valued

because of some perceived flaw, but in fact, provided immense value to the team. Billy could

draft or sign these players for incredibly cheap relative to other prospects and free agents, and get

the same performance value as those signed for much more money by the larger teams.

To get a different perspective on this evolution I interviewed Eric Kubota. Kubota was

the perfect man to speak to on this topic. He has decades of experience working in the Oakland

A’s front office and currently holds the position of Scouting Director for the club. Kubota was

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actually there in the 2002 season and played a major role when Billy Beane revolutionized how

talent is scouted in Major League Baseball. More than anyone, he has spent time perfecting the

merging of analytics and traditional scouting methods. He says that in 2002, every team was

most likely using stats in some form:

“More than anything we were probably more open minded to the data available to

us at that time. It would be disingenuous to say that other teams weren't looking at

the stats. If anything, Paul DePodesta was one of the first to really put that data

into a model to try and help us improve our odds in the draft. We are always

looking for incremental gains in success and this was just another way to do that.”

He hit on a very important note at the end. In an unfair game, these guys would try anything that

could get them the slightest little advantage. This was the way the A’s would top their win total

from 2001 to 2002. It would receive the name “moneyball”, just like the book. They would use a

statistical model that would give them an incremental advantage when scouting and signing

players. This saved Oakland money while simultaneously improving the on-field product. At the

end of the 2002 season, the A’s ended up spending a league-low $260,000 per win because of

this strategy (Miller). Embracing the analytics before others did gave the A’s a slight edge in

finding value where no one else saw it.

One might question if “moneyball” is applicable today. To be fair, the book was

published two decades ago with the film also being over 10 years old. Yet “moneyball” is not

antiquated, it is constantly reinventing itself with every new season. Kubota reinforced this point,

explaining, “When Moneyball came out, on base percentage (OBP) was felt to be undervalued.

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As more teams began to look at OBP, it was no longer undervalued and teams had to continue to

look elsewhere. This process will be never-ending as teams continue to scour new data sources to

find areas that are undervalued and able to be exploited.” To get a competitive edge, one must

never stop evolving. That is how “moneyball” has stayed relevant.

The art of using analytics to win baseball games, or sabermetrics as it came to be known,

created a whole new world of advanced stats employed by MLB teams. As teams searched for

new data sources that they could exploit, new statistics were found that are vastly more accurate

at describing a player’s true value. In recent years these stats have come to dominate professional

baseball. For hitters, OPS+ (On-Base Plus Slugging Plus) and wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created

Plus) are the stats that have the most influence in front offices (Harris). Similarly, for pitchers,

the popular stats that have popped up recently are FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and

ERA+ (Earned Runs Allowed Plus) (Perry). On a whole, teams are trying to maximize their

players’ WAR (Wins Above Replacement) while minimizing their cost per win. Massive multi-

year contracts like the ones mentioned in the introduction are an attempt to compile these stats

and use them to buy wins. This may seem complicated, but it is just the development of the

methods created in the early 2000s. As Lou Capetta of Bleacher Report puts it, “There are so

many statistics out there now, some of them very complicated that it's simply not fair to just

totally disregard the validity of sabermetrics as a whole. On the contrary, many of these stats

have changed the way players are evaluated for the better and the way the game as a whole is

evaluated as well” (Cappetta). Baseball is an ever-evolving sport and because of that, we will

continue to see it refined down to a perfect science.

Even though stats have rapidly gained influence across baseball, that does not make the

traditional scout obsolete. In his article for Bleacher Report, Capetta goes on to mention, “While

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sabermetrics have become a vital part of the game, it also can never totally take the place of the

good old-fashioned ways of evaluating talent. The ‘eye test’ is and always will be just as

important as any numbers in baseball” (Cappetta). Stats will never push the traditional scout out

of baseball, they can see human aspects of the game that do not appear in the numbers.

My second interviewee, Kevin Stanley, stressed this point. Stanley has been an area scout

for the Miami Marlins for over two decades. He has had the pleasure of scouting players such as

Miguel Cabrera and Christain Yelich, both All-Stars with serious Hall of Fame bids. He has a

lifetime of experience writing scouting reports and predicting players’ futures with his intuition

rather than a computer model. When asked if the traditional scout will become irrelevant with

baseball trending in an analytical direction, Stanley said, “Absolutely not. The smart teams will

always recognize the importance of what good scouts can bring to an organization.” This is just

to prove that even though teams are continuing to invest in their analytics departments, the

traditional aspect of scouting will always remain. The question is what is the ideal balance

between the two? That is what every MLB team is constantly asking itself.

This statistical revolution is not limited solely to baseball. The story of Moneyball

inspired general managers of multiple different sports to reevaluate what they value in players. A

great example of this is Brentford F.C. in England. The club came under new ownership in 2012,

with an invigorated focus on analytical scouting in the same style of the 2002 Oakland A’s.

Rasmus Ankersen, the team’s Co-Director of Football, told Bleacher Report in 2017, “For David

to beat Goliath, he needed to use a different weapon. If David had used the same weapon, he

would have lost the battle. You've got to find your weapons. That's what Brentford is about”

(Reed). Using this new approach, Brentford was promoted to the Premier League, the top tier of

English football, for the first time in club history. Additionally, Paul DePodesta, the man who

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implemented Beane’s vision in Oakland, took a job with the Cleveland Browns as their chief

strategy officer. He brought the “moneyball” mindset to the NFL. DePodesta started working for

the Browns in 2016 and since then they have turned a historically awful franchise around for the

better. They made the playoffs in 2020 for the first time in nearly two decades, thanks in part to

some key free agent signings inspired by DePodesta (“The Use of Moneyball”). The strategy of

finding an incremental edge using statistics is not owned by baseball. This mindset has been

sweeping its way across the entire world of sports since the book and film were published in the

early 2000s.

To what degree will this evolution impact the future of baseball? Well, we are already

seeing it in the way the game is played. Similar to basketball, baseball has had a revolution of

offense in the past decade. When Steph Curry entered the NBA and started draining three-

pointers at record levels, analysts began to realize that it was actually more efficient to attempt a

lot of threes per game. Now the rate of three-pointers attempted per game has skyrocketed across

the league. Baseball has its own three-pointer, the home run. Analysts realized that being able to

score a run in just a single swing was incredibly efficient. They encouraged their players to not

care about increasing strike out rates and swing for the fences regardless. J.D. Martinez, a

veteran of the MLB and a 5-time All-Star explained in an interview with Sports Illustrated, “Out

went ‘Swing down on the ball. Be short to the ball. Make contact.’ In came ‘Swing up at the ball

to match the plane of the pitch. Get the barrel in the zone early. Strikeouts are just another out’”

(Verducci). Offense is not the only place where changes are happening. Things are changing on

the defensive side of the ball as well. The shift has remodeled what a modern MLB defense looks

like. Rather than sitting in the traditional positions, teams have begun moving their fielders to be

in spots where the batter is statistically more likely to hit it. Yankees slugger Nick Swisher spoke

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on how frustrating it was to be on the wrong end of the shift in an interview with MLB.com:

“‘First, second, third game of the season, just leave Spring Training, you hit a couple of rockets

and next thing you know, they’re right at somebody,’” (Kelly). The shift is not an anomaly,

hitters across the league are dealing with this frustration regularly. Using sabermetrics,

statisticians have inspired rapid growth in the use of the shift: “In 2018, MLB teams combined to

deploy a defensive shift in more than 40,000 plate appearances, according to Baseball Info

Solutions, and that total jumped by more than 25,000 plate appearances in just a five-year span”

(Kelly). The game of baseball is tangibly changing as a direct result of analytics. It is hard to say

exactly how the game will evolve in the future due to analytics, but they will have a large impact

in some way or another. The way players are approaching the game is changing and the

attributes scouts look for in prospects are changing. That means with time it is inevitable that the

young stars entering the MLB ranks will be a different breed of ballplayer, one crafted from a

different era than the old guard.

Not everyone is excited about this never-ending evolution. In a conversation with MLB

commissioner Rob Manfred, an owner let his opinions on analytics be known: “[they are] an

arms race to nowhere” (Zucker). The context around this remark is unknown but his displeasure

is clear. He sees analytics and the newfound attention they have gotten as unnecessary, to say the

least. Later in the article, Manfred agreed with this sentiment saying, “‘Once everybody’s doing

it, that little margin that maybe you’re getting… I am sure that whatever that margin was at one

point in time-whatever it is today-it sure as heck is not worth the damage that was done to the

game over a period of time” (Zucker). Many see sabermetrics and the way it has changed

baseball as hurtful to the game. The growth of the three true outcomes (strikeouts, walks, and

home runs) has led to some of the lowest league-wide batting averages ever in 2020, 2021, and

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2022 (Zucker). This means some of the lowest number of balls in play and some of the least

entertaining baseball for the fans. To combat this, the MLB has implemented a ban on the infield

shift for the 2023 season (Passan). Teams have already begun to find loopholes they can exploit,

continuing the “whack-a-mole” cycle that has inspired so much criticism.

My path in baseball has been affected by this change at the very top. Coaches have told

me to adjust my swing to hit more balls in the air. This was an attempt to get me to hit more

home runs. It worked. From my sophomore season to my junior season the number of home runs

I hit doubled. Over the same two seasons, my strikeout rate jumped by nearly 20% and my

batting average dropped 16 points. Additionally, I have changed the way I play catcher to put

more emphasis on pitch framing and stealing strikes because analytics have shown this is where

most of the value a catcher provides comes from. This just goes to show that analytics are not

exclusive to the MLB, they are seeping into all levels of baseball. Everyone is curtailing their

game to be as appealing as possible to professional and college scouts. During the summer

between my junior and senior seasons, I traveled around the country to attend college showcases.

At each event, rather than taking notes on my swing or if I had quality at-bats, coaches measured

the exit velocity and launch angle. That’s it. My friends have shared similar stories from their

experiences going through youth baseball. Using statistics is more difficult at this level due to the

lack of sample size; at my high school, we play just 24 games for our entire season. However,

the changes that sabermetrics have created are extremely prevalent. All levels of baseball are

seeing these changes, not just the Major Leagues.

While some teams can afford to dish out hundreds of millions of dollars for big-name

stars, it is a reality that others cannot or just do not have the willingness to. This is where

analytics and “moneyball” come into play. By adopting analytics in scouting, poorer teams can

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gain the slightest edge over the big market franchises. This allows them to get undervalued

players and utilize their talents while the team can still afford them. In an unfair game, there will

always be this sort of cat-and-mouse game. Smaller teams always trying to be one step ahead of

the bigger teams in order to compete. As a result of that, advanced analytics are being adopted by

teams around the globe. As statistics become more advanced, inefficiencies will be spotted, and

exploited until everyone in the sport has shifted their methods. Baseball’s revolution has had an

impact on every professional sports league in the world while permanently changing the game of

baseball itself. It is a perpetual revolution; there is always a way to get incrementally better. The

science of baseball has brought about a new era of professional sports.

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