The Cubs Are The Anti-Moneyball Team. How Will You Change That, Tom Ricketts?

I also hope he does not feel the need to keep the coaching staff around for a new GM to fire….go ahead and clean house after the last game.

How unusual is it for a team to go an entire season without a grand slam

IMO, Moneyball is about identifying undervalued assets and maximizing value for your club. One tool for doing this is through statistical analysis.

Sabremetrics isn’t the answer, it’s just another way to figure out how valuable something is and what it costs to pay for it. Combine this with developmental staff, access to international prospects, and yes (the horror!) advanced scouts who know what skills to value and how to identify them and these are all parts of the equation.

The Chicago Cubs have been laughably deficient in ALL areas of developing a club for longterm success and have erroneously believed that a fat bank account can make up for those deficiencies.

That being said, strides have been made in the last few seasons and hopefully can continue to improve with a new, forward thinking GM.

The point is, the Cubs have been spectacular failures in the game of “moneyball” because they overpay for assets.

more runners on base = more runs, rocket surgery

Even if it’s not Beane, someone or some group with a new philosophy would be welcome. This is my understatement of the season, enjoy!

Moneyball is not the focus on OBP and walks.

It is not about employing analtyics.

“Moneyball” is about identifying market inefficiencies and taking advantage of them so that a small market team can compete using less money. Ignorance of the value of OBP is not longer a market inefficiency – that secret is out and that skill is now valued by the market.

The A’s still practice “moneyball” but they aren’t pursuing high-OBP guys anymore. They’re focusing on things like athleticism, defense, and health.

and argue that Moneyball is really about OBP+ISO (isolated slugging percentage, or SLG-Avg). For the most part, OPS fills in for that.

The Hendry-era Cubs have had some success, but failed painfully to capitalize on it. For the most part, the Cubs have been run like the big-spending teams Moneyball strategies aimed to beat by finding market inefficiencies. They are, in many ways, a cuddlier version of the 2000’s Mets.

Moneyball has seemed to = GET THE MONEY FROM YOUR FANS WITH HIGHER TICKET PRICES AND LOUSY RAINOUT POLICIES.

We need to work counts. Call it moneyball or smart baseball or playing the game the right way. In this new era of pitching domination, work the count. Get walks. Get good starting pitchers pitch counts up earlier in the game. Move runners. If that means Rudy is not on board, he has to go too.

This is a baseball philosophy that winning teams seem to do well. If you’re afraid to hit with two strikes, you shouldn’t play the game. I’m tired of hacking. I’m tired of not seeing hitters advance runners. This is not new. Baseball has seen this happen for over 100 years. It’s smart, winning baseball folks. Just because it got coined moneyball doesn’t mean Beane came up with something new. He just too new tools available to him to advance this thinking.

Last of all, this has to be taught from the draft to the MLB level. If you play for the Cubs, this is how we do it. This is how we win. You don’t need 18 million dollar contracts to play this way or guys with 5 year no trade clauses. You need 25 guys committed to playing winning baseball and have the pitching to match.

It sounds like a slow 133 minutes.

…seems to have a bit of success to it. I know, I know…$500 bleacher seats. C’mon guys…you gotta take one for the team every now and then. ; )

Theo Epstein has already shown that a big market team can have success using tactics similar to Beane. I wouldn’t call the Red Sox tactics moneyball per se but more of using saber-like tactics like concentrating on batters with high OBP and pitchers with a high strikeout to walk ration. The Cubs could be built in a similar model, if they choose to go that route.

Ricketts has decided to fix that by bringing back as many people responsible for that as possible.

In the half century I’ve been a Cubs fan, the various management regimes have always built teams around Wrigley Field, and the results have consistently proven that to be a big mistake. The conventional wisdom has always seemed to be to staff the roster with slow-footed sluggers to take advantage of Wrigley’s small dimensions. The main problem with that is that teams play half their games on the road, and with a few exceptions, Cubs corner outfielders have been eaten alive by spacious parks with a lot of ground to cover. To a lesser, but still significant, extent, the traditional power hitter strategy doesn’t even work that well in Wrigley because of all the days when the wind blows in. I’ve seen hundreds of potential home run balls die on the warning track through the years, and a lot of ball games lost because of it.

What I’d like to see the Cubs do is build a team that has solid defense, enough speed to cover ground in the large parks, and that balances power with players who can get on base and score by playing small ball when the wind is howling in. Speed never slumps, and good things tend to happen to teams whose lineups have more than one or two players who can routinely go from first to third on singles and score from first on doubles.

The difference between my BA and OBP in my player on MLB2k11 was only like .008 and I still drove in 280 runs, with 100+ Homers and almost 200 Runs. My average was high thats why I did so good. /sarcasm

It makes me laugh that Moneyball is a movie and that Billy Beane gets so much acclaim. A’s were good when……………………………………………….
they had Hudson, Mulder, Zito (when he was awesome). They had young hitting talent (’roided giambi, roided tejada, damon). Beane had good young talent, the got rid of it before it was expensive and bad (in the case of zito and mulder).

None of this stuff is real tough…get on base and get someone to knock him in. More importantly, have a great starting pitching staff (see giants 2010).

You lose me at Carlos Pena once again. Absolute horror of a player for $10 Milion, and as I’ve posted for months, he is not an offensive improvement over LaHair. Lahair can hit lefites at least! Yes, he so nice and well read and “nice clubhouse leader” but he’s not a productive hitter. Now if he could lead off and steal 40-50 bases with that ONB, that’s fine. But he is a middle of the order NOTHING as far as productivity. I call the Pena love a typical Cub fan error of judgement.

You want a team………have Halladay, Cliff Lee, Hamels and Oswalt be your 1-4 starters, then back it up with that incredible lineup.

When were the Yankees dominant? Yankees developed talent from the minors (Jeter, Posada, Williams, Rivera…) then added key free agents to make them great every year.

Every team has a budget, and if you load your team with affordable high quality young guys, then pay for top tier free agents, then that equals a yearly contender (see phillies…developed Howard, Hamels, Victorino, Utley….)

That is why I give Ricketts credit so far…at least he seems to be spending money where it counts…draft, development, and in Dominican Republic

Just read through this thread. You’ll basically understand the book, minus the initial chapter of how Beane was drafted by the Mets failed to make it in the big leagues.

@jamescrockett-
According to http://content.usatoday.com/sportsdata/baseball/mlb/salaries/position/1B/2011
carlos pena is the 10th highest paid 1st basemen. So what economics are you talking about?

He’s also batting .180 with risp now, so at least it’s 7 pts higher over the last month. Pena is 21st at that. I know he walks alot, but a middle the order $10 million needs to produce.

having said that, I’m now sure that Koyie Hill will hit one tomorrow.

smart hitters ball, whatever. Bottom line the whole organization needs to be taught to go deeper in counts. Swinging at the 1st pitch is not always a good practice. It is amazing how Geo use to be much better taking walks this year his BB/K ratio is terrible: 44/121. Up and down the lineup is that way. I mean Reed Johnson is just plain horrible:5/60.
 This has to start at the lowest levels.

It’s gonna be a few years, folks.

I want to see Boston miss the playoffs, but by some chance they do. I believe heads are going to roll in beantown and hopefully they roll to Chicago, i.e. Francona and maybe we get their GM too. Call it a pipe dream, but I’d love to see Theo Epstein as GM and Terry Francona as our new skipper.

“Moneyball”-type approaches on their own don’t seem to work. A mix of modern statistical analysis, old-school scouting and a healthy payroll seem to be the best mix.

The Red Sox might be the closest franchise to that.

this week’s Sports Illustrated, which includes several articles that relate to this weeks release of the film “Moneyball”.

One article in particular is an in depth piece by Tom Verducci that discusses how the Red Sox have used advanced metrics to guide their decisions in drafting, trading, signing and developing players in recent years. Since the Red Sox are the team that has by far enjoyed the most success using advanced metrics, the article is most intriguing and revealing.

There is also a piece on how and why the movie got made. The twists and turns of this story could almost be a movie in itself, and should be of particular interest to those who posted in response to the FanPost titled “Why the hell is Moneyball a movie?”. I think the article by Austin Murphy entitled “Brad Pitt Deals” provides a solid answer.

The Red Sox article by Verducci is titled “The Art of Winning an (Even More) Unfair Game”. I recommend it for those who want to learn more than even Moneyball offers re: today’s game. You will be amazed at how complex the Red Sox evaluation system has become.

I look forward to seeing the movie “Moneyball” tomorrow. The reviews so far have been positive.

with a little juice. Well, not exactly, more like mysterious magnanimous milkshakes (Ortiz) and hormone replacement ‘therapy’ (or gender reassignment) (Manny).

Kind of sucks for a team with such a long losing streak to finally win a World Series, but the shadow of the steroid era will always be cast over it. They were good, beating other Hulked up or Bane-juiced up teams, but as with anything steroids & PEDs touch, there will always be that shadowy specter of doubt.

Frankly I hope that the Cubs future plan revolves around some sort of analysis that I and people on this board have never heard of or even realize exists, not trying to take advantage of the market inefficiencies of 1999

The Cubs have actually zoned in on some players who aren’t going to walk 20% of the time but whose profile is that they make a lot of contact (or have in the past) and hit a lot of line drives which correlates to a high BABIP and therefore an above average OBP. Here’s a few guys who fit that profile:

Starlin Castro
Marlon Byrd
Brett Jackson
Josh Vitters – The scouting report on Vitters is “Thinks he can hit everything and might be able to”
Darwin Barney – he had an above average OBP in the months in which his K rate was down

Just to re-state, even if these guys haven’t been 100% successful at this at the pro leve, like Barney and Vitters, it is the way scouts see them – as high contact rate and high line drive or ground ball hitters – that might make them a new trend.

‘Moneyball’ buzz contrasts with Oakland Athletics’ reality: A fan’s take

“…It would be great to see this smart, hardworking guy hired by a team that at least has a modest payroll. If so, he would have a legitimate shot at putting his sound theories to the test.”