Myth 2: Billy Bean’s teams have won a lot. Competitive, small-payroll teams are a unique byproduct of Moneyball.
Reality: Billy Beane’s first few teams got some division titles, which distracted from the fact that they have an incredible stretch of inept postseason play.

Beane’s teams are 1132-972 in the regular season since 1998 (not counting 2011). Their highest win totals came during those Giambi/Tejada years, with the team winning over 100 games in both 2001 and 2002. Neither of those years would produce a playoff series win, in fact Beane would not see an A’s playoff series win until 2006, some eight years after he took over. It remains the ONLY playoff series win under his guidance. That streak is guaranteed to continue since the A’s were eliminated from the playoffs in 2011 long ago and currently sit at 70-86 in a year during which pundits picked them as overwhelming favorites to win the division. Most importantly, this marks five straight .500 or worse seasons for the team (and only one of those was a .500 season, in 2009).

In his 13 years, the payroll has been an average of 24th. At first glance you’d think this made them unique, a team with some winning seasons despite such a low-level spending policy(mandated by A’s ownership after poor revenue during the 80s and 90s compared to the cross-bay Giants).

The Florida Marlins, however, are a reasonable comparison. Their average payroll over this period has been 26th, yet the Marlins during that time period, won the 2003 World Series against the New York Yankees – the highest paid team in the entire league. In that single year, therefore, they won more playoff series than the A’s have, under Beane’s guidance, in 13 full seasons. They also gave us this brilliant post-World Series playoff rap by Juan Pierre:

The Twins are also a good comparison, with an average payroll of 22nd (thrown way off by 2010 in which they had the 10th highest payroll – without it they’d be almost 24th). During that stretch The Twins are 1090-1015 in the regular season, own 6 division titles, and have made 6 playoff appearances with one series win.

The standard operating procedure will remain -as always from Beane supporters – to say that the wins were due to Beane’s genius, and the losses are an unfair measuring stick because they represent results-oriented analysis. The reality however is that his teams are not built for playoff wins, and don’t seem especially adept at consistently scoring in the variety of ways needed to win close October games.

Up next in true Moneyball fashion, a look at Beane’s drafting and trading, attacking the myth that he has a skill for evaluating talent.

Previous:
Myth 1: The player valuation system instituted by Beane led to outlier offensive performances by his early A’s teams
Up Next
Myth 3: Billy Beane has a unique ability for evaluating talent.
Myth 4: Billy Beane came up with the form of sabermetrics he uses with The A’s.

In 1998, former MLB outfielder Billy Beane completed his front office ascension to become the General Manager of the Oakland A’s. 5 years later, a book was released about his “unique” player valuation methods, called ‘Moneyball’. This book would focus on Beane’s system of using metrics to find undervalued traits in current and upcoming players, hoping to yield the largest return on investment possible for teams with small payrolls (such as Oakland). Now 13 years later, after being coddled by a stat-loving sports media, Beane will no doubt be anointed as a genius and maverick by the general public when the film based on ‘Moneyball’, starring Brad Pitt, is released. A closer observation, however, reveals that Beane’s success is one of the greatest con jobs in sports history. Let’s look at some of the myths of Moneyball, sabermetrics, and Beane himself.

Myth 1: The player valuation system instituted by Beane led to outlier offensive performances by his early A’s teams. Most notably, the squads of 2000-2003, which caught the entire league by surprise.

Reality: While Beane’s teams did well in some regards, their best offensive players of the early Beane era had their performances significantly boosted by steroids.

During the early years a lot of emphasis in sabermetrics was placed on .obp, the percentage of time a player reaches base by any means (whether hits or walks). The A’s didn’t actually lead the league in .obp once in the 2000-2003 time period. They were, though, top ten each season until falling to 14th in 2003 after losing Jason Giambi and Miguel Tejada. These two players, the crux of that offensive attack, had an incredible effect on the team.

In 2000, Jason Giambi hit .333 with only 96 strikeouts, 43 HRs, and 137 RBI. He also led the league in .obp and won the AL MVP award. He’d finish second in the 2001 voting, and 5th in 2002 before leaving for a lucrative contract in New York. In 2000, Miguel Tejada hit 30 HR and drove in 115 runs. He’d finish 16th for the year in AL MVP voting, 19th in 2001, and would finally win it in during an epic 2002 campaign before leaving for Baltimore. Were three straight top 20 MVP finishes for two separate offensive players the result of complicated sabermetric analysis or something else?

In 2003 and again in 2011, both Giambi brothers admitted to steroid use in court:

The onetime Oakland A’s first baseman and 2000 American League Most Valuable Player testified that in 2003, when he hit 41 home runs for the Yankees, he had used several different steroids obtained from Greg Anderson, weight trainer for San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds.
…
Both Giambis testified that they had already used steroids before they met Anderson or heard of BALCO, and they said they were drawn to the trainer because of Bonds’ success.

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Tejada would later be exposed for his awareness of use by at least one Oakland player (after lying to Congress).

He pleaded guilty to lying about conversations he had during spring training in 2003 with an unidentified Oakland teammate who told Tejada he used steroids and human growth hormone.
Tejada admitted he gave the teammate two checks, totaling $6,300, for substances believed to be human growth hormone. The player did not know whether Tejada actually used the substances.

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This would seem to implicate Tejada for steroid use -assuming we don’t think he paid a teammate for HGH and then didn’t actually use it. Jason’s brother had lesser impact on the team’s offense (10 homers and an average around .250), but Tejada and Giambi had exceptional, team-carrying seasons repeatedly. All we have to do is compare the team’s performance with and without these enhanced contributions to seek out the true value of Beane’s work.

In the .obp, category Beane’s A’s teams averaged between 6th and 7th from 2000-2002. Since the two premier steroid users left the offense, the A’s have placed an average of 17th in that category. Given that the A’s philosophy at the time was to put people on base and drive them in with big hitters, it’s also of note that their home run rankings show a similar pattern. From 2000-2002 the A’s were 5th or 6th every year in the category. Without Giambi and Tejada, they have been an average of 19th. If the principle behind Beane’s sabermetrics is to place an emphasis on undervalued stats, shouldn’t the team have either continued to excel with these categories or generated runs in some other way, instead of deteriorating into such a pedestrian offense?

The area where credit should go to Beane would seem to be tutelage of The Big Three, his pitching rotation of Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson (drafted by Alderson in 1997), and Barry Zito. Is assembling three good young pitchers in any way unique to sabermetrics though? Didn’t the Braves and other teams (including previous A’s teams) already do that – years earlier – without calling it anything fancy?

Up Next
Myth 2: Competitive, small-payroll teams are unique to Moneyball and sabermetrics.
Myth 3: Billy Beane has a unique ability for evaluating talent.
Myth 4: Billy Beane came up with the form of sabermetrics he uses with The A’s.