Built to Win
Mac Thomason of the Braves Journal (an outsanding place to keep yourself current on the Braves) has an excellent review of Built to Win, a new book by the Braves’ GM, John Schuerholz. It appears that Schuerholz is yet another very smart baseball man who doesn’t get, or doesn’t want to get, the actual Moneyball concept. The idea is not, as Schuerholz seems to believe, all about getting statisticians in a room full of laptops and making team decisions based on ANOVAs and linear regression analyses. (Are baseball scouts that insecure?). It is all about recognizing and taking advantage of the inefficiencies in the system. Mac’s examples of JD Drew and Julio Franco are great examples of how the Braves have done this in the past. However, the comments on Mac’s original post reveal something even more troubling for the not insane Braves faithful – apparently Johnny is a big friend of Rush Limbaugh, for the love of Mark Lemke! As long as we’re talking baseball, a great blog about baseball, economics, and statistics with actual charts and graphs that gets Moneyball can be found over at Sabernomics. Check out this amazing post regarding steroids and their effects on home runs.
Books, Non-Fiction, To Checkout | Tim | 
May 10, 2006 6:06 pm
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By Nitro Nicole, May 12, 2006 @ 10:15 am
So I did finally finish reading Moneyball and I’m not going to post on it because I’m already sick of talking/thinking/living baseball and it’s only May 12th. That being said – I think it is a fascinating concept that a sports team can be created from computers and statistics. I never realized how “intelligent” a game that baseball was. According to my boss though, Billy Beane was really not the brains behind the Moneyball concept and it was really Sandy Alderson so in his view – the book is shit….
By DJ Cayenne, May 12, 2006 @ 1:57 pm
Your boss and Joe Morgan should get together. Who cares who the TRUE architect of the A’s success is? It is really beside the point. The Moneyball idea is the crux of the matter. Finding undervalued players and building a team out of it. And it doesn’t have to be done on a shoe-string budget without full-time professional scouts. Theo Epstein is a Moneyball enthusiast in Boston, he values sabremetrics, but no one is going to accuse him of being on the cheap. It seems that Moneyball is a Rorschach test for many baseball people, they are able to project whatever they don’t like onto it and call it crap.