The New Moneyball

"The new Moneyball player looks a lot like Boston's new centerfielder: fast, athletic, a slick fielder who even at age 37 and for $8 million a year is a bargain. 'Mike Cameron played on two of the 10 best defensive teams of all time [the 2001 Marlins and the 1999 Reds],' says [Tony] Blengino. 'Every team he's played for has gotten better. Every team he's left collapsed when he left. No, Mike Cameron's not a Hall of Famer. But he's clearly a winning baseball player.'" -p. 67, Sports Illustrated (March 1, 2010)


Hello skeptics! I know you're out there: you Red Sox fans who scoff at Theo's newfound love for run prevention and predict a downfall of epic proportions. I disagree with you. The players disagree with you. The front office (obviously) disagrees with you. But I know that won't sway you, so maybe this will: Sports Illustrated recently ran a six page article [in the Olympic issue, no less!] on the "new Moneyball," which, in case you were wondering, is defense and run prevention.

I'm guessing there's a lot of overlap in the "doubt Theo" and "Moneyball is all about OBP and Billy Beane is a failure" demographics, so before I start, I'm going to make some clarifications. Moneyball was not about OBP, but rather the exploitation of undervalued commodities within baseball. In the early days of the last decade, OBP was all but ignored, and so those who paid attention to it (Hey there, Billy Beane) reaped the benefits. Now, of course, on base percentage is quoted just as often as the old standby, the batting average, and it's displayed on scoreboards and television screens across the country. OBP is no longer undervalued by the market, and so teams looking for an edge no longer prioritize it as the Holy Grail of statistics.

According to SI's Albert Chen, defense is the new byword, and the movement is being spearheaded by the Seattle Mariners, who, despite scoring fewer runs than anyone in the American League, won 85 games last year, overcoming a pitching staff that essentially boasted Felix Hernandez and no one else. These same Mariners went 4-2 against your very own Boston Red Sox, on the back of a defense and run prevention strategy.


Theo's not stupid. He saw what we all saw: a stacked lineup (and bottomless pockets) to the south, and a team out west with a small payroll but good results. He put two and two together, added Cameron, Adrian Beltre, and Marco Scutaro, and as a result, Sox fans are about to be treated to a parade of defensive gems from April to [hopefully] sometime in October. This offense will be just fine, and the defense promises to be one of the best New England has seen. Let's all just take a deep breath and relax... and if you really feel the need to worry about something, I suggest you fret over the state of Beltre's balls.

HA! Sports Illustrated is Silly

So, as a college student, a daily trip to the mailbox is a must.  Normally I don't receive anything more than the usual campus memos about library hours, meetings, and lectures, and the occasional takeout place advertisement.  However, today I got a package from my mom, which confused me, as she hadn't told me she was sending one, and I'll be home in two weeks anyway.

When I opened the envelope and saw that she had sent me the Sports Illustrated (my subscription gets delivered to my house) baseball preview issue, I'll admit to being pretty excited.  Even though I could have read it online on April 6th, when it was published, I hadn't, so I decided to leaf through it and see how their predictions were panning out so far.

I barely got past the first page.  Ben Reiter wrote the page on the Yankees, who SI predicts will win the AL East with a 97-65 record (one ahead of the Sox, who supposedly win the Wild Card).  Halfway through his gushing (nauseating) take on the Yankees is a sentence that made me choke (oh, that's A*Rod's job? Right.): "[New York's] success will spring from its rotation-which is second to none."  

I understand that this was written before the season started, but right now, New York's rotation is second to a lot of people's.  Their team ERA is 6.24.  Ours is 4.18.  Heck, the Kansas City Royals have a sub-4 ERA.  No American League team is pitching worse than New York so far.  All of those expensive pieces? Not panning out just yet.  However, I'll admit that the season is long, and we all know that CC Sabathia at least will work out of the current funk he's in.  If AJ Burnett can stay healthy, he should do well too... though that's  big "if" with his track record.

But really, Sports Illustrated, that was quite the proclamation...

Ohhh, I see now, Sabathia's pitching poorly due to the SI cover jinx...