MONEYBALL’S END GAME
When all the richest teams are also the smartest, players feel payroll adjustments
There was a time when we wanted young players, and bigmarket teams wanted proven players and could afford the cost. But now, we’re all valuing the same things.
Even as he began constructing division-winning teams in Oakland in the early 2000s with a blend of statistical savvy, business sense and ruthless efficiency that came to be known as “Moneyball”; even as the book and movie by that name brought him cross-cultural fame; and even as his proteges began carrying the strategy to other teams, Billy Beane understood that Moneyball, someday, would reach an endgame: when all the richest teams in the sport were also the smartest.
That day, as is becoming abundantly clear, has arrived, and its fallout is undoubtedly contributing to the crisis currently gripping the game, with veteran free agents languishing unsigned at the start of spring training, the union making thinly veiled accusations of collusion on the part of owners and the sport facing a labour atmosphere as poisonous as it has been in decades.
“Eventually, it was going to happen,” Beane, the A’s executive vicepresident of baseball operations, said in an interview in his barewalled office at the team’s spring headquarters at Hohokam Stadium on the first day of workouts for pitchers and catchers. A cork bulletin board behind his head was empty save for 17 multicoloured push pins awaiting something to hang.
“Fifteen years ago, we valued young players,” Beane said. “‘ Well,’ you’d say, ‘everyone values young players.’ But no. The reason young players were important to the A’s is they were cheap. (Now), teams are valuing the same things. When the (New York) Yankees value their young players as much as the A’s or the (Tampa Bay) Rays do — wow. That’s what we have now.
“There was a time when we wanted young players, and bigmarket teams wanted proven players and could afford the cost. But now, we’re all valuing the same things.”
For Moneyball to work in Oakland as long as it did, it required smart management and a singleminded devotion to cost-consciousness from Beane and his lieutenants, but it was also predicated upon the knowledge their competitors, including (and especially) the richest teams in the game, were run recklessly and wastefully, throwing their millions around at high-priced free agents on long-term deals that, in many cases, proved to be terrible investments.
It is a generalisation, of course, but that dichotomy was what always allowed teams such as the A’s to exploit the gaps in the market, finding value along the margins and staying lean, young and flexible while the rich teams grew old and bloated. For a long time, it worked.
“The Achilles heel with some of those clubs,” Beane said, “was (their) players would get older on these contracts, and would be saddled with debt and depreciating value on these players.”
But look what has happened now.
Any list of the smartest-run teams in baseball would undoubtedly include the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have one of the game’s largest payrolls and won the National League pennant in 2017. It would include the Chicago Cubs, who won the World Series in 2016 with the sport’s fifth-largest payroll. It would include the New York Yankees, who came within one win of the World Series in 2017 with a payroll that, even in the midst of a supposed “rebuild,” topped US$200 million. And it would include the Houston Astros, who play in the country ’s fourth-largest market and who won the World Series last fall.
Not only do those teams have massive material advantages over teams like the A’s, but they all have farm systems that either currently rank in the top five of the game by industry bible Baseball America, or have been ranked in the top five within the past three years (and fell out only because they graduated so many prospects to the big leagues or used them as trade chips).
“Listen, the big teams are run very wisely now,” Beane said. “There are really smart guys who have capital. There’s no soft spots. They’re smart guys, and they’re surrounded by smart guys. It’s a very intelligent industry right now. In fact, one of the most intelligent (of any industry) . ... The big teams look like they’re going to be good for a long time.”
Whether the single-minded focus on developing young players and ignoring older free agents represents the organic spread of smart, analytical thinking, or a collective effort to stifle salaries for players who reach free agency — in other words, collusion — is at the heart of the current dispute between labour and management. What is indisputable is that the game has never seen a free agent market such as this one, with nearly 90 big-league free agents, including some of the most accomplished, still unsigned in midFebruary.
Beane is among those who aren’t prepared to draw major conclusions from the economic equivalent of a small sample size — the player movement from one off-season out of the many he has witnessed in almost four decades in professional baseball.
“Making assumptions ( based) on one winter, or one year? I mean, how many times has the new thing become old?” he said. “So we have to be careful.”
Beane also pointed out he has no firsthand knowledge of what sort of contract figures this winter’s free agent class are discussing. Mired in a never-ending search for a new stadium to replace the outdated, unsightly Oakland Coliseum, the A’s will enter 2018 with a payroll of roughly US$65 million, which will almost certainly be the lowest in the game. It is a position Beane and A’s general manager David Forst have grown accustomed to being in, and it means they have had almost no substantive discussions with any free agents.
They have signed exactly one major-league free agent this winter: a two-year, $10-million deal with reliever Yusmeiro Petit in early December. The team’s quiet off-season has one side-benefit: It has allowed Beane to indulge his passion for European soccer; he is an adviser to Dutch club AZ Alkmaar and in December purchased a share of Barnsley Football Club, a second-tier team in England.
“I have no idea what those guys are asking for, because I’ve never been involved in it,” Beane said of the top free agents. “For us it’s a normal winter. It’s like, welcome to my winter.”
And while the union leadership has decried the spreading plague of “tanking ” — whereby teams shed payroll and hoard prospects, willingly trading 100-loss seasons now for the hope of contending in a few years, the way the Cubs and Astros did ahead of their championships — it is not something Beane and the A’s can be accused of, if only because they have never had an expensive roster to tear down in the first place.
Or, when they have traded away veterans — as when they jettisoned Trevor Cahill, Gio Gonzalez and Andrew Bailey in December 2011 — they have generally added others back. That winter, after shedding those veterans, the A’s turned around and signed Yoenis Cespedes, Coco Crisp and Bartolo Colon and traded for Seth Smith.
“We won the division that year and went to the playoffs three years in a row,” Beane said. “Everyone thought we were rebuilding. And we were like, no, we’re just reshuffling.”
Beane acknowledged the appeal (and the recent track record) of tanking — “The criticism needs to be wrapped around the idea of, well, it did work,” he said — but said it isn’t a strategy he has used or would want to use.
“Maybe that’s hurt us,” he said of the A’s avoidance of long-term rebuilding plans. “(But) I look at it differently. If I can get to .500 at the (season’s) midpoint, what’s going to happen is that 10 teams are going to fold, and I’m going to have seven of those teams on my schedule, so there’s two or three more wins right there. All I need to do is get to 86 wins (to be in position to win a wild card). And if I make one acquisition? I look at it (that) way.”
Where all these free agents are going to sign is up to other executives from other teams. What’s going to happen with the economics of baseball is for others to debate and decide. And tanking teams are someone else’s problem. For Billy Beane, trying to survive in what is clearly a post-Moneyball world, they are nothing more than another market inefficiency to exploit.