The Extra 2% - Tampa Bay Rays

[keniget]

I read through the link to the first ten pages that Ross posted in the football forum, which I found very interesting (so thanks for that Ross!), but as I know nothing about baseball it left me curious about something.

The author made a passing reference in the prologue to Billy Beane at the Oakland A''s regarding the whole moneyball revolution, however went on to make the distinction that the owners of the Rays were different as they were relative outsiders to the game (unlike Beane) and also distanced the Rays from the likes of the Yankees and Red Sox who are giants with huge revenue streams and pulling power.

So that left me wondering about the whole moneyball thing in baseball, particularly given all the stuff we've heard about NESV and the Red Sox. I was under the impression, for example, that NESV along with Theo Epstein also fulfilled the same criteria of not having a background in the game and applying Wall Street savvy to great and widely respected success. Is their achievemnent a lesser one because the Red Sox were a sleeping giant?

How many moneyball-esque success stories are there? Which ones are more highly regarded / impressive?

 

[Rosco]

It's a good book, and you probably don't need to have much interest in baseball to enjoy it but it would help.

There are some similarities between Henry, other FSG members and the Tampa Bay ownership. Henry grew up a baseball fan and followed it all through his life before he managed to get into baseball, Stuart Sternberg - majority owner of the Rays is similar. They did operate in similar ways but their starting points were vastly different - and that's why I would class what the Rays did as the bigger achievement. (even though they didn't win the World Series)

It's been said before but there are quite a lot of similarities between LFC and where the Red Sox were when FSG bought them. They had an 86 year drought before their Championship, despite being a team who probably should have won it at some point. They were a big market team, with a long and interesting history, a historic stadium in need of an upgrade and a passionate fanbase with a hunger for a title. Granted we haven't had an 86 year drought but otherwise we're incredibly similar. Right now the Red Sox are only behind the Yankees in revenue and payroll terms and while they've always generally been a good team under FSG they've become a juggernaut.

Would it be a massive achievement if we won the league soon, yeah it definitely would. But lets say West Brom finished second in the next couple of years - that's a bigger deal isn't it given their complete lack of resources ?

The Rays operate on a budget that's about one third of the Red Sox and Yankees. The Rays are in the same division as both the Red Sox and Yankees, making their chances of success even slimmer. There are three divisions in each league, the top team in each division qualify for the playoffs as does the best second placed team. So to get to the playoffs the Rays have to be better than one team that has three times their budget. What the Rays did would be the equivalent of Rangers getting to the CL final after being paired with Inter Milan and Real Madrid in the group stages.

What was interesting in the book was some of the stuff the Rays did, a lot of it didn't appear groundbreaking but when you see it all together there was a massive transformation. Some of the things they did were simple - doubling the coaching staff throughout their system in order to improve players, making huge efforts to improve fan experience, reaching out to local businesses in the area etc.

They didn't allow the author complete access even though he spent a year with them - quite a bit they needed to keep secret. But one of the things they were doing was using detailed info about pitchers (called Pitch-Fx), to determine how much they should push the pitchers. They realised that one of the keys to success was being able to keep pitchers healthy and worked out that when a pitchers release point changes by a certain amount it's a predictor for injury - similar to what our new Australian fitness and medical team have done when they let slip that they look at how long a players foot stays on the ground during a stride as their guide to predicting injury. The Rays also used that info when it came to deciding whether to keep a pitcher or not - they have gotten rid of a couple of pitchers in trades who have since been plagued by injury.

There haven't been too many moneyball successes because almost everybody is doing it now - teams like the Yankees who used to buy "proven" players consistently underperformed and because they were saddled with players just past their peak and on big contracts - sound familiar ? Now the Yankees generally are much more clued up and rarely waste money the way they did before the Red Sox became very good.

 

[keniget]

Thanks, that's all interesting stuff.

I'll give the book a read...

 

[darkstarexodus]

It's definitely worth it, Ken. I'm only marginally a baseball fan and found it interesting, if not quite captivating. Well worth the read.

(Wow, so tired and more than a bit drunk. Proofreading is becoming rather difficult.)