Hot Stove U: Changing their Sox

The Setup

Since Michael Lewis penned “Moneyball” in 2003, franchises have been branded either by their support or disdain for the philosophies that the book espouses. The Oakland Athletics were held up as the model organization, the team that won by ignoring the traditions of baseball and finding value in underappreciated assets — the most prominent of those at the time being slow, unathletic, career minor leaguers who draw walks to avoid making outs.

A’s GM Billy Beane was winning with teams full of players that old-school scouts had hated. From John Jaha to Matt Stairs, the A’s were the destination of choice for guys who could run about as well as the average fan in the seats. Where other teams saw a lack of bat speed, an inability to play defense and a body that would break down by age 30, Beane saw the ability to construct an offense that would score runs by stringing together a few walks and a home run.

This particular brand of baseball, dubbed the “Moneyball” style, was despised by those who had been taught that the game should be played by fielding your position well, bunting runners over and doing the little things that help your team win. But now, in an attempt to chase the current undervalued assets, the tables have turned. Teams that are using the nerd-stats approach that the A’s made popular have abandoned power-hitting oafs in favor of athletic defenders who can run like the wind.

The “Moneyball” teams are now building rosters that would fit perfectly into pre-spreadsheet baseball. Perhaps no team exemplifies this shift as well as the Boston Red Sox.

The Proof

With an Ivy League-educated general manager who hired stat maven Bill James as a consultant, the Red Sox have been one of the most visible sabermetric teams in baseball recently. They built teams around David Ortiz, J.D. Drew and Kevin Youkilis, showing that they valued the same traits the Athletics had earlier in the decade. When the Sox finally tired of Manny Ramirez’s antics, they devised a three-way trade to bring them Jason Bay, another player who fits that particular mold.

However, when GM Theo Epstein evaluated how to improve a roster that finished in second place in the AL East and lost in the first round of the playoffs in 2009, he did not conclude that the team needed more power hitters to supercharge the offense. Instead, he let Bay sign with the New York Mets and then reallocated the money to Mike Cameron and Adrian Beltre — despite the fact that the duo hit fewer home runs combined than Bay hit a year ago.

Neither Cameron nor Beltre can match Bay’s production at the plate, but they can run circles around him in the field. Defense is where Epstein saw an opportunity to improve in the most cost-efficient way, so out went the burly slugger with bad range and in came a couple of average hitters whose stardom is measured in Web Gems.

Epstein and James have traded on-base percentage for ultimate zone ratings, believing that the market has over-corrected and is now undervaluing a player’s ability to save runs in the field. They aren’t the only ones — the Tampa Bay Rays, Seattle Mariners, and yes, even Billy Beane’s Oakland Athletics are also on the bandwagon.

The results of this shift toward run prevention? The “Moneyball” teams are targeting the type of fast, athletic, fundamentally sound players that scouts have been drooling over for years. Tampa Bay, Oakland and Boston were all in the top five in stolen bases among American League clubs in 2009. Seattle finished eighth and then outbid everyone else in the league for speed-and-defense specialist Chone Figgins this winter. The Mariners also led the league in sacrifice bunts, and that doesn’t figure to change now that Figgins has joined the club and the team replaced power-hitting first baseman Russell Branyan with glove-man Casey Kotchman.

Likewise, the A’s should feature a mostly small-ball offense, especially with the addition of Coco Crisp to an outfield that already featured Rajai Davis and Ryan Sweeney. Beane now believes that having three center fielders tracking down every fly ball hit will make up for the fact that his three starting outfielders combined to hit 12 home runs in 2009.

The Conclusion

The age of the Giambi brothers is over. Sure, these teams would still love to have a middle-of-the-order thumper who can get on base and hit the ball 500 feet with regularity, but they aren’t going to pay the market price for power when similar value comes at a discount in another package. The value purchase now is to re-create the 1985 St. Louis Cardinals, a tremendous defensive team led by speed merchants who ran their way into the World Series despite a glaring lack of home run hitters.

Whitey Herzog, who managed that Cardinals team, would never be mistaken for a “Moneyball” disciple. But if Herzog were still putting together rosters in 2010, the teams that would most resemble what he would want are the teams that use statistical analysis to help inform their decisions. What was old is new again, and 2010 will be the year that the scouts and statheads finally come to an agreement on how a team should be built.