verb_to_trust wrote:When Barry Zito played for the A's it sort of did until Oakland would inevitably crap themselves against the Yankees.
Pretty much this...it worked to a point to make a team like Oakland competitive (though you could argue that getting Hudson/Mulder/Zito to come along together on the whole was a bigger part), but no one ever really won a title with it without also spending a ton of money
Re: MLB
Posted: Mon December 12, 2016 10:03 pm
by philpritchard
numbers wrote:Did moneyball ever really work?
Oakland managed to find sustained success (8 playoff trips in 15 years) despite bottom half payroll every season and an inability to retain their own players.
More recently, the Rays made the playoffs 4 of 6 years using similar strategies despite the same problems (and a significantly worse payroll situation than even those A's teams).
There's a reason literally every team in baseball has adopted the strategies that made those teams successful.
Re: MLB
Posted: Mon December 12, 2016 10:46 pm
by numbers
philpritchard wrote:
numbers wrote:Did moneyball ever really work?
Oakland managed to find sustained success (8 playoff trips in 15 years) despite bottom half payroll every season and an inability to retain their own players.
More recently, the Rays made the playoffs 4 of 6 years using similar strategies despite the same problems (and a significantly worse payroll situation than even those A's teams).
There's a reason literally every team in baseball has adopted the strategies that made those teams successful.
So the A's were able to make the playoffs out of a weak division and lose in the first round every year, and the Rays were able to parlay years of last place finishes into a bunch of really good young players, which is the entire point of the way they do draft positioning.
Re: MLB
Posted: Tue December 13, 2016 2:30 am
by philpritchard
Yeah, that's what happened. It had nothing to do with making smart decisions.