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Surya Maddali

Professor Babcock

ENGL 137H

November 13th, 2022

There is a reason baseball is known as “America’s pastime.” It was played starting in the

late 19th century and has become such an influential and popular game today. While maybe not

as popular as American football and basketball, it certainly is the oldest sport and has the richest

history of them all. The game has had its stars, from all time greats like Babe Ruth and modern

legends like Albert Pujols. However, how these players have been analyzed and perceived as

great is definitely evolving and still very contested.

The origins of baseball are as old as the founding of America itself. They date back to

the 19th century in England, an era which saw many different games and sports played there.

Specifically, baseball is seen deriving from a mix of rounders(a game commonly played by kids)

and cricket(History Staff). From the national governing body of rounders itself in England,

Rounders England, the game is scored “where points known as ’rounders’ are scored by a player

hitting a leather-cased ball with a bat and then completing a circuit of the track – consisting of

four bases”(roundersengland.co.uk). This is eerily similar to baseball today, where you indeed

have to round four bases to score a run. However, the one thing that rounders did not have was

strikes and balls, and the batter would stay up until they made contact(almost like cricket).

Speaking of cricket, which is still a widespread sport played in all corners of the globe, the

similarities between it and baseball are glaring. Whether it’s batters in baseball or batsmen in

cricket that need to hit a ball with a bat or pitchers in baseball and bowlers in cricket that have to

throw the ball to the batter/batsmen, it can be easily observed how similar cricket and baseball
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are, and how they act as the popular bat and ball sport depending on which part of the globe

you’re in.

Baseball was first played with rules similar to today by a group of men in New York City

who played with a diamond infield, three strike rule for outs, and foul lines(History.com Staff).

The first official game was played in 1846, and the rest is history.

That being said, the sport of baseball has had many changes during its very long

existence. One example of this is the live ball era, which emerged out of the dead ball era and

made baseball a much more entertaining game. However, the most important and probably most

impactful change to the game of baseball has been the use of analytics and statistics in the game.

It has been a gradual but influential change, bringing about even further changes in how the

game is played, how players are assessed, and how teams recruit players. Due to the

development of new methods such as sabermetric statistics and the need for money, what the

Oakland Athletics did in the early 2000s, namely the ‘Moneyball Approach’, led to a debate on

how players should be assessed and utilized by baseball teams.

The game of baseball has evolved greatly, especially in how players are assessed, looked

at, and valued by teams. For one, it is important to look at how players were primarily assessed

originally. In a study done on the Moneyball Approach published in 2005, authors Ehren

Wassermann, Daniel R. Czech, Matthew J. Wilson & A Barry Joyner refer to the conventional

methods used to assess players as quoted from a MLB scouting pamphlet. For example, the

study lists things such as “fluid arm action and easy release” and “a strong arm and defensive

skills…”(Wasserman et al.). That being said, the study also outlines eleven different guidelines,

those being “ (1). Strength, (2). Starting the bat, generating bat speed, (3). Full arm extension and

follow through after making contact, (4). Head stays on ball, (5). Lack of fear, butt stays up at
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plate, (6). Short stride, (7). Top hand is evident upon making contact and follow through, (8).

Head of bat does not lag, (9). Aggressive, hits first good pitch, (10). Short strokes, yet ball jumps

off bat, (11). Bat goes to ball (Not a swing through a certain arc area and the ball happens to be

in that zone)”(Wasserman et. al). At first glance, there’s a lot of physical characteristics

involved. The first characteristic mentioned is strength, but it almost feels as if many of the

characteristics are also strength-based. For example, generating bat speed is almost wholly

dependent on strength. The same holds true for the contact oriented characteristics, such as the

idea of following through after making contact, hitting a “good first pitch”, and the bat going to

the ball in the first place when the pitch is thrown. On the other hand, some of the other

guidelines seem very arbitrary such as lack of fear. Given that prospective players have

obviously experienced pitches being thrown at them for years and years, it is hard to discern

exactly what these words mean as quoted from the MLB pamphlet. Of course, strength itself can

be subjective in the eyes of the many scouts that scour the depth charts of high school and

college teams to look for players, but the distinct guidelines surrounding strength certainly bring

more clarity as to what exactly scouts are instructed to look for.

It’s also apparent that there is barely any use of statistics in this era. The assessment of

players, as explored above, is driven by the physicality of the players and what they did on the

field with these abilities. As a result, a very narrow range of statistics were used to supplement

the assessment of a player.

One of the very few statistics that were used to assess players at this time(with still a

primary focus on their physical characteristics) was batting average. In fact, one could say that

this statistic was emphasized the most above others. Batting average is a measure of how many

hits a player gets as compared to the number of plate appearances that they have. An average
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between .200 and .300 is considered to be good, and most MLB players fall in this range. Given

this, organizations at the time generally thought that players that gathered the most hits would be

of most use to a team and help it win the most games. This is essentially the conventional view

and the view held for the longest time during the existence of baseball.

This also ended up reinforcing the idea that teams had to pay as much as possible to win-

that is, they had to pay the players the most amount of money as possible to attract star players to

a team and keep them on the team for a long time as well, since players with the highest batting

averages were valued the highest.

As a result of scouts valuing physicality over anything else when it came to picking up

prospective baseball players for their organizations, they tended to value high school prospects

over others since they were younger and had more energy(essentially, they had more time to play

baseball in them). The aforementioned study from the Sport Journal mentions this concept as the

high school “phenom”(Wasserman et. al).

But then things changed. In 2002, the Oakland Athletics were looking for a new

approach of acquiring talent. It was up to General Manager Billy Beane to ascertain how to put

together a team that wins games with resources that were not afforded to them which other teams

had. The results of this would eventually become known as the Moneyball approach as

headlined in the book of the same name by Michael Lewis, who popularized what happened to

this team in the 2002 season. In the preface of the book, Lewis writes, “Understanding that he

would never have a Yankee-sized checkbook, the Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, had

set about looking for inefficiencies in the game. Looking for, in essence, new baseball

knowledge. In what amounted to a systematic scientific investigation of their sport,

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the Oakland front office had reexamined everything from the market price of foot speed to the

inherent difference between the average major league player and the superior Triple-A one.

That's how they found their bargains”(Lewis XIV). The impetus of this approach started with

one man, Billy Beane, who was the general manager of the Athletics of the time. A former

player, he knew the game well and knew what was facing him. At the time, the Oakland

Athletics had the fifth smallest total payroll in the entire Major Leagues, with 41,942,665, or

roughly 41 million dollars(Baseball’s 2002 Payrolls). That obviously pales in comparison when

thinking of the payrolls of almost any team today, but was also very low for its time. In fact, the

three largest payrolls in the same season that year were all over 100 million dollars, those teams

being the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, and the Texas Rangers. The Oakland Athletics

were a staggering roughly 60 million dollars lower(in other words almost two times less) in their

total payroll as opposed to the richest teams. In a sense this is logical, as Oakland is a very small

market city when considering the fact that there are more populated cities in both California

itself and the United States at large.

This is where Billy Beane came in. He saw the need to build a team that would be

successful but with financial limitations. The first thing that he started doing was to use more

statistics when it came to recruiting to find undervalued players that were effective, but the team

could pay less for. He did this through the use of sabermetric statistics, which, while having

been around for a few decades, were wildly underused and disregarded by player recruits and

scouts. Billy Beane’s own story as to how he was being recruited, as outlined in the book

Moneyball, best outlines this conventional approach taken since the beginnings of the sport to

assess players. “They'd ask to see Billy run. Sam would have Billy run sprints for them. They'd

ask to see Billy throw and Billy would proceed to the outfield and fire rockets to Sam at the
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plate. They'd want to see Billy hit and Sam would throw batting practice with no one there but

Billy and the scouts”(Lewis 8). This exemplifies how scouts and recruiting departments looked

at players for most of the existence of baseball: physicality, as explored before. However, Beane

tossed all of this philosophy(more or less) aside, and attempted to use a more analytical-driven

approach. Batting average was the preferred statistic(as explored above) that was almost

exclusively used to assess players, which was another thing that Beane changed. He saw the

value in using statistics such as on base percentage and slugging percentage instead to assess

players as opposed to batting average. On base percentage measures how many times a player

reaches base by any means(not just hits) compared to plate appearances, which shows efficiency

and the full extent of the impact a player can make. Slugging percentage measures the amount of

bases taken each time a player takes per plate appearance, and once again shows the efficiency of

a player every time they are up at bat. Since players with the highest batting averages had the

most monetary value, players that excelled in these statlines did not, which was integral to the

approach to Beane and his Oakland Athletics.

Another point of note here is how Beane shifted the window of players to recruit. As

implored above, high school players were more valued by scouts as a direct result of the

physicality argument: high school players were younger, had younger arms, and had more years

left to play baseball in them. Beane tossed this aside, and argued that college players should take

precedence over high school players. As such, he saw more value in college players as opposed

to high school players. This primarily comes from the fact that college programs have resources

to develop players’ abilities and talents to make them ready for the Major Leagues, and players

will be even more ready to play at a higher level as opposed to being barely ready to play in the

Major Leagues coming out of high school. On top of that, players in college face more
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formidable opponents and players, so they get more experience facing other players that are at an

equally higher level as opposed to a higher likelihood of lopsided talents and games in high

school. Additionally, acquiring players from college is a financial game too. Since players were

able to spend most of their development and improvement at the college level, it becomes less

contingent on the Major League team where they end up to develop them in their farm system as

much as a player that has less development experience(ex.a player that got drafted straight out of

high school). It costs money to keep these players in the farm systems longer in order to develop

them.

While this had almost no effect on the league at the time and was even met with internal

resistance from managers and scouts who preferred the conventional approach along with

external resistance from the broader baseball community, it ended up having a lasting impact in

the league and changed how teams looked at players. For one, the Athletics ended up making

the playoffs that year for the first time in years, which was impressive due to the very short

turnaround as a result of Beane and the front office overhauling their approach. This did not stop

here, however, and examples of teams succeeding with the same philosophy stretch to the

present day. For example, the present-day Tampa Rays exemplify how this approach can be used

in an effective way. While they made the World Series(and ultimately lost) in 2020, that was the

“COVID year” for Major League Baseball and analysts often disregard the results from that

season since it was shortened and not representative of how teams can truly perform when

normally doing so over a 162 game stretch. That being said, the Rays had the 26th lowest

payroll in the 2021 season(Reuter). With such a low payroll, they were still able to bring in

eventual star players such as Brandon Lowe, Randy Arozarena, and Wander Franco, who helped

lead them to sustained success. In that season alone they won the American League East, which
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is one of the hardest divisions to win especially with the New York Yankees being in it, and

made the playoffs as a result. The same success continued in the 2022 season, as they snuck into

the playoffs and made the American League wildcard round. While this was almost 20 years

after the Oakland Athletics of 2002, the Boston Red Sox were able to use this approach to win

the World Series only two years later in 2004. They minimized new money spent on players

using the ‘Moneyball’ approach, and it paid dividends for them as well.

The game of baseball has truly changed. Without the contributions of Billy Beane and

the 2002 Oakland Athletics, one specific and impactful change wouldn’t have happened: the

increasing reliance on the use of statistics to assess a true player’s ability to play the game of

baseball. Not only this, but he was able to do it for a team with a very small market and payroll,

which was groundbreaking at the time due to the fact that teams were usually able to assemble

competitive squads only if they had a large payroll. Many teams(such as the aforementioned

2021 Rays) were able to replicate this with great success. This whole approach wouldn’t have

occurred, however, without the innovation of sabermetric statistics through the writings of Bill

James that brought advanced statistics together.

This will definitely continue to be the same going forward. Teams are continually

finding ways to minimize their payroll whilst having effective players that help them make the

playoffs and occasionally the world series. Statistics such as on base percentage, slugging

percentage, OPS are now paramount in assessing young players, and other sabermetric statistics

such as WAR are now in the mainstream conversation. Analytics in sports(but especially in

baseball) are only increasing in importance and usage(insert hiring statistics here), and this

would certainly have not happened(or in the same capacity) if it were not for Billy Beane and the

2002 Athletics(he literally “changed” the game).

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Works Cited

Academy, U. S. Sports. “An Examination of the Moneyball Theory: A Baseball Statistical

Analysis.” The Sport Journal, Jan. 2005,

https://thesportjournal.org/article/an-examination-of-the-moneyball-theory-a-baseball-stat

istical-analysis/.

ESPN.Com - MLB Playoffs 2002 - Baseball’s 2002 Payrolls.

http://www.espn.com/mlb/playoffs2002/s/2002/1011/1444560.html. Accessed 13 Nov.

2022.

Lewis, Michael. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. General Books, 2010.

“Play the Game.” Rounders England, https://www.roundersengland.co.uk/play/play-the-game/.

Accessed 13 Nov. 2022.

Reuter, Joel. “MLB Moneyball Power Rankings: Which Team Got the Most Value from 2021

Roster?” Bleacher Report,

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2950334-mlb-moneyball-power-rankings-which-team-

got-the-most-value-from-2021-roster. Accessed 13 Nov. 2022.

Staff, History. “Who Invented Baseball?” HISTORY,

https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-baseball. Accessed 13 Nov. 2022.