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Moneyball teams

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Re: Moneyball teams

#101

Post by what_ever »

lordnacho wrote: post #80

It happens now and again that the best team has very few of the best players: - Denmark at Euro 92. The only world class player, Michael Laudrup, decided he was boycotting the coach. His brother was a fairly decent striker, and future Man Utd legend Peter Schmeichel was in goal, but everyone else was a journeyman. - Greece at Euro 2004. Nobody from a top team in a top league, but Otto Rehagel managed to coach them to…

So once in Premier League since it's inception (1991 IIRC) and twice in Euros since I don't ever remember when should be that surprising?

Re: Moneyball teams

#102

Post by BurningFrog »

geoka9 wrote: post #41
BurningFrog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you picked a sports team by the most paid players in their league. The football team would be half quarterbacks, the hockey team mostly goalies and so on.

Goalies are the highest paid players in hockey? Interesting.

I didn't do my research there, sorry.

You hear a lot about how a good goalie is half the team in modern hockey, so I thought that would translate to salaries.

Anyway, I hope I made my bigger point clear, despite the questionable example.

Re: Moneyball teams

#103

Post by jordanlev »

rsync wrote: post #92

I think we need to be critical of the Moneyball narrative - and not just because Oakland hasn't actually performed that well under the MB regime ... The understood narrative is that dummies were choosing players based on broken heuristics and that proper, sober heuristics would uncover hidden value. Put another way: If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results. I…

Reminds me of this great article from last year about a couple of stats nerds who started managing a minor league baseball team using sabremetrics:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/what-happe...

Re: Moneyball teams

#104

Post by bsder »

rsync wrote: post #92

I think we need to be critical of the Moneyball narrative - and not just because Oakland hasn't actually performed that well under the MB regime ... The understood narrative is that dummies were choosing players based on broken heuristics and that proper, sober heuristics would uncover hidden value. Put another way: If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results. I…

> Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ...

The human brain is also very good at misleading itself. Statistics is how you avoid that.

Do remember that Moneyball happened in an era where statistics was just becoming more ubiquitous. Bill James was collecting and collating statistics from a bunch of volunteers who used to snail mail him the scoring sheets from the games. He only quit doing that in 1988 because suddenly there was a flood of statistics.

So, from weak data to Moneyball in less than 10 years is actually fairly impressive.

Re: Moneyball teams

#105

Post by conjecTech »

ghaff wrote: post #95
asdfasdf32r3 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the central thesis of Moneyball. I'm a huge baseball nerd, including on-field and statistical side. The idea behind the WAR (Wins Above Replacement) stat is that you should adjust for context, then evaluate players in that vacuum. Moneyball was about identifying and exploiting market inefficiencies. It actually rejects the team level optimization ("he's a team player" is explicitly rejected as a…

Agreed. It's also worth observing for those who might not really be baseball fans that baseball is really less of a team sport than most major sports. Yes, team dynamics can reach toxic levels and sometimes teams seem to outperform their individual roster members. But other than some degree of matching players with positions (pitchers in particular), you mostly want players who would be best/best value on key stats u…

The entire offensive side of the game pretty clearly violates the notion of independence. In particular, the value of a batter with particular stats is dependent on the batters that come before and after him. This is the reasoning behind stacking people with high on base percentages in front of sluggers. If it were not a team sport, you'd see no clear patterns in line-up. This applies at the team selection level as well. For instance, a player who can draw a lot of walks is worth different amounts to different teams depending on their ability to convert those into runs.

The fact that saving a run is nearly equivalent to scoring a run means it bleeds over into the defensive side as well. A phenomenal batter with a high error rate may be of enormous value to one team since their pitching staff strikes out more batters than average while being a terrible addition to another team.

If you're still unconvinced, I could throw together some simulations later that might make this clearer.

Re: Moneyball teams

#107

Post by ryandrake »

Rylinks wrote: post #96
avip wrote: post #39

My model for ideal hiring are the Spurs. They consistently hire for talent and potential, provide the proper mentoring and conditions for the potential to fully materialise. "As you sow, so shall you reap". But few have the patience to sow nowadays. We rather buy ready-made in the grocery store.

Most companies cannot have their employees sign multi-year contracts. Outside of sports, there is a much bigger risk of your competitors poaching people after they've developed.

Presumably that's always a risk regardless of whether you hired someone junior and trained them or whether you hired someone already skilled. As long as you're doing the standard things that help you retain talent (like paying market rate, providing good opportunities, etc.), there should be no reason to worry, right?

The only companies that should be worried about "poaching"[1] are the ones, for example, who are not paying market rate, have crappy projects, provide no career advancement opportunities. I've never heard of a talented employee leaving a company for literally no reason.

1: Which by the way, is a pretty offensive term--we're not deer or wild game owned by some feudal lord.

Re: Moneyball teams

#108

Post by ghaff »

conjecTech wrote: post #105
ghaff wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's also worth observing for those who might not really be baseball fans that baseball is really less of a team sport than most major sports. Yes, team dynamics can reach toxic levels and sometimes teams seem to outperform their individual roster members. But other than some degree of matching players with positions (pitchers in particular), you mostly want players who would be best/best value on key stats u…

The entire offensive side of the game pretty clearly violates the notion of independence. In particular, the value of a batter with particular stats is dependent on the batters that come before and after him. This is the reasoning behind stacking people with high on base percentages in front of sluggers. If it were not a team sport, you'd see no clear patterns in line-up. This applies at the team selection level as w…

That's fair enough. Although I'd argue that it's more a case of assembling an appropriate portfolio than it is a "team" in the way that people normally use that term.

(I'd also argue that overall offensive ability trumps a lot of optimization around base stealing or the type of hits.)

ADDED: i.e. I'd argue that if populating a roster with about a half dozen All Star sluggers were financially viable, I'd argue that would probably be a pretty effective team however unbalanced.

Re: Moneyball teams

#109

Post by ryandrake »

Another way to look at it is: What causes projects to succeed or fail?

I've seen my share of failed projects throughout my career (as a participant and as a co-worker watching it happen). By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak, or because they didn't hire "rockstar" programmers, or because the engineers didn't go to Stanford. They failed because of things like requirements growth, unrealistic schedules, emotion-based/gut-based (rather than measurement-based) product decisions, and external factors (market changing and company couldn't react). If companies spent more time worrying about these things and less time worrying whether their engineering interview candidates can balance a binary tree on a whiteboard, we might see hiring practices change.

Re: Moneyball teams

#110

Post by runeks »

Only hiring the best is inherently unsustainable, because it implies a need for "other companies" to train people into being the best, and only then are you willing to hire them.

The greatest companies are those who offer an atmosphere in which good developers can grow into the best developers. The worst companies are those who believe they can hire people from great companies, and consequently transform into great companies themselves. Great companies produce value; poor companies consume it.

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