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Moneyball teams

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Re: Moneyball teams

#171

Post by ethbro »

saghm wrote: post #150
sien wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The soccer team would be Real Madrid. The baseball team the New York Yankees. They seem to do OK.

The baseball team currently with the highest roster salary is not the Yankees, but the Los Angeles Dodgers by almost 20%. They're currently in third place, behind teams with the 16th and 26th highest roster salaries (out of 30 MLB teams)[1]. Obviously it's early on the season, but we can look at last year's season to get a better heuristic. The top two teams in terms of roster salary were once again the Dodgers and Y…

I'd imagine the majority of sports have a fairly loose correlation between money spent and winning due to (a) limited sample size leading to high variance (even with a superior player selection strategy), (b) limited number of games played (though baseball does better than other sports here), and (c) games consisting of more dependent than independent events (leading to low chance events having cascading repurcussions).

At least in MLB, 40 multi-year players isn't that large a sample!

Re: Moneyball teams

#172

Post by bdg »

shallot_router wrote: post #16
ktRolster wrote: post #3

Or, hire the best, and make a team out of them. Or hire people with high potential and push them to reach it. Or, hire people who can get the job done. One thing for sure: if you have mind-numbing processes, "the best" will leave, and others will not reach their potential.

Yeah, these "don't do [hip thing], do [contrarian but normal/common sense] thing" articles (or the reverse of them) are becoming a bit tired. You should have good team-building and organizational skills and good technical hiring skills.

I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy the article format. I agree that one should have good team-building and technical skills. I also think there are other and possibly better ways to improve development team throughput besides "hiring the best".

Re: Moneyball teams

#173

Post by bdg »

acdha wrote: post #86
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, fair point. Ended up stepping on myself there a bit. Maybe "Top of their discipline" would be a better way to say it.

Yeah, it's hard to talk about this since we're using a single term to convey multiple complex concepts.

This reminds me of a post on Less Wrong about the meanings of words and the idea we're targeting. http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/

Re: Moneyball teams

#174

Post by cowardlydragon »

The biggest problem with open market hiring:

The best people aren't on the open job market. They'll get scooped up by their network.

You're hiring the best of new grads, bullshit artists, people that just moved, extenuating circumstances, or didn't impress anyone they ever worked with.

Re: Moneyball teams

#175

Post by dcole2929 »

pyoung wrote: post #154
mod wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kobe is top 30 all time assists. What are you talking about? I detest the man, but you can't use statistics to argue against him. http://stats.nba.com/featured/kobe_by_the_numbers_2015_11_29...

But he played ball for 20 years. I think average number of assists per game is a better stat here, where he was ranked 136th according to this link [1]. [1] http://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/ast_per_g_career...

There have been over 3000 people to play in the NBA. Ranking 136th still makes him better than the vast majority of people to have ever played the game. Especially as a two guard on a team that primarily ran the triangle, an offensive system that devalues traditional pick/roll dribble creation and generates most of it points on secondary actions (eg hockey assists) off high post play.

Re: Moneyball teams

#176

Post by upquark »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #20
georgeecollins wrote: post #11

I wish I could triple like this! Hire the best is lazy thinking. * I have been on teams that were not considered the best until they had success, then everyone on the team was a "star". * I have worked places where they only hire "superstars"-- and were pretty serious about paying for good talent and being picky-- and still failed for all kinds of organizational reasons. Teams with more role players, or more cohesion…

At a former (large, organizationally deficient) company, there was this small team of 5 people with very different specialties (and personalities). They were a "strike team" of sorts, tasked with helping out at a technical level different projects that were in trouble. They were excellent. They saved my team's integration of a camera co-processor in an SoC. But finally a re-org came around and some high-level manager…

> Nowadays, my primary criteria for joining a team is the quality of the people and of the manager.

That's mine too, but nowadays teams and especially managers last about 6 months in one place. What is one supposed to do?

Re: Moneyball teams

#177

Post by saghm »

ethbro wrote: post #171
saghm wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baseball team currently with the highest roster salary is not the Yankees, but the Los Angeles Dodgers by almost 20%. They're currently in third place, behind teams with the 16th and 26th highest roster salaries (out of 30 MLB teams)[1]. Obviously it's early on the season, but we can look at last year's season to get a better heuristic. The top two teams in terms of roster salary were once again the Dodgers and Y…

I'd imagine the majority of sports have a fairly loose correlation between money spent and winning due to (a) limited sample size leading to high variance (even with a superior player selection strategy), (b) limited number of games played (though baseball does better than other sports here), and (c) games consisting of more dependent than independent events (leading to low chance events having cascading repurcussion…

I don't disagree, but I also don't think that's indicative that paying the most money is the optimal strategy. I'd much rather play for a team that does win rather than one that "should" but doesn't. My point, which I alluded to in the last paragraph, was not that teams shouldn't spend a lot of money, but that spending a lot of money is not a good substitute for spending money intelligently.

Re: Moneyball teams

#178

Post by asdfasdf32r3 »

conjecTech wrote: post #133
asdfasdf32r3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." This is the older, common wisdom that has essentially been refuted by modern analytics (SABRmetrics, if you will). Team-dependent statistics like R + RBI (and pitcher ERA!) are dependent on the performa…

It seems like we're more or less in agreement...Team performance and individual performance are interdependent, particularly in naive statistics like the ones you've mentioned are traditionally used. You're talking about making team-independent estimations of player value. That's completely valid. What I'm also saying is that in a similar vein, when you are considering how a player's addition will impact a team, you…

Yes, agreement! Thank you for nudging me to recognize that.

However, the studies I've seen (regular Fangraphs and BP reader) suggest these interactions between player skill sets is minimal, if such an effect can be shown.

Take lineup position. It's been studied ad nauseam, by some of the brightest in the field. Turns out, lineup order, over the course of a season, doesn't really matter that much. An intentionally suboptimal lineup underperforms an "optimized" one by maybe a couple wins per year. Almost all lineups actually implemented are more like fractions of a win, which is generally within error bars.

By and large, baseball is a game where you just assemble the best talent and they will win. (This is in regard to on field talent; I do not believe "clubhouse culture fit" is as silly as in the tech world, and is usually retroactively defined.)

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