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Moneyball teams

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Re: Moneyball teams

#121

Post by stupidhn »

bsder wrote: post #104
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. B…

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

And it's taken over every sport thereafter: soccer, hockey, football and basketball.

Re: Moneyball teams

#122

Post by humanrebar »

ryandrake wrote: post #109

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…

> By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak...

YMMV here. I've seen many projects fail because teams unnecessarily accumulated technical debt of various sorts. I guess you could blame management for not knowing about it or prioritizing correctly or something, but good engineers know that you have to include technical cleanup in the feature estimate or you'll end up like this.

I've also seen many unforced errors that created more technical debt than was worth it (over-complicated from-scratch frameworks, betting on unproven demo-ware, etc.).

Re: Moneyball teams

#123

Post by Rylinks »

ryandrake wrote: post #107
Rylinks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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?

Right, that's the point: sports teams benefit from being able to pay below-market rates to players they have developed. If you're doing the standard things to retain talent either way, why not just hire someone skilled?

I'm not arguing about the moral case here. It would be great if companies invested in people out of a sense of responsibility. But I don't think "As you sow, so shall you reap" translates from professional basketball.

Re: Moneyball teams

#124

Post by asdfasdf32r3 »

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…

"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 performance of the rest of the team. They also correlate much less with a team winning games than other stats, like OBP.

That's one of the central theses of Moneyball and the SABR movement: it's better to ignore stats like (pitcher) Wins, RBI, and R, because they measure the teammates contribution more than the player you're tryign to measure.

One popular advanced pitching statistic is literally named Fielding Independent Pitching, and is calculated using only BB, K, and HR. This tracks more with contributions to a team winning than stats that include fielding skill, randomness, sequencing, etc.

What you described for a good hit / bad field team does work around the edges, but these effects are not very strong. The latest research suggests the biggest impact might be matching your pitching staff tendencies with fielders; if you have a flyball heavy staff, invest in better OF defense (Mariners, 2017). If you have worm burners (Houston, esp w/ Keuchel), invest in your IF defense.

The goal of the modern stat movement is to evaluate a player independent of team context using statistics that do not depend on their teammates. This is because estimating a players "true talent level" is much more useful than evaluating RBI.

Re: Moneyball teams

#125

Post by humanrebar »

ryandrake wrote: post #107
Rylinks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The only companies that should be worried about "poaching" are the ones, for example, who are not paying market rate....

Well, "only" is implying it's not almost universal. Companies routinely pay market rate for new hires and then base raises and bonuses on KPIs for individuals, teams, or the whole organization.

Are there companies that say, "Well, we had a mediocre year, but market rate for devs went up 8%, so I guess that will be the baseline raise for everyone."? If a company does anything less, eventually employees are paid below market rate and they're forced to negotiate a bigger raise (convincing management to ignore KPIs and pay attention to market rates) or find a new job.

Re: Moneyball teams

#126

Post by humanrebar »

Rylinks wrote: post #123
ryandrake wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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? Right, that's the point: sports teams benefit from being able to pay below-market rates to players they have developed. If you're doing the standard things to retain talent either way, why not just hire someone skilled? I'm not arguing about…

> sports teams benefit from being able to pay below market rates to players they have developed

They also pay to keep players off the payroll of their competitors. There's not strong incentive to develop the players in those cases.

Re: Moneyball teams

#127

Post by jabv »

Will_Parker wrote: post #90
dionidium wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably true of a quarterback, but it's not generally true of hockey goalies. You'd much rather build your team around Sidney Crosby than any goalie to ever play the game.

Ok, fair enough! Though, has anyone ever analyzed this question rigorously with data? I.e. is there a Bill James equivalent in the ice hockey world? The larger point is that individual stars definitely matter a lot in pro sports. And recruiting and retaining them with extremely disproportionate amounts of money doesn't seem to be irrational for most sports.

Look into Corsi and Fenwick.

Re: Moneyball teams

#128

Post by humanrebar »

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…

> If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results.

Not really. We're not talking about computers inventing algorithms from raw data. People typically invent the heuristics and algorithms, so it's still people being clever and creative. They just have computers codify their decisions (i.e., code).

In other words, a spreadsheet didn't come up with the OBP correlation. A spreadsheet was just used to do the analysis more efficiently.

Re: Moneyball teams

#129

Post by draw_down »

caseysoftware wrote: post #48
Evolved wrote: post #35

One of my favorite movies, Miracle about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that upset the Soviets, had this dialogue that actually happened between Head Coach Herb Brooks and Assistant Head Coach Craig Patrick. I feel it applies here. Patrick: This is the final roster? You're kidding me, right? You're missing some of the best players. Brooks: I'm not looking for the best players, Craig. I'm looking for the right ones…

Which implies something major that everyone is glossing over: If the "right people" aren't the same as the "best people" are the criteria we're using for "best" correct?

When people either can't or don't want to measure the performance of who they picked and who they didn't, they resort to stories that sound good. Even if you have "rigor" around how you score candidates, if you don't connect those scores to subsequent performance it's all still just a narrative.

Re: Moneyball teams

#130

Post by sebastos »

pklausler wrote: post #111
jph wrote: post #18

Moneyball and Six Thinking Hats are excellent approaches to for people and roles. But they aren't enough. The key driver of top-tier teams is excellent ongoing safe communication. To build communications, use team goals (e.g. OKRs & KPIs), team ways of working (e.g. TEAM FOCUS), and team positions (e.g. scorecards). My notes about these are open source: https://joelparkerhenderson.github.io/ Edit to explain abbreviat…

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