Playing “Moneyball” with money

BOSTON — Never has the language of Major League Baseball’s championship seemed quite so archaic. How can you have a true World Series without Japan, Korea, Cuba or the Dominican Republic? Does the “Fall Classic” convey the very real possibility of snow cancellations? As for the Series hero, he will have to be “Mr. November,” leaving “Mr. October” to yesteryear’s Bob Gibsons and Reggie Jacksons.

The 2009 Series may also mark a revolution in an era defined by a term of far more recent vintage — “Moneyball,” made famous in a 2003 book by Michael Lewis. Lewis’ baseball classic introduced fans to a novel management approach, told through the shrewd mind and hubristic personality of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.

It posited a theory that would change the way baseball teams did business: that small-market teams like Oakland could utilize new measures of players and statistical analyses of game trends to compete effectively with richer, big-market teams that were threatening — by dint of revenue and payroll inequities — to dominate the game eternally.

For the serious fans, new hitting stats like OBP (on-base percentage) and OPS (a combination of OBP and power) quickly became a fundamental part of the modern game’s lexicon and were elevated above traditional measures — regarded by Beane as relics of another century — like batting average, home runs, runs batted in and stolen bases.

The “moneyball” approach favored patient hitters — Red Sox star Kevin Youkilis, a promising minor-leaguer back then, was famously anointed “The Greek God of Walks” — and hard-throwing pitchers. It pioneered efforts to develop more meaningful defensive stats than simply errors, numbers that would reflect a player’s defensive range as well as his reliability.

Beane never claimed to have invented this new, stat-centric approach. Writer Bill James, the king of baseball geeks, had been developing this baseball science, now called sabermetrics, for decades. And Sandy Alderson, Beane’s predecessor and former boss in Oakland, had already begun incorporating Jamesian principles in the A’s front-office approach. But it was under Beane — with journalist Lewis in attendance — that Oakland and baseball witnessed the fruits of the revolution.

In 2003, when Lewis’ book was published, the A’s would win the A.L. West for the third time in four seasons. And while the A’s lost in each of those years in the first round of the playoffs, they did take the league giants — the New York Yankees twice and the Boston Red Sox once — to a deciding fifth game.

In the ensuing years, Beane’s regime continued its success. By 2006, the A’s had a streak of eight consecutive winning seasons. And that year the A’s won another division title and — notably, in an all small-market match-up with the Minnesota Twins — made it through the first round of the playoffs. That triumph appeared to have exhausted Oakland’s good fortune. The big-market Detroit Tigers swept the A’s in the A.L. Championship series. And over the past three seasons, the team has been a consistent loser, with 76, 75 and 75 wins.

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