Extreme Moneyball: An Independent Baseball Team’s Descent Into Sabermetric Thinking

so you may be looking at the title and you might be a bit confused about a year ago I decided that I should start reading actual books one of the books I found is called the only rule is it has to work by riders and co-hosts of the affectively wild podcast Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller now you may have realized that I said I bought this book about a year ago yeah it took me about ten months for me to start reading it apparently my attention span only allows me to binge watch YouTube videos regardless I read the book and I highly recommend it to any baseball fan the basic premise of the book is that Sam and Ben wanted to apply sabermetric ideas to construct and run a baseball team their ideas took them to the Pacific Association a lower-ranking league of independent professional baseball where they took over the Sonoma stompers with little money at their disposal they set upon their quest for baseball supremacy using nothing but sabermetrics this video is essentially a summary of the book but I'm mainly looking at the methods that they used and what the results were I'm not really going to talk about actual storylines only if they are essential to the context of the statistics it wouldn't be fair to spoil everything about the book so go check out the book if you want to learn more about the storylines now let's take a dive into the Sonoma stompers descent into sabermetric thinking or what I like to call extreme Moneyball now I think it's important to understand the context of some of the main characters involved in the prologue we are introduced to Paul Havas Davich a starting pitcher who in April 2015 was trying out for the River City Rascals of the frontier League he had done pretty well in his scrimmages however in his final scrimmage he gave up a home run he would be cut by a text from the manager a player in the prime of his career who was cut by a team nine levels below the majors had now gotten an opportunity from a team 2,000 miles away he would be taking a pay cut from 600 to $500 Paul also feared that his girlfriend would break up with him as he had spent the last few summers circling around the independent baseball world he packed his bags and went to Sonoma Sam and Ben knew Paul as a name on a spreadsheet no video no radar statistics no prior interviews nothing but he went 11 and 1 with a 1.8 oer a 4 a division to college team as a senior I think this story speaks volumes about the baseball world but Paul is living in a much different area of that world compared to Sam and Ben Paul was worried about his time in baseball coming to an end at the same time Sam and Ben were thinking about the lack of sabermetric usage in baseball they were thinking why don't teams try to man out fields and five men in fields against extreme ground ball in fly ball hitters why don't they deploy their best relievers at the most important times instead of wasting them in low leverage situations where they're likely to record a save that's what Sam and Ben were thinking about like I said they were living in different ends of the baseball world Sam and Ben were trying to run a crazy experiment while Paul was trying to chase an unlikely dream now that we understand the underlying context of this experiment let's talk about the team Sam and Ben were given the chance to run the baseball operations of the Sonoma stompers the stoppers are part of a four team league known as the Pacific Association this league is nine levels below the majors Sonoma is a town of around 11,000 people near the Bay Area in California however this town is really close-knit every season players actually with local residents known as host families it's like this every single season now on to the actual team rosters are comprised of 22 players the stoppers only have three players from the previous season that will be returning however they find a veteran player named felon Lentini who they call PHA he becomes the stompers player manager later on they attend the league wide player tryouts and draft two noteworthy tidbits salmon been found a player that was built like David Ortiz but was deceptively athletic no one but these guys noticed him long story short they essentially tampered their way to drafting him also the stoppers traded six doughnuts for a third-round pick particularly three maple to chocolate and one glazed no I'm not kidding personally I think that trade is unfair I would ask for at least three glazed doughnuts in return third-round picks are valuable in the end the guys assemble their team you may notice that there has been no sabermetrics so far enter the spreadsheet what set Ben and Sam apart from the rest of the league was that they had statistical knowledge that they could apply so they could search for wrongly released players using the previous season stats all of these stats compiled into a spreadsheet these are known as the spreadsheet players an interesting quote stuck out to me 99.9% of the talent is sucked away in the draft that remaining point 1 percent could be the key to the stompers season the spreadsheet had everything from adjusted on-base percentage to catcher's framing a lot of the spreadsheet guys don't sign for their own personal reasons but they did sign these players here's what the opening day roster looks like pause the video if you want to look them over now here's how salmon been predicted their players would finish by the end of the season what did salmon Ben have at their disposal that no other team an independent baseball had they had pitch FX at their home park these are cameras that will track pitches to record the break velocity location speed off the bat the angle the trajectory and a lot more but that's not all they had at their disposal they also had hit FX which provides measurements of batted all trajectory and command FX which provides measurements of pitch accuracy they were also given access to bats or baseball analysis and tracking system which allows the user to import video and to set time stamps for each pitch tag its type and location and to mark the outcome of each at-bat all of these assets are new for this level of baseball statistics are not a certainty spreadsheets are not a certainty salmon Ben understood that the more we learn about baseball the better we understand how misguided any sense of certainty is you can have all of the stats and predictions in the world but only the players know what it's like to stand in that batter's box you can show them all of the adjustments they need to make but that can fly out the window in an instant baseball can't be perfectly predicted the goal for Sam and Ben was to find a balance between these two clashing ways of thinking let's see if they accomplish that goal the stompers won on opening day thanks to a go-ahead homerun by one of their spreadsheet guys Kristin gay day their first use of the shift on a pull hitter didn't work as the batter bunted but for the rest of the game that same batter grounded into the shift through the team's first six games they went six and O which is actually the first perfect week in franchise history here are the stats from those games notice how large the gap is in the four right columns the Worc plus difference is very telling now let's look at the pitching stats through the first six games the noticeable differences are an e ra and average in short the stompers were the best team in the league for the first six games interestingly during the next weekend Jose Canseco was part of the team for two games yes the Jose Canseco fifty-year-old Jose Canseco here are his stats from those two games not great but it could have been worse later on the MLB Draft happened this is where the spreadsheet comes into play like I said earlier 99.9 percent of the talent is scooped up in the draft Sam and Ben are looking for that 0.1% here are a few names and stats from that spreadsheet the player that they end up signing is Taylor EADS however not for a few more weeks the stompers have started the season 11 & 2 here is what their pitching stats look like look at the huge gap and runs Allowed some of this can be attributed to Shawn Conroy who was one of the league's best pitchers at the time while he was mainly placed in the bullpen the guys wanted him to start he was given the opportunity during a game on pride night Conroy came out as gay a few days earlier the first professional baseball player to do so in history he ended up pitching a complete game during his start on pride night the scorecard from this game is now in Cooperstown here's a funny quote from the book our small team has a chance to help a player make history thanks to a spreadsheet that discriminates based only on stats the stompers would lose a few games because of old-school bullpen management from their manager fay in one game in particular the stompers lost a game because Fay didn't bring in their best reliever Shawn Conroy because he's a closer in faes mind the closer is out there to get the save that's it later in the season Faye is fired after many more disagreements that will take too long to talk about he is replaced by a new guy named Yoshi heading towards the end of the first half of the season the stoppers are 20 and 10 with a three-game lead and nine games before the first half ends by the way the way the championship game works if you are at the top of the first half standings you have locked your place into the championship game so if the stompers stay in first place they are going to the championship game here are the average ages and the percentage of first-year players per team the stompers are the youngest team in the league and one-third of their players are playing their first professional season another player the team signed was Santos Saldivar a pitcher entering his first professional season he was on the same college team as pitcher josé de Lyonne here's how they compared stats wise during their last season de Lyonne was a junior and Saldivar was a senior while de Lyonne was drafted in the 24th round of the 2013 draft and became a top 30 prospect Saldivar left college after his senior season in 2015 without being drafted and went to play for Sonoma baseball is unfair salmon been give the new manager Yoshi some stats that show that pitchers do worse as they go through the lineup two or three times they recognize that some pitchers just want the W and their win column so they don't want to be taken out before completing five innings but at the same time this traditional thinking is hindering potential team success that illustrates the argument between traditional and sabermetric thinking there was a system that Ben and Sam wanted to implement that I had never heard of a system of calling pitches from the dugout using a computerized random number generator so the selection of pitches is truly random and the batter can't pick up on patterns from certain pitchers however it would be very difficult to set up they would have to figure out how often to throw each pitch for each pitcher in each game and how to relay that call to the catcher and/or the pitcher in just a few seconds and how to convince the pitcher to throw a pitch that he doesn't want to throw they also had other ideas such as using arm fatigue metrics to make pitching changes overall it would be too much to implement it's almost the end of the first half of the season and the team decides to use a five men in field for the first time something you rarely see even in the majors it turns out to be a success as the player that they used it on had trouble adjusting to it the stoppers would go on to win the first half of the season clinching their place into the championship game unfortunately many of their key players would not be there to take part later in the season teams and leagues above the Pacific Association poach Talent throughout the season so the league loses a few players because of that also because this is a summer league some of these players are only playing for a portion of the summer because they have to go back to their normal lives whether it be school or some other commitment many players that were on the team at the end of the first half of the season were not there in the championship game this hurt the team's second-half performance which I'll get into in a minute there's actually something that Ben and Sam overlooked about the landscape of the league that they are in their opponents severely lack left-handed hitters look at these comparisons the league was essentially experiencing a lefty shortage at this point in the season the stoppers left-handed pitchers had entered a slump this was a major reason why furthermore the stoppers perform much more poorly as a team in the second half of the season compared to their first half they actually lost two of their last three games of the season which lost them home-field advantage for the championship game here's how the league compares stats wise between their first and second halves of the season San rafeal is the only team with massive improvements Sonoma was the team that disappointed the most looking at Sonoma individually particularly with runners in scoring position you can see that in the second half of the season sonomas pitchers are giving up more hits with runners in scoring position while sonomas hitters are not driving in their own baserunners now we are at the championship game Ben and Sam actually did some sneaky business and got the best pitcher in the league Maxo BD signed by the Wichita wingnuts of the American Association he would actually be released from his new team after one ineffective start but he couldn't play for San Rafael because rejoining the team is against league rules baseball is unfair they also indirectly got Matt Chavez the best hitter for the San Rafael Pacific's signed by the San Diego Padres where he did not perform up to standard and high able now San Rafael are without two other best players in the championship game let's fast-forward to the top of the eighth inning the stompers are down by two runs one of the best hitters for the stompers Mark Hurley is up to the plate with two runners on base the manager of the Pacific's decides to bring in a left-handed pitcher Chris Lovejoy to face the right-handed Hurley here are the WRC splits for Hurley and here are the weighted on base average splits for Lovejoy this is one of the worst managerial decisions you can make Howard would single and bring in a run now comes in Andrew Parker a guy who was much better against lefties than righties you would think that the manager would bring in a right-handed pitcher but traditional baseball thinking causes the Pacific's right-handed closer Guadeloupe Barrera to continue warming up rather than come in why because he's the closer and he only pitches in the ninth inning what did Parker do he belted a ball over the fence for a three-run home run now the stoppers are up by two runs except it had actually bounced over the wall so it was a ground rule double and the game was tied let's go to the bottom of the ninth with Sean Conroy pitching who is actually very efficient with runners on base Conroy used to be the closer but now he's in the sabermetric friendly fireman role or if you play out of the park baseball the stopper role well despite all the stats in the stompers favor Conroy gives up a walk-off single and San Rafael are champions baseball is unfair was this experiment of failure no it wasn't because baseball is a game of failure in fact Ben and Sam's experiment was the reason why two of the best pitchers on the stompers Santos al d'Ivoire and Dylan Stoops were signed by major league teams the Brewers and Padres respectively these teams used the pitch FX data that was gathered technology that no other independent team had access to but at the same time data can only get you so far as seen with many moments throughout the season people can read the same data and come to two different opinions the projections from opening day by Sam and Ben weren't the most accurate the spreadsheet pitchers were solid while the spreadsheet hitters didn't fulfill their promise while the Sonoma stoppers didn't win at all they became a symbol for progress in baseball of course we saw that with sabermetrics but along with Shawn Conroy story the 2016 stompers became the first professional team to have multiple female players on the roster while enroute to the franchise's first championship all in all the goal of the experiment may not have been met but it progressed the sport more than salmon Ben could have ever imagined in the words of baseball's forward thinker Brad Pitt how can you not be romantic about baseball check out the book in the description if you want to learn more because I can assure you guys I did not go over everything I hope you guys enjoyed the video thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: SportStorm

Views: 71,337

Rating: 4.9249873 out of 5

Keywords: moneyball, baseball, mlb, independent baseball, sonoma stompers, sonoma stompers 2015, the only rule is it has to work, sabermetrics, baseball sabermetrics, baseball advances statistics, baseball statistics, sean conroy, extreme moneyball, moneyball baseball, an independent baseball teams descent into sabermetric thinking, baseball story

Id: H22QP46O55c

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020