Moneyball principles for college?

My opinion... with the great disparity between HS pitching and hitting across the country I think it would be hard to compare players.

Given the disparity of quality and unbiased scorekeeping I agree.  

Whose going to agree if I keep the scorebook for our team and my son happens to be the best hitter and fielder on the team?  

Good point.  That plays into it also.  I imagine that's one of the reasons coaches and scouts prefer the PG Tournaments to observe players.

Skills not stats get players recruited so #1 and 2 are out the window. Most college coaches seem to drool over speed. More so since BBCOR. If you can hit you can play. So I would say no on three of four. Colleges play a numbers game. They bring in 35 players they believe can play now. If about 20 pan out they're all set. Then they bring in 10-15 new ones next year. How many pro teams have 10-15 prospects ready to step in?

I can see the problems with some of it. However, what if college coaches applied those principles when evaluating JUCO players. Would it makes sense in that case?

Keep in mind that Moneyball was about a team that applied principles over a decade ago. The majority of specific principles are far outdated in the game today.

I'll address each principle two separate ways. One from the angle of a college coach looking to win a lot of games, and one from a scout looking to evaluate talent.

1) Coach: The objective of a hitter should be to not make an out. The way to do this is to get on base. So, yes, OBP is extremely important. Batting average is very much dependent on defensive abilities, and therefore tends to be somewhat inaccurate in terms of performance evaluation. RBIs are not an individual stat and therefore are absolutely pointless when measuring individual performance.

Scout: A player that shows the ability to have good plate discipline is a desirable commodity, and is an attribute that is taken into account.

2) Coach: I don't know what "proven winner" is supposed to mean, so I'll assume it means a good pitcher. If that's the case, then yes, a coach would prefer this type of pitcher.

Scout: Absolutely not. Talent is talent and projection is projection. It is impossible to make a blanket statement like that and hold it as true. The A's do not apply this philosophy.

3) Coach: It depends on the success rate with which a player is successful stealing bases. A run expectancy chart would be ideal for such an analysis, although the disparity of skill amongst college teams would lead me to question the accuracy of such a chart. Speed is NEVER a bad thing regardless if the coach is someone who wants to steal a lot of bases. 

Scout: Speed is good. The faster, the better.

4) Coach: Depends on the position.

Scout: Same as above. It would be very difficult to project a player who can't hit, but defense is extremely valuable at many positions. Enormous strides have been made in the professional game with regards to valuing defensive prowess and therefore the Moneyball ideals of defense are somewhat (although not completely) outdated.

I'd also like to stress the importance of understanding what Moneyball was actually about. The book was outlining a business that found market inefficiencies in a lopsided market that enabled them to have a competitive advantage. It was a book about economic principles… many people fail to realize that.

Easier to get walked in HS because u can play against a lot of teams w weak pitchers. I see this w players on sons Summer travel team. When u start to see good pitchers esp those hitting corners u may see them struck out looking a lot more.

Still some stealing on good college teams.even if your not stealing it's nice to have really fast runner on second make it in to score on deep OF hit.

"Do colleges follow these general principles when looking at high school players?"

There are several hundred collegiate baseball programs.  And each one of them has a coach with a philosophy that is going to be unique to him at least to some extent.  Some will borrow concepts from Moneyball, others won't. 

Not everyone agrees that Moneyball was actually a success in real life (though of course in the movie it worked beautifully!).

I have no inside information about college baseball recruiting, but I think it would be hard to apply most of these concepts.

Hitting - Very difficult to compare these kinds of numbers for HS players from different states, conferences, etc.  Looking at PG/GameChanger numbers would probably be better, but still not good enough. However, a coach might get a good sense of this by watching 4-5 games against good pitching.

Pitching - Winning in HS probably doesn't translate well to college. Most HS kids can't even hit a run-of-the-mill curveball.

Speed - College coaches love speed. Are they misguided, or is it more important in college than pro?

Defense - This one may apply more than the others, but more in choosing a line-up rather than in recruiting.

If anything, I would think that a Moneyball college coach would really favor JC transfers since he would have reasonably reliable data to analyze.

Originally Posted by Stafford:

I can see the problems with some of it. However, what if college coaches applied those principles when evaluating JUCO players. Would it makes sense in that case?

Your assumption is that scorebooks and numbers at the JUCO level are equal to that of the ML. Bad assumption! In general, each succeeding level is better at everything than the previous one. Better facilities, better administration, better coaching, better players, and better officiating. Unfortunately, no amateur level comes close to the big boys when it comes to scoring and statistics.

However, in very general terms, those items you mentioned are likely followed to at least some degree. Something to keep in mind is, “college” includes a lot of different levels. Many people don’t know there are two very different kinds of JUCOs, then you’ve got the NAIA schools along with all the different NCAA levels.

The bigger the dawg and the closer it is, the more they can pick and choose, and the more $$$ they’ll be able to devote to it. Unfortunately, its really difficult to get hold of HS numbers for every team, so whether those numbers are good or bad really makes little difference.

I think, actually, that walks are one of the more projectable stats. In Moneyball, they found that patience at the plate, which leads to increased walks, projected well. They found that the skill needed (patience) didn't seem to be something that they could teach. If you weren't walking in HS, you most likely wouldn't start exhibiting patience at the plate in pro ball. So, sure, you'd walk more in HS than the pros, but it projects well.

Originally Posted by roothog66:

I think, actually, that walks are one of the more projectable stats. In Moneyball, they found that patience at the plate, which leads to increased walks, projected well. They found that the skill needed (patience) didn't seem to be something that they could teach. If you weren't walking in HS, you most likely wouldn't start exhibiting patience at the plate in pro ball. So, sure, you'd walk more in HS than the pros, but it projects well.

I’m not so sure a lot of walks in HS come off of “weak” pitchers, if “weak” means poor pitching skills. My PERCEPTION is, just the opposite is very often true, where a pitcher with above average skills compared to the group, is trying to nibble and/or having pitches called that are by their nature harder to control.

Having said that, I couldn’t say whether a hitter drawing walks is projectable or not. In order to be projectable, it would seem to me to mean drawing walks is a skill all by itself. But it seems it would be made up of several skills, the main one being having a solid understanding of the strike zone.

I don’t know right off hand how anyone would go about proving a player who walks a lot in HS would walk a lot at the next level, other than taking that stat for each year in HS and seeing if it remains fairly constant in relation to the other hitters at the higher levels. In order to that, you’d need the numbers for the average player, and I don’t see any way to do that for HS players.

Reminds me the saying " you can't walk off the island"

I do see the idea of being able to predict whether or a person will continue to walk is more of a personality trait than a physical ability.

Some kids can't sit still, are always being told to stop running, are being told to stop doing that. And you know what, they can't. Call it hyper activity, or call it being a boy, or whatever, some kids are just wired that way. And telling some kids to take a pitch or to wait on a certain pitch or a pitch in a certain area is just not going to work. They won't have the patience, just can't do it.

Others can sit on the pitch they want to hit, and don't panic when it's 0-2. They're still waiting on the pitch they want. That type of patience and composure is not something you can coach. Just my opinion.

The thing about walks is that they require the participation not just of the pitcher and hitter, but of the umpire as well.

As my kid moves into playing HS I'm interested to see how skill level of the umpires compare to LL and travel and how that impacts his game.

My kid has always been selective at the plate, sometimes too much so.  His first year of LL Majors I had him hitting leadoff, and he had more walks than hits. I think he hit close to 400 but his OBP was off the charts. The next year when he was a 12U I batted him #3 and told him I needed him to drive in some runs, but he kept getting more walks  than hits. I even moved him to #6  for a couple games so that he knew there was nobody behind him to drive him in if he walked.  Didn't work.   I moved him  to #2.

But travel was a different story.  We had pretty good volunteer umps in LL, but in travel, there are too many guys working 4 or 5 games per day.  Some of those guys are looking for outs, so anything close with 2 strikes gets a kid rung up. It took a while, but my kid learned to swing at not just borderline pitches, but pitches out of the zone with 2 strikes on him.  He still lead his team in BBs, but nothing like before.

So now the question is will the strike zone be more accurate in HS, and will he be able to return to his more selective approach. From what I saw in unofficial fall ball, so far so good.  The umps look pretty good, and he seems to be ready to take a few more pitches.

That was also the conclusion of the Moneyball guys.

After one year of JV and one of varsity, my 2015 would answer that with a resounding "No, they are not more accurate". Or at least not accurate enough. He has a very good eye at the plate. There have been plenty of times when he was wrung up on a pitch 6-8 inches off the plate. After the game he'll tell me about it and my question is always "You're absolutely right. Does that change anything?"

Still a work in progress for him to get a read on the umpire, foul bad pitches off, or put them in play. He just hates making soft outs. Another part of the equation is that he hits with power and is not a burner, so his walks aren't as valuable as some of the other guys.

The first statement is absolutely true.  As far as the second statement, I will say that it remains dynamic.  By that I mean that every umpire is still different.  In HS, I saw a wide variety of umps.  Some had a HUGE strike zone, some had a zone the size of a paper plate.  It is the hitter's and pitchers job to figure out each individual umpires strike zone and take advantage of it.  

Now that my son is playing in college, it's not a lot different.  I'd say you don't get any HUGE strike zones, but there are still umpires that have bigger zones than others.  Some will give the low strike, some the high.  Some the inside, some the outside.  I think as you go up the ladder, the differences are smaller, but they are still there.  But in HS, you will still get some crazy calls.  Like I said, the best hitters and pitchers will figure out what's going on pretty quick and work to take advantage of it.

Yep. You don't walk your way to college ball. I remember my son's showcase coach telling him to stop working the count and drive the ball. He told him he'll vouch for his plate discipline if it comes up in conversation.

J H and RLB are exactly right. The A's were taking advantage of mis-priced skills in the market for baseball players. One thing always happens in a market when any aanalyst finds a pricing inefficiency and starts to arbitrage it: the arbitrage opportunity narrows and eventually disappears.

So, OBP is no longer mis-priced in the baseball player marketplace. That doesn't mean it isn't just as important a factor, just that it's not undervalued, and so a small revenue team like the A's can no longer exploit the mis-pricing.

So, yes, I believe college coaches understand and buy into the basic elements of saber metric/moneyball analysis.

As for the question of project ability of plate discipline, I think it is definitely something that carries through from level to level. It was always a strength of my son's. In HS he had 5X as many BBs as Ks. In college, obviously that was not going to happen, but still he had about 1.3 walks for each K, and Baseball America said he had the best strike zone judgment in the ACC. First seasoning pro, he still had more walks than K's.

So I believe that this ability, whether it is learned or whether it is innate, is definitely something that transcends levels. 

I agree with JH and RLB that Moneyball was not so much about OBP or college pitchers as much as it was about exploiting market inefficiencies when a ball club could not match the rich big boys(Yankees and RedSox for example). Those inefficiencies change as they are exploited and people jump on the bandwagon. One thing that has always bugged me is that the misconception of the A's of that time were a bunch of Scott Hattebergs's when the real stars of the offense were Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez offensively who were not exceptional base on ball guys and a tremendous starting staff.

I raised my son to be a leadoff batter who would be a very disciplined hitter but at different levels he had to adjust his aggressiveness up as the pitching got better, the first time being about age 14 in travel ball as more and better breaking balls were seen and then in college where you must be more aggressive than high school. Yet despite this he still walked almost one time per game in high school, while hitting between .426 and .526 in AA high school ball with power. In college I explained that disciplined didn't necessarily mean walking all the time as much as going deep in counts and seeing many pitches and that is what he has done reaching base 36-38 times on BB's and HBP each season in college while hitting .351 and .347 and having a ton of 7-10 pitch AB's as the leadoff batter on one of the premier DII's in the nation.

I feel that unless a hitter developes discipline at a young age it gets harder and harder to tone down OVERAGGRESIVENESS and lack of controlling the corners of the plate. You see this in ML baseball where many guys continue as non walkers or guys who see few pitches no matter how much they are criticized for it. They can't change. It is a rare young hitter that can up his walks a lot in one season such as Mike Trout did and still be just as good a hitter because they are often changing their very nature as a hitter.

So its not the Moneyball concept we are talking about for high school guys as just talking about developing plate discipline while still being a deadly hitter. I don't feel plate discipline shows up as much on ball four as it does on 0-0, 0-1, 1-0, 0-1, 2-0, 1-1. and 1-2 and how the hitter approaches each in each individual AB. Even the greatest leadoff guy can't take the first pitch every time or even the vast majority of time. But he will do it more often than a normal guy who lacks discipline.

I think much is made of the statement about stealing in the book Moneyball but the value of stealing is all about percentage of success. A guy who steals 30 bases but is caught 17 times is hurting his teams offense while a 80% success rate or above on steals (certainly on steals of second) helps the chances of scoring more runs. The success percentage has to be even higher on steals of third to be a plus. While OBP is more important than sheer speed alone in scoring runs, speed can't be discounted too much because it plays in both offensive and defensive performance. Jeremy Giambi had a good OBP but he was such a slow, poor baserunner that he overcame whatever he gained the minute his OBP dropped below an exceptional level. The best thing is to find that Great OBP guy who has speed--Oh yeah-Craig Biggio!!

From my perspective, this pretty much sums it up.

Originally Posted by JMoff:

From my perspective, this pretty much sums it up.

Are you saying you agree a player’s speed isn’t a statistic, and how does a coach/scout who doesn’t get to see every game, know if a player can hit or not?

The logistics for looking at every player eligible for college are far too enormous to allow even the biggest schools to see more than a fraction of the nearly 500,000 HS players in the nation. There has to be some way to winnow out the chaff, and like it or not, that happens by the use of some form of statistic.

I would imagine there are market inefficiencies in college baseball, too. The big programs have a huge recruiting advantage over the others for the blue chippers. But maybe there's a way to build a winning program with other types of players. The question may be, how does the innovative college coaching staff exploit the current system?  In Moneyball, the data was readily available for the Paul DePodesta character to analyze. With college recruiting, is there data available that's being ignored or undervalued? I can't think of any.

I used to believe that if a kid can hit, then he would be found. I'm not so sure about that though. At a showcase camp with pro style workout, lots of kids can hit bp fastballs. However, fewer will have the height, speed, whatever that is valued.

Of course, I'm leaving out what is always said, don't worry about the result. Coaches/scouts or whoever are evaluating the swing and not where the ball went.

So, a tall, fast kid with a nice swing will be way overvalued in comparison to smaller, slower kid who is a better hitter in game situations, especially if no one sees the good hitter in a game situation and that is his only tool.

Stafford,

Be thee careful. You’re on the verge of spewing heresy and being labeled as a drooling dolt who just doesn’t understand.

You should be a bit more respectful of coaches/scouts or whoever! Don’t you know they’re never wrong? C’mon! Have you ever heard of a ML team drafting a dud or making a bad trade? It just doesn’t happen because the system is so darned efficient and all the participants so knowledgeable.

I'm just thinking about a kid that I saw over the last two years. He could hit for average and power. But, he was short, and kind of softly built, a little heavy, and slow. But, he was a hitter. I guess he got marked down for his range on defense, since he was short and slow, but he was a scooper/picker at 1B. He bailed out his infielders on shorthops in every game I saw him play. He killed it high school over the two seasons I saw him play and was a strong legion player as well. I have no idea if he attended camps or showcases. 

I believe he had the talent with the bat to hit at any level of college baseball. He went to a D2 program and I will follow him out of my own interest even though I don't know him personally. A D1 near his high school didn't offer. Go figure.

And for the record, I realize that coaches, recruiters and scouts know more than I do. But, I still wonder about things sometimes.

In normal baseball parlance, there is a distinction between measurables (height, weight, velocity, 60-yard time, etc) and statistics.

In the singular, "statistic" is widely but imprecisely used to refer to either a single data point (number of home runs) or to a number that reflects some sort of analysis of game performance (ERA, OBP). 

I'm guessing here, but I guess that JH does pay attention to high school players' measurables but doesn't consider those measurables to be statistics, even though Stats For Gnats would include those measurables in his broad definition of statistics.  

Is this correct, guys?

College coaches bring in projectable talent. Stats, Moneyball, etc have nothing to do with talent evaluation and projectabilty. 

The college game in many ways is like playoff baseball, so pitching and defense dominate. The season is essentially made up of 10 three game playoff's for conferences, plus a few games in between. A conference championship and then Regionals. Pitching dominates. Speed is alive and well in college ball and stealing is a big part of the game. 

So most of the "money" goes to pitching and fast skilled players. The best teams are the best recruiters. (plus those who can develop talent quickly since they only have them for three years)

Swampboy,

You’re pretty much on target as to how I use the term “statistic”. I do that because I see anything that used to measure something, in this case baseball players, as being a statistic.

I see the stats used to measure “game performance” as just that. Not things to use to project players’ futures, but simple measurements of what’s taking place in the present. I do believe that if the numbers for say HS were as varied and dependable across the entire spectrum of HS players as ML numbers, they could certainly be used to some degree to prognosticate. But that has never meant I advocate their use for that in the present system.

Originally Posted by BOF:

College coaches bring in projectable talent. Stats, Moneyball, etc have nothing to do with talent evaluation and projectabilty. …

Well, I wouldn’t say they have “nothing” to do with talent evaluation and projectabilty, but I would agree they have a completely different function. The numbers will draw attention, such as if a kid playing on some backwater team out in the boonies suddenly shows up as hitting 3 times the normal number of HRs or striking out 19 batters a game. But that’s not the same thing as using those numbers to base projections on.

If one is intellectually honest, there’s just no way a scout is going to be able to personally evaluate every HS player in an area like ours where there are more than 170 teams. Heck, he’s lucky if he gets to see every player once, let alone enough times to get a reasonably accurate evaluation. So, he has to have some reason to go take a look at a kid, and those reasons almost always are that the player is performing far superior to his peers.

Back to the question as to whether colleges care about the things that the "Moneyball approach" showed to be undervalued in terms of contributing to winning baseball games:

First, J H and others are correct when they wrote that Moneyball was at core a financial analysis rather than a baseball analysis. They found that the market for baseball players was systematically mis pricing certain skills, such as OBP and overpricing things such as saves. The A's took advantage of these pricing inefficiencies, and were able to then use their limited financial resources to maximum effect.

In financial market terms, this is what is known as an arbitrage. Having better insight as to how an asset should be priced, you sell the overvalued asset and buy the undervalued.

One thing always happens: when an actor in a market demonstrates through arbitrage transactions that the market has mispriced something, others follow, and those mispricings disappear. So when the Sox and others started waking up to the new way of pricing baseball skills, those skills have now come to be priced correctly.

Now as to the question of whether a specific skill like "getting on base" or "plate discipline" is projectable, I'd have to say definitely. That is, is a player who demonstrates this skill at one level likely to also demonstrate it at the next? I'd say the A's sure thought so - that was the whole point of finding guys who get on base. If the skill did not transcend levels, there would be no reason to select for it.

With my own son, it certainly did,if you take OBP and K/BB ratio as a measure of plate discipline. In HS, my son had better than a 1:5 K/BB in four years at varsity level. I forget what his OBP was, but it was high.

In college, obviously he was going to strike out more, but he was still about 1.3 walks for every K, had about a .430 OBP over 4 years, and Baseball America said he had the best strike zone judgment in the ACC one year.

His first season as a pro, same basic thing. .430-ish OBP and more BB's than K's.

I know it is a sample of one, but I do think this is projectable.It goes to overall approach to hitting and strike zone judgement, each of which seems to carry over level to level.

This is not to say that OPB or K:BB ratio is the most important thing as a batter, just that I believe it is more-or-less an attribute of a hitter like power or speed that is somewhat inherent.

I don't know if its old  school thinking, new school, moneyball or whatever. But I was taught, learned however you want to put it, played HS and College ball in 70's and 80's, that the sign of a good hitter was at least their walks equal their strikeouts. If your strikeouts were outstripping your walks you were in trouble. Optimally your walks were greater then your strikeouts. And back then we got mad if we struck out.Why? Because nothing happens when you strike out. Nothing. Just a walk back to the dugout.

It's as old school as "choke and poke."

Moses -

It's actually relatively rare for a good hitter to have more BB's than K's, at least in the majors. Of the top 25 hitters in 2013, not one did it. A couple were close, such as Cabrera. Even in college, if you look at most rosters, very few hitters have more BB's than K's.

Is it desirable? Yes, especially for hitters that aren't the power guys. But I don't think you can say a hitter with more K's than BB's is not a good hitter.

Rob- Correct. The consensus at the big league level is that a strikeout is far less detrimental than minimizing power potential due to a change in approach (opportunity cost, I suppose, would be a fitting term here). No one would say strikeouts are a good thing, but they are far less bad than they were previously considered to be.

From a scouting standpoint, a high strikeout rate could raise a red flag. It could also lead to a projection, given a player's athleticism and an organization's ability to make alterations and maximize the player's toolset. Again, strikeouts are not a good thing. But context is necessary when evaluating a player, at every level.