Moneyball Review: David Justice

One of the main players the Athletics brought in to replace Giambi and Damon was outfielder David Justice. Justice was clearly at the end of his career (he never played after the 2002 season), and the Yankees had declared he could no longer play. As the movie stresses, they even were paying half his salary. What the movie doesn't mention is that the Yankees originally shipped Justice to the NY Mets. Exactly a week later, the Mets shipped him to the Oakland A's for Mark Guthrie and Tyler Yates. Guthrie spent 1 year with the Mets, registering a -2.245 PE in 48 innings, earning a 1.4 WAR (he had a 0 WAR in 2001 with Oakland) and 1286 WASP. Yates didn't get into the majors until 2004, and only appeared in 21 games for the Mets. They weren't good appearances either, with a -1 WAR. This means the Mets got a grand total of .4 WAR in the trade. With the Athletics, Justice produced a 1.4 WAR, .376 OBP, 2.48 PAPP, 1.0 PPG, and 5000 WASP. The WASP isn't good, until you calculate that the Athletics only paid half of his salary, then his WASP is 2500 (below the Halladay Standard). Billy Beane and company took a chance on an aging player mainly because of his OBP, and it paid off.

Moneyball Review: Ricardo Rincon

Early on in the movie, Billy Beane tries to trade for Cleveland Indians reliever Ricardo Rincon. That is when he meets Jonah Hill's character as the trade doesn't go through. During the season, because the Indians are out of it, Beane is able to trade for Rincon. In the trade he gave up minor leaguer Marshall Mcdougall. Mcdougall never appeared in the majors for the Indians. Rincon, on the other hand, played for the Athletics from the middle of the 2002 season until the end of the 05 season. In that time he earned a 2.1 WAR and made about $3.9 million dollars. This gave him a very nice WASP of 1857. I guess there was a reason that Beane and company wanted Rincon.

Moneyball Review: Chad Bradford

As promised, this is part of a series I am doing off some of the moves found in the movie "Moneyball". Firstly, I wanted to talk about one of my favorite pitchers in the past decade or so, Chad Bradford. In the movie, Jonah Hill's character notes that Bradford was overlooked because people didn't like his strange delivery, which I have always loved personally. Jonah Hill's character claims that Bradford is worth 3 million dollars. This is a very large claim, since he made $170,000 with the White Sox in 98. In his last year with the White Sox in 2000, Bradford posted a WAR of .3, which is clearly not worth $3 million dollars a year. However, he did this in only 13.2 innings! If the White Sox gave him about 50 innings (more or less average for a reliever) in 2000 (assuming he pitched with the same success) he would have posted about a 1.14 WAR. This means (according to the Halladay Standard in WASP) he would have been worth $3,409,091. In 2000, his ERA was 1.98, with a 2.04 FIP (Fielder Independent ERA, tries to take fielders out of the equation), gave up no home runs, left over 70% of runners on base, and walked just one person. The movie doesn't really stress trade details on many players (which is probably a good thing for cinema sake), and doesn't mention that he was traded to the Athletics from Chicago for catcher Miguel Olivo. Olivo, unlike Bradford, is still in the Majors, but has bounced around and is playing for the Mariners. He played in pieces of the 2002, 2003, and 2004 seasons for the White Sox, playing in 166 games. He was really mediocre, posting a .5 WAR in that time, and was shipped off to Seattle. Bradford, on the other hand, was pretty nice for Oakland. He played for them from 01-04, pitching 248 innings with an ERA of 2.70, and a WHIP of 1.23. He averaged about 65% groundball outs, and picked up 61 holds in 02-04. His total WAR was 3.9 and he only made 1.7 million during that time (a far cry from the 3 million dollars a year he was worth), giving him an amazing WASP of 436 over that 4 year period. After the 04 season, he was traded to the Red Sox for Jay Payton. Payton's OBP wasn't all that great as an Athletic (.302 in 05, .325 in 06), but he was a formidable player, posting a 2.3 WAR in his 2 seasons. He made 6.25 million in his two years as an A, giving him a solid 2717 WASP. Bradford only spent 05 with the Red Sox, posting just a .5 WAR. Certainly the trade for Bradford, and then even the trade sending Bradford away, were trades that worked out greatly for the Athletics. Some of these moves seem quite magical, but they made sense when you looked at the numbers. When you do that enough times, you get movies made after you.

Moneyball review: Part 1

Over the next few days (or weeks, who knows) I will be posting about Moneyball the movie. Most of the posts will be about the actual trades Billy Beane made at the time, and will try to use some of the same methods (along with some of my own) they used to see if the moves actually worked. However, I would like to give a short review. I am no movie critic, and have no skill grading acting, so I am just giving an opinion. With that said, if you consider yourself a baseball fan, you need to watch this movie. It is now my favorite baseball movie. They used a nice mixture of actual game-footage and simulated acting for game moments, and its the best I have seen in a sports movie. Because it's based on real life events, we don't get the crummy storylines included in many sports movies. The players are real, and the story-line is (mostly, at least) real. Great job on research to not only know all the players involved with the A's but also the players on other teams (I was caught in quite a few "o yeah, I forgot about that" moments, such as that Raul Ibanez played with the Kansas City Royals for a time). For those not baseball fans, it is a good underdog story, with slight political overtones, its the rich versus the poor, the fortunate versus the not so much. Whether sportsy or not, its a good story-line, the good guy doesn't necessarily win, and life is complicated. Of course, the cast is very good as well, headlined by Brad Pitt (for the female viewer, there are many scenes of him working out, and probably one two many closeups of his chest area) and Jonah Hill. A minor complaint might be that Carlos Pena looks nothing like Carlos Pena in the movie, although that is really hard to cast (Jeremy Giambi didn't look like Giambi either). Other than that, there is not a lot to complain about. There are some kind of soft, mushy moments, but they don't over do it, and they seem appropriate. I think everyone should at least give this movie a chance, and I will give it an A-.