Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting and thought I'd share.

Graham Yost explains the season premiere of Justified

Acting is hard (Moneyball out-take)

17 of the most bizarre, obscene, or pointless entries on Wikipedia

Awesome Q&A w/ Teri Garr (it may be old but it was new to me)

Rob Gronkowski’s Friend Bibi Jones To Perform At Stoughton Club (what a great potential Super Bowl promotion)

Moneyball Back On?

It looks like Moneyball is not dead as a feature film. I enjoy Aaron Sorkin's writing of dialogue as much or more than the next guy but I still don't see Moneyball as worthy of being made into a picture.

I'm a big Michael Lewis fan and I'd suggest The New New Thing focusing in on the character of Jim Clark or a adaptation of The Blind Side as two Lewis books more worthy of being made into a film than Moneyball.

Bottom of the Ninth

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does sports and business. Many thousands of words have been poured over the move of the Dodgers and Giants out of New York and out to the gold fields of California. I can't recall anyone really taking the time to detail what happened next in New York after the city was left with just one team and a huge vacuum in its baseball loving soul.

Michael Shapiro takes the time to tell what happened next with his book Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself. This book was a great read. I fancy myself as a guy who knows both his baseball and his history but this book told me a story I had no clue about.

Have you ever heard of the Continental League? I admit that I had never heard of it until reading this book and yet this brainchild of Branch Rickey came tantalizingly close to becoming a third Major League in baseball. The effects of the threat of the Continental League can still be seen today any time you watch a game involving the Mets, Astros, Angels, Twins or Rangers (formerly the Senators). Throw in teams in Denver, Atlanta, Buffalo and Toronto and you have what would have been the Continental League. (Poor Buffalo got screwed the most out of all the would be Continental League cities.)

The effects of the Continental League can also still be felt today any time you watch an NFL game featuring a former AFL team. Many of the same cities and many of the same ownership groups were involved in both the Continental League and the AFL. Probably most significantly, the AFL took the Continental League's TV revenue sharing plan hook line and sinker and rode that plan to the success the NFL enjoys today.

Had you ever heard of Del Webb? I had not and I was astonished on how much power the publicly silent co-owner of the New York Yankees wielded behind the scenes.

The book was written focusing on two men - Branch Rickey and Casey Stengel much like Moneyball was written with a focus on Billy Beane and Bill James. If you enjoyed Moneyball you surely will enjoy Bottom of the Ninth. I can't recommend it enough.

Moneyball Indeed!

With the recent trade of Joe Blanton to the Phillies - the last of the players who were both drafted by the A's in 2002 and who subsequently were featured in Michael Lewis' book Moneyball are now all out of the Oakland system. Major League Jerk recently did an excellent Moneyball recap of "Where are They Now".

I'm not concerned so much with "where are they now" but two facets do interest me. What did the A's really get out of the 2002 draft? And how money really plays into moneyball. Let's take a look at the players who made the bigs to answer these questions.

Of the nine players drafted and featured in the book - three are still making contributions at the major league level. Those three are:

- Nick Swisher (16th pick overall) had three solid seasons for the A's averaging 26 HR and better than 82 RBI per season for those three years. Prior to this season Billy Beane traded Swisher to the White Sox in exchange for left-handed pitcher Gio Gonzalez, right-handed pitcher Fautino De Los Santos and outfielder Ryan Sweeney. It should be noted that Sweeney actually leads Swisher in several offensive categories this season including 3B, SB, BA, SLG, and OPS. That's not to suggest that Sweeney is as good a player as Swisher but the drop-off isn't really that, that much. Besides - the White Sox will pay Swisher $3.5 million this season compared to the A's paying Sweeney just $395,000 - plus the A's got two top pitching prospects in the deal.

- Joe Blanton (24th pick overall) was just traded to the Phillies for prospects second baseman Adrian Cardenas, left-hander Josh Outman and outfielder Matt Spencer. In his career for the A's Blanton was 47-46 with a 4.25 ERA. Blanton signed for $3.7 million this year and next year's contract is sure to be north of $5 million. That's for a guy who had exactly a league average ERA and who was one game over .500 for a team that was well over .500 in his time in Oakland.

- Mark Teahen (39th pick overall) never played a day in the bigs for the A's and now plays for the Royals. He will make a little more than $2 million this year. Teahen was part of 5 player trade in 2004 that in part sent Teahan to the Royals and Octavio Dotel to the A's. Dotel saved 29 games in a season and a half for Oakland but is widely regarded as an awful, awful closer. It should be noted that 15 of the 38 players taken ahead of Teahen never made it to the big leagues.

So what conclusions can we draw from this information? The A's had 6 first round picks in 2002 and 3 of those picks have turned into productive major league players. A 50% success rate for first round picks isn't bad (consider that the Pirates had the 1st overall pick and they chose Brian Bullington over such names as BJ Upton or Prince Fielder). The A's got 6 combined productive seasons out of Swisher and Blanton and then turned around and got 6 top prospects for them before the big money started kicking in. When they sold a prospect (Teahen) for a "proven" player (Dotel) it backfired. The main lesson of Moneyball was that the A's success was due to buying low on undervalued assets and selling high on over-valued assets. The prospects for veteran players (Swisher and Blanton) is just a continuation of that lesson and should lead to continued success for the small market A's.