Talk:Geeks and Baseball/@comment-93324-20060324123926

I&quot;ll grant you that the Yankees have done well in the sabermetric offensive categories, but I still take issue with lumping them together with Boston. Unlike Cashman (apparently), Theo Epstein focuses deeply on sabermetrics when building teams. The Weaver reference was simply illustrating my point: it&quot;s possible to intuit correct sabermetric strategies without a calculator in hand. Weaver may have been the ideal sabermetric manager, but he wouldn&quot;t know Runs Created from a hole in the ground. Yankees management has simply scouted their way into a bunch of guys who, incidentally, put up great "sabermetric numbers". As for Moneyball, yeah, neither New York nor Boston needs to worry about cash flow like Billy Beane does, but do the Yankees really need to spend like drunken sailors every offseason on shitty pitchers and over-the-hill veterans? Exhibit A on the difference between Boston and New York: Johnny Damon. Epstein didn&quot;t see the wisdom in giving a four-year, $52 million contract to a 32-year-old coming off the two best seasons of his career (as in, nowhere to go but down -- Barry Bonds is the only guy who gets better when he hits his mid-thirties), with declining defensive skills to boot... But the aptly-named Cashman thought it was a great deal. Sabermetrics? Hardly. The point: Boston gets their sabermetric numbers by design, NYY gets theirs by coincidence.