Talk:Geeks and Baseball/@comment-207.1.176.66-20060322103920

I take it you never read moneyball. Moneyball has NOTHING to do with sabermetrics. Moneyball is about economic inefficiencies. When it was written the A&quot;s discovered that On Base Percentage (OBP), was not valued high enough in relation to how valuable it was to winning. Hence they focused on it. However, soon the other teams caught on and now OBP is valued in accordance with its actual usefulness. Because of this the A&quot;s have to look for other market inefficiencies. They focused on High School pitching in the last draft. They also recently have focused on defense. Moneyball is a sytem to compete with a low payroll. For the A&quot;s it has been quite effective. They have to rip apart their team every year because they can&quot;t pay giambi, tejada, zito, etc. You may not be a fan of theirs, but I&quot;d rather have their organization than the Royals.

The Red Sox concentrate on sabermetrics. They can have a huge payroll so they don&quot;t need to worry about the Moneyball philosophy. They can simply figure out which statistics corelate best to winning and focus on them regardless of cost. Even though Slugging Pct., OBP, and DIPS are not things you can get cheap the red sox can focus on them because they can afford it.

Paul Depodesta really never got a fair shake in LA. Injuries killed his team more than anything he did. Other than Derek Lowe, he didn&quot;t make any really bad signings. Paul&quot;s problem is that he simply has not talent to deal with the media. He&quot;d be much better off running a team in partnership with a move vocal partner.

J.P. Riccardi has had some success with the Blue Jays. If he were in any other division I&quot;d pick them as a dark horse world series team. Making the playoffs in the same division as the Yankees and the Sox is going to be hard though.