I don’t know about you, but Bill James is the guy who took my wobbly love for the game in a specific and rather satisfying direction. I loved baseball before I read Bill James, but I didn’t really get it.
James subbed for Rob Neyer at ESPN.com on Monday. If you missed it here is the column. ESPN.com: MLB – James: Rooting for the home team
It demonstrates why James is so damned good. Bill takes his guest shot and uses it to dig at one of the more irritating qualities Neyer has. More importantly, Bill makes the rather important point that all the calculating, and all the sabremetric hoo-ha, really just point to a set of advantages. It doesn’t mean that if you do everything by the sabremetric book everything is going to be easy.
This is important to remember in roto because the in competitive leagues, where the majority of owners know what they’re doing and pay attention all season long, the principles that sabremetrics bring to the game (like Shandler’s LIMA Plan) are only advantages when other people disregard them.
Once a pitcher’s price jumps because he meets the LIMA standards, for instance, he’s no longer a bargain and no longer someone to go after.
The same is true in the big leagues. The Oaklands are doing great and Billy Beane deserves credit, following the principles that Gene Michael used putting together those great Yankees teams of the mid-nineties, without the rather sizeable budget. But once the other big spending teams starts stocking up on those guys, all that will be left for the little spending teams will be big swinging, no walking guys at every position.
And that sabremetric option won’t be available to Billy Beane any longer.