Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
July 29, 2004
Wild Padres

One of the teams I'm quietly rooting for this year is the San Diego Padres. Although he's not usually recognized as one, Kevin Towers is a Moneyball GM. If you take them out of PETCO (which so far seems to be a pitcher's park), the Padres have the best road OBA in the NL (.347). Their slugging on the road is okay, 7th. The pitchers strikes out twice as many as they walk (their pitchers have walked the 2nd fewest batters in the NL). In looking at last night's starting lineup, there not a bad OBA in the bunch. They're sitting atop the wild card race this morning, and very much in the NL West chase. If SD, LA, Oakland, NYY and Boston all make the playoffs, you'll have five out of eight teams playing Moneyball. That's pretty good.


Posted by David Pinto at 09:52 AM | Team Evaluation | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Hm, their K/BB ration is still over 2 when you take out Boomer. I'm a bit surprised he only has 46 Ks this year.

Posted by: Robert at July 29, 2004 10:09 AM

you are? his K/9 rate has been falling steadily over the past few years. from 2000-2004: 6.5, 5.3, 6.0, 4.3, 3.7. hello, Rueter-ville!

Posted by: jamie at July 29, 2004 10:33 AM

5 of 8 teams playing Moneyball? If that turns out to be true, please write about it and send a copy to Joe Morgan and Buck Martinez, will ya?

Posted by: Gene at July 29, 2004 04:34 PM

re: Moneyball

As that old 70s song went,

"Just give me money, that's what I want"

The superiority of modern management techniques were not obvious to most businesses in the 1950s and 1960s, but by 1982, when the influential article at MIT on improving productivity was written and circulated, most everyone in American Business was listening to what the MBA schools had to say.

It will take a while, but the revolution will be complete in the next 10-15 years and afterwards, we'll wonder why there was so much resistance to the obvious.

By the way, gotta love the Padres too. Though SD is a tough town to be serious in--nice weather, nice women, nice food--how can you get serious there???? Kind of like the Florida problem for years, but they finally seem to have gotten around it there.

--AJK

Posted by: Art Kyriazis at August 12, 2004 08:34 PM