Stinson: Moneyball 2.0? New pitching stat could help identify new talent
From Scott Stinson at the National Post on May 29, 2015, with mention of SABR members Wayne Greiner and Jarvis Greiner:
It has been 12 years since Moneyball was published, and 13 years since the first playoff appearances of the Oakland A’s team that it documented. That is to say, on-base percentage isn’t sneaking up on anyone any longer.
The things that Billy Beane championed with the A’s — the value of OBP and slugging percentage when evaluating prospects, and a decreased reliance on traditional indicators such as speed and contact — have long since been accepted by enough by people in the game that the original Moneyball conceit has largely been neutralized. That development poses a challenge for teams trying to find a statistical edge to complement their scouting: The central tenet of the Beane way of thinking, identifying the market inefficiency and then exploiting it, demands that there is still something left to exploit.
A couple of guys from Edmonton think they have just the thing: pitch quantification. Here is Wayne Greiner, chief salesman for the metric they call Quality of Pitch, or QoP, with the bold statement: “We think QoP is eventually going to carry more weight than ERA.”
Read the full article here: http://news.nationalpost.com/sports/mlb/moneyball-2-0-new-pitching-stat-courtesy-of-a-couple-of-guys-from-edmonton-could-help-identify-hidden-talent
Originally published: July 3, 2015. Last Updated: July 3, 2015.