Moneyball and Finding Market Inefficiencies

I asked myself the question last week after reading about relievers being the new money ball. Could a team win enough games to make the playoffs, let and possibly win a World Series and not spend anymoney on a Starting Pitcher; in theory, a 13 man bullpen that played match-ups on a game-to-game basis. The whole point of “moneyball” was/is to find market inefficiencies and do things nobody else was doing. The concept is surely something nobody else is doing.

The average wins needed to win a division, not the number that the team won but just one game better than the 2^nd place team in baseball over the past 5 seasons is 89.56. Is 90 wins doable without a starting pitcher. Baseball strategy would tell you absolutely not, however market inefficiencies might say otherwise.

Take the NL West for example, the average wins needed to win the division over the past 5 years is 88, and using current baseball strategy a team like the Padres is never going to get to 88 wins when LA has a payroll nearly 300% of theirs. 

The Padres $66 million payroll makes signing star players very tough. Anyone who signs a deal worth more than $10 million is making at least 15% of their total budget. Good luck finding an Ace for that kind of money, heck could luck finding a decent #3 starter for $10 million. So when they invested almost $14 million on Josh Johnson, they were essentially saying we are happy with an outfield of Alexei Amarista, Mark Kotsay, Kyle Blanks and maybe 50 games of Carlos Quentin. 

In a system of 13 relievers all playing the part of a “pitching staff, “ Josh Johnson doesn’t do you any good. In fact spending more than $3 million on any pitcher doesn’t do much good. The Padres have close to $36 million dollars locked up on 5 pitchers. If that $36 million were to be spread amongst 5 relievers at $2.5 million dollars each, they would have had $23.5 million to spend on Shin Soo Choo.

I know what you’re thinking where are they going to find 13 good relievers to make this work. Well, I took it into my own hands and set up a Franchise with the San Diego Padres on MLB2K13. My starting budget was 70.14 million dollars. I identified 13 relief pitchers that were NOT the current closer of their team (based on 2012 season, remember) and traded for all of them. For the record every trade was accepted there were no forced trades.

I entered the fictional 2013 season with a pitching staff of Charlie Furbush, Nate Jones, Aaron Crow, Tony Watson, Kelvin Herrera, Robbie Ross, Wilton Lopez, Tom Collins, Jake McGee, Ryan Cook, Sean Doolittle, Antonio Bastardo and Johnny Venters. My pitching staff cost me $6,264,000. Leaving me with $63,876,000 to assemble this lineup, and still have 8 million left.

CF: Norichikai Aoki

2B: Dustin Pedroia

LF: Alex Gordon

1B: Edwin Encarnacion

RF: Jay Bruce

SS: Ben Zobrist

C: AJ Pierzynski

3B: Brett Lawrie

BENCH: Omar Infante, Adam Eaton, Will Nieves, Cody Ransom

Each day for the next week I’ll release what happened during the month.

Tuesday – April

Wednesday – May

Thursday – June

Friday- July

Saturday – August

Sunday – September, October and a season wrap-up.