If MLB did this deliberately without the consent of the teams, some owners might be upset.
As the article points out, players are already adapting their hitting approach to produce more home runs, and presumably that’s at least partially due to the added likelihood of success for that strategy with the juiced balls.
So of course there’s also a team-building aspect of this shift for GM’s to consider. A decade ago, all the smart money was on high “OBP” (on-base percentage) players over boom-or-bust power hitters. If MLB did juice the ball, it shifted the ground out from under tens of millions of dollars of team analytics, and billions in payroll decisions made based on them.
>A decade ago, all the smart money was on high “OBP” (on-base percentage) players over boom-or-bust power hitters.
That is not an entirely accurate characterization, in fact most of the time the moneyball teams valued those boom and bust players more than traditional teams. The actual equation they were using was something close to 3*OBP+Slugging so slugging is good, and they tend to get walks a lot along with their strikeouts so OBP is usually good too.
Yep, "three-true-outcomes" (HR, strikeout, walk) players were seen as undervalued. Much of today's developments can be seen as flowing out of that re-evaluation of the "badness" of strikeouts.
OBP driven by consistent-but-weak contact was the sort of thing that sabermetrics types in 2008ish were shifting away from. Adam Dunn types (high OBP power hitter, low average) were seen as undervalued compared to Juan Pierre types (low power, higher average).
Fun thing about Pierre vs Dunn - Fangraphs has them practically tied in career WAR in the same number of seasons. But traditional evaluations praised the scrappy Pierre types a lot more than the strikeout-happy Dunn types.
Right. What people always seem to forget about the analytics based approaches, particularly the "moneyball" concept is that the intent was to identify those undervalued players. If the current trend is to prefer players with attribute X, that means that they'll be more expensive than their relative worth, so identify attribute Y which is also important and you can pay them a lot less.
People still refer to moneyball style approaches as if the exact metrics which were used in 2001 are the end all be all, but as soon as people caught on to OBP and such the real moneyballers were by definition off to something else.
While you're kind of right, I downvoted because I don't think that's the most reasonable or fair interpretation of what they're saying.
I think their point is largely true in two or three ways. The first is that prior to the moneyball era, teams treasured power hitters in a way that was much more OBP agnostic.
The second way is that they underappreciated players who don't hit for power but put up strong OBPs, like Scott Hatteberg.
The third is that however much moneyball teams prized home runs, they certain prize them even more now than before.
I think it's perfectly fair to say these distinctions support the notion that moneyball teams didn't value power hitting the same way as the generations that preceded or followed them.
As the article points out, players are already adapting their hitting approach to produce more home runs, and presumably that’s at least partially due to the added likelihood of success for that strategy with the juiced balls.
So of course there’s also a team-building aspect of this shift for GM’s to consider. A decade ago, all the smart money was on high “OBP” (on-base percentage) players over boom-or-bust power hitters. If MLB did juice the ball, it shifted the ground out from under tens of millions of dollars of team analytics, and billions in payroll decisions made based on them.