Bad Baseball Analogy

Interesting theory, bad analogy:

For generations, avid baseball fans have been able to recite the batting and earned-run averages of their favorite players and have known instinctively that the higher the former and the lower the latter would pave the way to victories. These statistics, like gravity, ruled their lives-that is, until financial writer Michael Lewis and his 2003 bestseller, Moneyball, challenged conventional wisdom by revealing a cadre of Major League Baseball insurgents within the Oakland Athletics' front office.

Led by General Manager Billy Beane, they held such heretical thoughts as "on-base percentage is more important than either batting average or slugging percentage" and "pitchers can only be effectively measured independent of the defense around them." This out-of-the-box thinking allowed Beane's Oakland club to win more regular-season games than any team except the Atlanta Braves, despite having one of the lowest payrolls in the American League. Beane looked at things differently and learned to do more with less money. Moneyball unintentionally suggested a new way to look at another American institution-the U.S. Navy.

Our Navy, larger than the next 13 international navies combined, can be compared to the highest-paid team in baseball. With its Barry Bonds super carriers, Mark McGwire cruisers, and Sammy Sosa destroyers, today's Navy consists of all power hitters, with huge slugging percentages and salaries to match. But what if there were another way to build the team? Oakland's ten-time All-Star and two-time World Series champion Ricky Henderson epitomized the ability to get on and get home by setting a career record for runs scored (2,295)-despite a .279 lifetime batting average-because he also held the career records for walks and stolen bases as well as a lifetime on-base percentage of .401. What if presence, the naval version of the oft-neglected on-base percentage, was actually the most critical naval mission

Problems:

1. Rickey Henderson's several tenures with the As corresponded with Billy Beane's general managership for only 1 year, 1998. The As won 74 games that year.
2. Moneyball advocates highly value slugging percentage. They tend to view batting average and stolen bases with disdain.
   
3. Barry Bonds, not Henderson, is the classic Moneyball player. Bonds career OBP is 43 points higher than Henderson. Indeed, Barry Bonds was better at everything (including, arguably, defense) than Rickey Henderson, except for stealing bases, a skill not highly valued by Moneyball advocates. Also, Barry Bonds holds the career record for walks.
4. There's a big difference between the "Fords vs. Ferraris" analogy and the "Henderson vs. Bonds," and it goes like this: Foregoing Ferraris makes it possible to purchase more Fords; crew and building slip limits are important, but the most important limitation is generally thought to be overall funding. In baseball, "Fords" take up key roster space; a dozen Alex Gonzalezes may cost the same as one Derek Jeter, but Jeter takes up only one roster spot, which is why he's so much more valuable. This is not to say that roster construction should always favor one highly paid player and a bunch of scrubs, but it does mean that the baseball analogy doesn't hold as well as the car analogy.
5. A better choice of comparison than Bonds vs. Henderson would have been Ken Griffey Jr. vs. Craig Biggio. Bill James often made this comparison, arguing that the flashier and better known Griffey was inferior to Biggio in skills such as taking walks and getting hit by pitches. Biggio was genuinely more valuable than Griffey, even though he got payed less.

Nevertheless, the key point holds; baseball professionals fundamentally misvalued players for decades because they didn't understand the relationships between the key variables, and misidentified the most important metrics of player performance. This basic error of analysis, in a highly lucrative and extremely competitive environment, suggests that analysis in other fields may similarly be flawed, even when the stakes are very high. Thus, it's worth asking whether current naval analysis is using flawed metrics. That said, it's probably not accidental that the very best players and managers from the pre-Moneyball era operated with what appears to have been a tacit understanding of what made players valuable. Ted Williams, for example, is the ultimate Moneyball dream, with a .482 career OBP. Contemporaries may not have identified precisely why he was the greatest hitter of all time (the walks rather than the home runs), but they seem to have understood his value on a basic level. Similarly, it's perhaps not all that surprising that legendary manager John McGraw sported a .466 OBP as a player, a number which is particularly impressive given that walks weren't reported in most news accounts of the time. There are a few examples of players whose real value is only recognized in hindsight (say, Rusty Staub or Roy Thomas or Bobby Grich), and a few examples of players who were wildly overrated (George Sisler and, I daresay, Tony Gwynn) but mostly people seem to have gotten it right, if only intuitively. I don't know how that intuition would transfer to naval analysis, but it's probably worth investigating.