If anybody out there happens to be interested, the Oakland Athletics are on track to turn in their worst performance on the baseball field in more than 10 years.
Normally, the travails of a losing ballclub wouldn't be of much note outside its hometown. But the A's aren't just any faltering ballclub.
Over the last decade or so, the team and its general manager, Billy Beane, have been the leading exponents of a style of major league management known as "moneyball," after the title of Michael Lewis' 2003 book about the franchise.
Moneyball, in Lewis' formulation, meant the use of sophisticated statistical analysis to identify underappreciated -- and therefore underpriced -- players and assemble them into a successful team.
This is a powerful concept in a sport where have-nots face the challenge of competing, on the field and in business, with permanent haves such as the New York Yankees. The A's, not exactly a small-market but certainly a low-budget organization, employed it to stay competitive for years at a time, reaching the playoffs five times since 1999 despite a payroll consistently ranking among the lowest in the game.
This won't be one of those years. The team's won-lost mark of 62-77is tied for fourth worst in the American League.
The A's performance presents an interesting question. Does it show the limitations of moneyball -- do the immutable economics of Major League Baseball, in which the rich get richer and leave the other teams in the dust, trump even the best statistical analysis?
Or to put it another way, does it actually confirm the utility of moneyball -- are the A's behind the eight ball in part because every other team in the league is now using the same methods?
Certainly the latter phenomenon is a real one.
"Every team today has a guy doing this sort of analysis," Kevin Goldstein, a writer for the website Baseball Prospectus, told me recently. "Oakland originally was getting more bang for the buck, but players today are more properly valued as a whole. So it's harder to find diamonds in the rough."
The Boston Red Sox went to the extent of adding Bill James, baseball's godfather of statistical analysis (whose annual 1982-88 Baseball Abstracts still occupy an honored place on my bookshelf), to their front office in 2003.
