Brewers Strive to Remain the Fastest Team in a Speeding-Up League

Over two decades ago, Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball around a few key principles pursued by his subject, the Oakland Athletics organization. They were what became a cliché: market inefficiencies. There were big, fundamental and broad ideas, like the concept that minor-league and collegiate statistics could help predict major-league production, but there were also these few truths about how the A's would operate, because of where the rest of the league was in their understanding of them:

1. On-base percentage is a better indicator of a player's contribution to scoring than is batting average, by a wide margin.
2. Teams fixate too much on readily visible skills, like velocity for pitchers and players' sizes and body types.
3. Defense is not well-measured or evaluated by available metrics, and should thus be emphasized.
4. Speed is dramatically overrated.

Since then, every item on that list has become obsolete. Though teams might still slightly overvalue velocity, the industry now grasps the value of on-base percentage; has developed multiple defensive measurement tools that make fielding a more efficient segment of player evaluation; and sees players as much in terms of their strengths and creative opportunities for improvement as in terms of their limitations or deficiencies.

Then, there's the speed thing. The league quickly adjusted to this, and both fans and analysts can agree: they overdid it. The game became achingly slow, with plodding sluggers not only taking up all corners as teams chased OBP and power, but forcing their way into middle infield throughout the league. Brewers fans well remember the tenures of Jonathan Schoop and Mike Moustakas as middle infielders with the Crew, but they're just two extreme examples among many. The game turned its focus toward skills, rather than athleticism, and it lurched toward centering on power, rather than leaving space for the way players could play in space.

At the time of Moneyball, that made sense. The league had just undergone unprecedentedly rapid expansion, adding two teams each in 1993 and 1998. That made talent a scarce resource, and there were more unathletic guys with one or two highly valuable baseball skills around than there were great athletes who had rough edges on their games. That made it easier and cheaper to acquire the sluggardly sluggers and the deceptive pitchers with great command of 89-mile-per-hour fastballs than to target speedsters, and lo, the speedsters often swung too much and didn't get on base enough, anyway. The game was not suffused with young players who blended athleticism and baseball nous, but it sure was overflowing with suspiciously strong guys who could swat 25 home runs almost by accident, well into their 30s. Paying for those guys made more sense than circumventing your sticker shock and signing a waterbug of a leadoff hitter.

Besides, who could tell how much their speed even helped them, other than in terms of stealing bases? We couldn't reliably tell good defenders from merely average ones, but a fast defender was more expensive than a slower one, even if they weren't actually better. And was stealing bases all it was cracked up to be? Quickly, teams ran the numbers and decided that it wasn't, because too many players got caught too often to make it an important part of most offenses.

All of that is now out the window, and the Brewers embody it better than anyone.