Rob Manfred, MLB Comes for Moneyball

Rob Manfred's reign of terror over baseball now looking at spending caps for off-field matters

Orioles GM Mike Elias, the modern-day poster child for analytics

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is continuing his assault on the integrity of baseball by taking aim at off-field spending of Major League clubs:

Major League Baseball and high-ranking club officials have discussed limiting how much teams can spend in areas other than player salaries, such as technology, player development, scouting and health, multiple people briefed on such discussions told The Athletic.

Different pockets of management have talked about the potential cost controls, whether it be owners speaking to one another, or in similar conversations between club higher-ups. But MLB’s executive vice president of baseball operations, Morgan Sword, is said to have discussed the concept again last week on a call with club financial officers, an official briefed on the meeting said.

A league spokesperson said MLB’s focus has been on technology vendors, rather than staffing.

“There is nothing happening on that front,” the spokesperson said. “What we are focused on is gathering information on vendor costs to find potential cost savings through efficiencies and to ensure equal access to all technology.”

But multiple officials who have been briefed on or participated in some of these conversations said the thinking extends to personnel, as well. At least some clubs would enjoy seeing caps on spending in any area that can influence on-field success, player salaries or otherwise. Executives with smaller-market teams have long lamented the task of keeping up with the spending capabilities of larger market teams

Manfred, ultimately, is an employee of Major League baseball owners. And it sounds like a conversation with one of these owners is what started this entire conversation:

Rob Manfred got a phone call. It was “one of our more senior owners,” as the commissioner put it, and they began talking about the number of employees who work on, well, numbers.

“You know, I don’t know what this analytics thing is, but I have, like, 75 guys,” the owner told him. “What I want to do is, I would spend a week in the analytics department. I was going to figure out what the hell these guys do.”

“So, how’d it go?” the commissioner asked.

“Well, you know, I got a lot of smart guys down there,” the owner said, “but I am absolutely convinced that analytics is an arms race to nowhere.”

So we have an owner who didn’t know what was going on in his own business who doesn’t understand the leading edge of what’s going on in his business space decreeing that he doesn’t understand what the fuss is all about.

If that sounds strangely reminiscent of business owners and economists who thought the internet was an arms race to nowhere, you’re not alone.

The problem here is that the entire hypothesis is wrong. One of the things Ken Rosenthal wrote in the article is:

Executives with smaller-market teams have long lamented the task of keeping up with the spending capabilities of larger market teams.

But Rosenthal follows up two paragraphs later by stating the obvious:

But with roughly 40 percent of the season complete, the standings suggest concerns over market size and competitive balance could be overwrought. Entering Tuesday, four revenue-sharing recipients — the Rays, Twins, Pirates and Diamondbacks — were in first place. Three others — the Marlins, Brewers and Orioles — were in position for wild cards.

The four teams most associated with analytics and Moneyball over the years would be Oakland (where it all started) followed by Tampa Bay, Houston, and Baltimore. Only Houston could be considered a large market with an owner with deep pockets to afford both a large analytics operation and make significant free-agent investments.

The entire premise of using analytics in baseball is to make small-market, lower-revenue teams compete on a more equal playing field with the big-market teams. Oakland couldn’t afford big-money free agents, but they could afford to invest in analytics to find market efficiencies with players who slipped through the cracks.

This is something the Orioles have embraced and invested in. Just look at some of the guys the Orioles have added in recent years off the scrap heap through either through waivers or being dumped in trade:

• Bryan Baker

• Felix Bautista

• Yennier Cano

• Aaron Hicks

• Jorge Lopez

• Jorge Mateo

• Ryan O’Hearn

• Ramon Urias

• Austin Voth

All of those guys, with the exception of Lopez, are current contributors on this seemingly playoff-bound team. And Lopez was flipped for four players, including Cano and three pitching prospects.

The Orioles investment and belief in analytics did that. Without the analytics? Who knows what guys the club would pick off the scrap heap? It would be back to the days of Jace Peterson, Craig Gentry, Jhan Mariñez, Oscar Salazar, or Rocky Cherry.

Major League Baseball is not going after big market clubs if they implement this spending cap: they are going after the smaller-market clubs that have embraced analytics and have often made the bigger market teams look silly. After all, the Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009 because they have not embraced the analytic mindset. But they are doing this in some manner because they can unilaterally implement a cap on non-player salary spending. Such a cap would not need approval from the MLB Players Association, though I can imagine that they would have some serious opinions on it.

Analytics leveled the playing field between the rich teams and the not-so-rich teams. Any change to league-wide rules surrounding analytics, scouting, and the like would create a more uneven playing field that benefits big-market clubs at the expense of smaller-market ones. It’s an argument that flies in the face of MLB’s efforts to negotiate a salary cap with the MLBPA or to continue the Luxury Tax, Revenue Sharing, and more. It’s just another bad idea from a Commissioner who has been full of them…