Parts I, II, and III

It seems that Dan Haren won a Cy Young or two since last season. That is, if the response I am getting regarding my criticism of his being traded for Mark Mulder is any indication. I am just not that high on Haren but that's why the play the games. There's nothing left to do but watch they play in actual games next season.

The other argument that I made against the strategy of dumping all but one experienced starter (Barry Zito) drew one response from the cryptically named "voxpoptart". To wit:

I know your concern (understandable) is that Billy Beane has kicked away the A's chances for 2005.



Still, what struck me about your least-experienced-staffs list is how _most_ of those teams were early in a process of last-to-first transformations. The '77 Tigers, '96 A's, '96 Mariners: those were soon to be outstanding teams, 100+ victory teams. The '82 Twins, '78 Braves, '81 Mets, those were soon to be champions too. The Whirlpool Principle states that bad teams are drawn towards .500, not towards championships: those young-staff strategies suddenly look pretty good to me. And no, I didn't have any advance bias in that direction.

So does this strategy help in the long run, say within five years? Let's take a look. I researched are all the teams that qualified for the previous study with their record over the next year and then the subsequent four years, or five years in total. On average their winning percentage fell 11 percentage points the first year, but improved 28 points, on average, over the next four.

So maybe vox is onto something. But wait, a good number of those teams stunk before the jettisoned the bulk of their staff. The A's just missed the playoffs last year.

I narrowed my query to just those teams with a .500 or better record in the previous year. They improved on average by 48 points in the first year and then fell, on average, 66 over the next four years.

As a matter of fact, of the 42 teams that had a record equal to or better than the A's last year (.562 winning percentage) who then went on to pursue this strategy only four had any improvement whatsoever in years two through five, and two of those improved by an average of one percentage point. Those teams are the 1882 Chicago White Stockings (1-point improvement), 1885 St. Louis Browns (54 points), 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers (13 points), and 1978 Baltimore Orioles (1 point).

For the record, here are the teams with the greatest improvement overall:

And then the best improvement for teams in the last 50 years:

You'll note that none of those teams had winning seasons in the year prior to the adopting strategy similar to Beane's.

So will what the A's did pan out? I guess it could. But history isn’t really on their side.