Paul M. Holmes
Rob Simmons
and David J. Berri

Michael Lewis’s best-selling book, Moneyball, demonstrated the efforts of Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane, to create a successful baseball team in spite of its location in a small market. Previous studies have argued that the salary returns to the neglected skill of on base percentage (OBP) should rise once the Oakland A’s hitters demonstrated proficiency with this skill. Our key result is that after Moneyball was published in 2003, hitter salaries for free agents signing new contracts were not more closely related to OBP. Consistent with efficiency, we find no long-term...Read more

Mark F. Stewart
Heather Mitchell
Constantino Stavros

The best selling book Moneyball posited a theory on the success of a Major League Baseball franchise that used detailed match data to identify inefficiencies in the market for professional baseball players. These statistics were then exploited to the advantage of that team. An important part of this strategy involved using mathematical techniques to identify which player statistics were most associated with team success, and then using these results to decide which players to recruit. This paper uses a similar approach to analyze elite Australian Football, making use of various types of...Read more