Has Money Ball leveled baseball's playing field?

Billy Beane thinks so...

From Bob Klapisch:

It’s been almost six years since Moneyball became the bible of baseball’s information revolution, but A’s general manager Billy Beane, the architect of this New Age, admits he’s paid a heavy price. Everyone in the game is smarter these days, and that includes the behemoths with cash – notably the Red Sox.

You could say Beane’s nightmare is Theo Epstein, the Sox GM who’s successfully applied “Moneyball’s’’ principles and backed it up with a payroll the A’s could only dream about. This worries Beane, and he says it should worry the Yankees, too.

“One of the reasons the Red Sox have gained on the Yankees is because the foundation of their organization is run like a very successful small market, yet they have the ability to retain their premium players in their prime,” Beane said. “When a club does that, it knocks the wind out of not just their rivals, but also small-market competitors.”

The Bombers reluctantly agree.

“The Red Sox are incredibly bright,” GM Brian Cashman said in the passages of the best-selling book, “The Yankee Years.”

“They have the best of both worlds. … When you look at Boston there’s no reason to think they won’t continue to win. The fact of the matter is you arguably have the brightest front office with lots of resources and an ownership group that supports it.”

Beane, of course, realizes this is somehow all his fault: Baseball’s intelligence gap has closed rapidly since 2003, because the old way of doing business — subjectively evaluating talent — has been replaced by the objective: numbers.

The A’s were heavy into on-base percentage a few years ago, until everyone else got smart. Coincidentally or not, that’s when the Yankees stopped winning pennants, and the A’s streak of making it to the postseason – every year from 2000 to 2003 – came to a crashing halt.

After the 2001 World Series, 12 different teams played in the next seven Fall Classics. Since 2005, eight Series berths have been filled by eight different clubs, and last year, no team repeated as division champion for the first time in 20 years.

To answer my own question, I'll say yes. I think Moneyball principles have changed the way organizations build teams, and led to more sound baseball decisions all across the game, in big and small markets.

The success of the strategy addressed in the book has to be one of the major contributing factors to a more leveled playing field.

I just finished reading the chapter in The Yankee Years that talks about Moneyball, the one that Klapisch took the Cashman quote from. The book is fantastic, by the way, and should be required reading for Yankees fans. And no, it's not some sleazy tell-all like the media made it out to be.

Anyway, the chapter in the book is basically this article with more details and focused much more on the Red Sox.

As soon as John Henry and Larry Lucchino took over in 2002, they added Theo Epstein, hired stats guru Bill James, and as we've learned the hard way, the baseball world hasn't been the same since.

You have to wonder if the Yankees and Brian Cashman missed the boat a bit with the Moneyball mindset.

I know Cashman is a stats guy, it was one of the problems Torre had with him during the last few years he was in New York, but was he possibly being overruled by the more old-school Tampa faction for most of the early 2000s? Or was he and the rest of the organization—from scouts on up—not as savvy as the rest of the new-school GMs and scouts around the game?