With Moneyball, Oakland Wins Most With Least

It's the type of debate shouted across a thousand barrooms every Friday night: Who was baseball's best team of the '00s? Well, Red Sox and Yankees fans can pipe down a bit, because long-suffering Oakland A's fans just got a little ammo in this fight.

Leave it to the statheads at Baseball Prospectus – former stomping grounds of Playbook's own Mark McClusky – to come up with an arcane-yet-plausible formula to definitively settle the issue of who runs the most efficient club. It's based on a method called Payroll Efficiency Rating, which essentially is weighted on rewarding higher win totals for smaller market teams.

BP's Shawn Hoffman breaks it down as such:

To run through a quick example, the Rockies spent $75 million on payroll last year, a bit below average. That should have led to around 79 wins, which, given their local market, would have created around $41 million in marginal revenue. But the Rockies actually had 90 third-order wins, which likely created somewhere around $58 million. Divide the two, and you get a 1.43 PER. Since 1.00 is average, we can say the Rockies' front office performed 43 percent better than average in 2009.

Based on Hoffman's analysis, no general manager was better at getting more batting average for his buck than Oakland's Billy Beane—former MLB flameout, star of Michael Lewis' groundbreaking book Moneyball, and not-so-secret fascination of Brad Pitt. Broken down by individual seasons, Beane snagged three of the top five most efficient, including one season defined by an incredible 20-game winning streak.

Overall, here's how the top five teams shake out:

1. Oakland Athletics — Billy Beane (2000-09) — 1.52
2. St. Louis Cardinals — Walt Jocketty (2000-07), John Mozeliak (2008-09) — 1.25
3. Cleveland Indians — John Hart (2000-01), Mark Shapiro (2002-09) — 1.18
4. San Francisco Giants — Brian Sabean (2000-09) — 1.16
5. Toronto Blue Jays — Gord Ash (2000-01), J.P. Ricciardi (2002-09) — 1.16

Not bad, although I'm sure Red Sox and Yankees are more than consoled by the two World Series championships each club has won since 2000.

Photo: deb roby/Flickr, CC