Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
You may not have known Doug Pappas, who died suddenly last week, but he was watching Bud Selig for you, and writing brilliantly about what he saw.
May 24, 2004 | The end of the week brought terrible news that baseball had lost a true friend and a great writer when Doug Pappas died of heat prostration while hiking. He was 43.
You may not have heard of Pappas, but if you're a thinking baseball fan you've no doubt felt his influence. He was a Manhattan lawyer by trade, but his passion was writing about the business of baseball. No one I've ever read has a more thorough understanding of how baseball economics work, and no one, anywhere, was a more fierce enemy of commissioner Bud Selig.
As Pappas was fond of writing: Draw your own conclusions.
His writing and research have had a huge impact in the so-called sabermetric community -- he was a leader in SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, for which that application of scientific methods to baseball is named. That community in turn has a growing influence within the game. The A's, Blue Jays, Red Sox and Dodgers are the leaders now in running their organization at least somewhat along sabermetric principles.
His ongoing research into marginal wins per marginal payroll dollars showed that economic efficiency, not piles of cash, translated into winning. It was a simple formula: Pappas figured, based on the performance of players making the big-league minimum, that a team made up of such players would win about 49 games in a year. Then he subtracted the minimum salary amount from each team's payroll figure to determine how much each team had paid (marginal dollars) for each win after its 49th (marginal wins).
The most efficient team was the Oakland A's. Michael Lewis cited Pappas and his work in his book about the A's, "Moneyball," which is the baseball book of the century so far, and Lewis has said that the question he wanted to answer when he began work on the book was "How did a team with so little money (the A's) win so many games?"
Pappas was an ace at showing how Selig & Co.'s various arguments about competitive balance, revenue sharing, contraction, the need for a salary cap and new publicly financed stadiums, and other issues were either a pack of lies or the result of a complete misunderstanding of economics. (Draw your own conclusions.)
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