It's not what we don't know that's the problem - it's what we know that just ain't so...

A couple of pet peeves that strike me this morning, as I'm listening to the broadcast of the Red Sox game from last night.

One of the pre-game guests was Sean McAdam, and he talked, as many people have, about the necessity of having pitching depth, about how lucky they were last year and the fact that their starters didn't miss any starts to injury last year. Look, they absolutely were very healthy last year. Martinez, Schilling, Lowe, Wakefield and Arroyo combined to start 157 games last year. Not one of them missed a start due to injury.

But Arroyo was starting because their number 5 starter, Byung Hyun Kim, was hurt at the beginning of the year. It's true to say that the starters that started were healthy. But it's not true to say that they didn't miss any starts due to injury, because they did. A similar phenomenon took place a year ago when people talked about the position players, completely ignoring the fact that their DH, Jeremy Giambi was both ineffective and hurt. David Ortiz was depth in 2003 - Bronson Arroyo was depth in 2004.

I love Joe Castiglione, but he's once again, as so many have done, either misunderstanding or misrepresenting Moneyball. Referring to A's SS Marco Scutaro, Joe said "[he's] not exactly a Moneyball player - last year in 137 games he only had 16 walks."

Obviously, Lewis talked about walks. He talked about OBP, and the weakness in batting average and RBI. But the point of Moneyball wasn't that OBP was the way to build an offense. Obviously, 16 walks in 137 games is unacceptable for a regular player. (Though it's interesting to note that it looks way out of character for Scutaro. He walked a decent amount in the minors with pretty good OBPs everywhere he went. And he's already walked 14 times this year.)

The point was that teams like Oakland, at a significant financial disadvantage to their competitors, needed to look for players that were not properly valued by the baseball labor market. For whatever reason. There are skills that are overvalued and skills that are undervalued. Teams like Oakland need to be finding the undervalued players. That was the point of Moneyball.