In the Bay Area, soccer and baseball are intertwined

By: Melissa | November 17th, 2007

The MLS Board of Governors voted Friday to continue grandfathering players making over the Designated Player salary cut-off. This means that Eddie Johnson, Carlos Ruiz, and Landon Donovan can stay at their current clubs and continue making their current salaries without any roster changes or trades. I hope this bit of news puts many of the Donovan to San Jose rumors to rest (’cause they’re getting on my nerves). At the same time, I wonder if San Jose would actually try to acquire the somewhat expensive Donovan since many of the Quakes’ executives moved over from the Oakland A’s and the A’s management approach was one of the primary subjects of Michael M. Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball. The book outlined many of the ideas from A’s GM (and consultant to the Quakes) Billy Beane; the big zinger being that a series of carefully constructed statistics (called sabermetrics) can gauge a player’s performance and his subsequent worth to the club. The book argues that Beane’s approach allowed the A’s to find cheaper players undervalued in the current market while at the same time remaining competitive against teams with larger budgets. Now I’m aware that MLS salaries do not compare to MLB salaries but since the amount of money MLS rakes in is drastically lower than what MLB does, I’m going to assume that big-picture-wise, Donovan makes a lot of effin money and that may be a big factor to SJ management.

I believe Beane is currently hard at work trying to find ways to apply sabermetrics to MLS but whether he succeeds is another story. Personally, my attraction to soccer has more to do with the fact it’s less reliant on statistics (I’m still trying to wrap my head around the Mexican FMF playoffs and their relegation system) than many of the other major American sports. But I do know that stats are slowly creeping in since we’re seeing more and more of an importance placed on assists as well as goals scored. And its not just the the Earthquakes who are listening to Beane’s ideas. On November 20th, he will be speaking at the Future of Football Conference in London alongside panelists such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Lawrie Sanchez, Sam Allardyce, and Alan Curbishley. It seems the entire game itself is now taking notice.