In the part of Money Ball that I am currently reading, Billy Beane and the Oakland A's run into yet another problem. I previously talked about the A's losing Damon and they are currently dealing with a similar problem with Jason Giambi (the first basemen) going into free agency. Since the A's are one of the poorest teams and Giambi is demand a salary that is through the roof, they have no choice but to cut their losses and find a replacement. The A's have to make yet another extremely important decision that will impact their future as a team greatly. The main problem is that they cant replace all of what Giambi brings to the table as a player in a cost effective way.
"The important thing is not to recreate the individual, Billy would later say. The important thing is to create the aggregate. He couldn't and wouldn't find another Giambi; but he could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without , and buy them for a tiny fraction of Giambi himself" (Lewis 141). I found it interesting how the A's dealt with this problem by going around to find little pieces of Giambi without spending a huge amount of their money on him in a cost effective way. Now the question was what is the most important thing to replace. "And they realized that they could afford, in a roundabout way, to replace his most critical offensive trait, his on-base %" (Lewis 141). This would be no easy task due to the fact that Giambi had led the american league in on-base % by 50 points. Again the A's worked with what they had and instead of finding one player to make up for this stat they found multiple. In your opinion is it reasonable to focus primarily on one stat even though it might be the key to winning and gaining an advantage?
Jason Giambi's career stats: http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/g/giambja01.shtml
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