Yankees played Moneyball better than anyone in 2009

There was one very logical reason for Michael Lewis not to base his 2003 best seller “Moneyball” on the New York Yankees: Americans don’t like rooting for Goliath. It’s in our fabric to favor the underdog, the little guy who everyone counts out. That’s what made the scrappy Oakland A’s the perfect choice for Lewis. They were the team competing with the Yankees with only a fraction of the payroll thanks to a quirky general manager and his staff full of number-crunchers who never let their gut-feeling get in the way.But if Lewis’ book was about a progressive franchise exploiting market inefficiencies to overcome all the odds, then the 2009 season proved once and for all that the market has fully corrected itself. Thanks in part to “Moneyball,” in part to the guys at Baseball Prospectus and in part to the simple evolution of the game, every team now realizes that on base percentage is far more important than batting average and that RBIs or Wins aren’t the most telling statistics ...