Michael Lewis Moneyball

Moneyball, a term developed by Michael Lewis’ novel Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and popularized by the movie covering the Billy Beane’s Oakland Athletics 2002 season, focuses on discovering undervalued players. It advanced a system whereby a lesser funded baseball club could be competitive by building a winning team without spending as much as wealthier organizations. Throughout the early 2000’s when the Moneyball era flourished, it seemed as though every organization was trying to model the success that teams such as the Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox had found when using innovative concepts based on the theories of sabermetrics. Sabermetrics, devised by Bill James, is the use of advanced baseball statistics to unbiasedly

The problem that lies within this basic idea is that not all teams have an equal amount of funds to use, which creates a conflict between the rich and the poor. As Billy Beane states, “The problem we’re trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us” (Moneyball). The Oakland Athletics have consistently had one of the lowest payrolls in Major League Baseball, making success in the Bay Area particularly hard to come by for Billy Beane. The challenge of working with a miniscule payroll compared to other organizations in the league, forced Beane to discover a new way to construct a team. To overcome the tremendous gap between the rich and poor payrolls, Billy Beane and his staff had to be innovative when creating their new team. However, the new theory of creating a team based on sabermetrics was not accepted by the world of baseball in the beginning and utilization of such was a difficult sell. When anyone in the world tries to promote change they are faced with push back, which Billy Beane and his staff were not immune. The only way the Moneyball theory would come to be recognized was if it yielded success. The model was eventually proven in 2002 and 2003 when Beane was able to

Moneyball is structured around the supposition that it is superior to determine talent based on numbers rather than the old school eye test. “This is a business. It’s more than just, ‘I like this guy, he’s a warrior.’ You can define what a warrior is. Everything can be measured. And if not, we should strive to do so and get to higher ground,” (Rosenthal). As Moneyball grew so did the prominence of sabermetrics, spurring the manufacture of new information. As Futterman explains, “Beyond that, ‘Moneyball’ celebrated measurements at exactly the time when computers and simple programs were exponentially increasing the speed at which the educated working public could analyze data and hold everyone accountable for their results.” All of a sudden by 2005, every single aspect of the game could be objectively quantified and used to determine value of a player. In today’s game, a player consists of an innumerable amount of valuable statistics. “In the aftermath of Moneyball, most teams have staff dedicated to analytics looking for strategic advantages over their competition. An indicative, but far from comprehensive, survey of various teams and technologies testifies to the sophistication, variety, and ubiquitousness of the advanced analytical techniques and concepts,” (Armour 358). The ascending significance of these statistics has come to