Moneyball: A Poor Major League Baseball Team

Moneyball In 2002, the Oakland Athletics were an incredibly poor Major League Baseball team. As Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics General Manager puts it in the movie, “there are rich teams, then there are poor teams, then there is fifty feet of crap, and then there is us.” In 2001 The Oakland A’s made a playoff run but couldn’t pull through. After this season the Oakland A’s lost all of their important players because other teams were able to afford them. Billy Beane had to put a team together for the 2002 season, a very grim looking task. Billy Beane had just lost a trade to another team due to a lack of funds and he decided to visit the Cleveland Indians about the trade. This is where he has his first interaction with Peter Brand (Paul

The coach wouldn’t play the team how they were meant to be player, after so long even Peter Brand started to lose faith. The biggest examples are the two scenes at the scouting table. In the first scene the scouts are talking about the reasons behind why they look at and end up choosing a player. Some of the examples described were “passing the eye candy test”, “having an ugly girlfriend means the player has no confidence”, “having a classic swing”, The sound the baseball makes while popping off the bat means he’s a good hitter” (although they don’t hit well on paper). Billy obviously thinks this thinking is a bunch of bologna. He realizes that they need to be thinking differently than the other baseball teams that have all the money. In the second meeting, Billy brings Peter with him. In lack of better terms, Billy “explains” to the scouts the new direction of the Oakland A’s and scouting as a whole as Billy states, “we are card counters playing blackjack, trying to turn the odds on the casino. As you can guess, the scouts very much disagree with him and

For one the statistical data and the way the world is changing. Every day that passes the world of technology gets more and more advanced, Advanced Intelligence (AI) has become a huge topic in recent years and months. As myself and this world get older, technology and AI are going to get even more advanced. This applies to my life because, like Billy Beane and even baseball, we need to evolve and embrace change or we will be the dinosaurs. I really like how John Henry puts it, “the first guy through the wall always gets bloody. Always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business, but in their minds, it’s threating the game. Really, what it’s threating is their livelihood, their jobs, it’s threating the way that they do things. Every time that happens, whatever it is, the people who are holding the reins, who have their hand on the switch, they go batshit crazy.” This has been seen in the world with computers and technology as they had their upbringing people feared them and didn’t like the idea of change. The majority of the world fears change. In our lives we need to embrace change, get excited for what it has to offer, and do our part to learn. Doing this can put us ahead of our competition and make us a people more marketable. The simple structure of having an open mind to change and action can yield incredibly powerful