Use Of Sabermetric Approach To Major League Baseball

The Moneyball, the art of winning an unfair game is a book on how an unsuccessful team, the Oakland Athletics, takes an analytical approach to selecting players. Rogers (2003), describes Moneyball strategy as finding value in undervalued players. The Moneyball strategy is derived from the Sabermetrics, which is an analysis of baseball players and statistics that measure activities of a player (Laurila, 2016). Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics applied this unorthodox method of selecting players, which caused the Major-League Baseball (MLB) manager and scouts to question this approach. Beane looked for players who were undervalued by looking at On-Base Percentage (OBP), whereas, scouts would traditionally rely on Run Batted

Although skeptical at first, his application of this new approach was proven to be successful, in fact, it was so successful that many other professional sports organizations, as well as fortune 500 companies were intrigued by this concept (Palmer, Dunford, & Akins, 2016). However, this new concept or approach was not so easily accepted by fellow MLB teams; many were not supportive of the new method and vehemently opposed the idea. This is because Sabermetrics did not look at the conventional performance of the players, and many managers and owners of MLB teams felt that it devalued their credibility. As a result, Beane’s unorthodox method received major push backs from

There are many methods of overcoming resistance with no one particular being the best model. Some of the more common ways are: to get the people involved and have them participate in the change process, understanding the nature of the change, make efforts to change staff’s view and attitude towards the change, and actively engage the staff. In Moneyball, Beane faced much resistance from scouts, team managers, and players, but he overcame it by getting them involved, using persuasion and coercion tactics, and he actively engaged them. However, it is salient to be able to accept casualties; for example, those that cannot conform to the change and/or refused it all together (Long, Newman, & Russell, 2012). These casualties are the cause for stagnancy and the organizations must be willing to sever their ties with those employees. In the case of Moneyball, players who were highly favored by the manager, but were not producing were traded and replaced by those unknown with high OBP. Overtime, the entire organization was transformed, leaving mostly if not all the players that had high OBP according to the Sabermetrics. Overcoming resistance is difficult and change do not occur overnight, the Moneyball method was no exception. However, overtime, the mainstream baseball realized the new process was generating success in individual players and as a team; more importantly, the success was so profound, that other MLB