Michael Lewis successfully turned nerdy data into an interesting story. His book “Moneyball” is a must for baseball enthusiasts and economists alike. It was never boring, despite all the baseball and statistical jargon. However, I stilI prefer the movie.
There is a trope called “competence porn,” which is described as “the thrill of watching bright, talented people plan, banter, and work together to solve problems.” The movie is the epitome of this trope.
Brad Pitt has the first-world problem of being a “character actor trapped in a movie star’s body.” His role as Billy Beane in “Moneyball” perfectly encapsulates this problem with his Oscar-nominated performance and perfectly mimicking the real life Beane by working out instead of watching games.
“Moneyball” exposes the problems of over-relying on subjective scouting. Take, for instance, in the book, when the Chicago White Sox was observing pitcher Chad Bradford. Lewis writes: “Chad didn’t look like a big leaguer. Chad didn’t act like a big leaguer. Chad’s success seemed sort of flukey.”
Lewis further explains that the reasoning for this subjective behavior is that team front offices “preference for their own opinions over hard data was, at least in part, due to a lifetime of experience of fishy data. They’d seen one too many guys with a low earned run average in Triple-A who flamed out in the big leagues. And when a guy looked as funny, and threw as slow, as Chad Bradford – well, you just knew he was doomed.”
The book gives an array of evidence into why baseball’s scouting views existed for so long. And with that, the movie perfectly demonstrates this conflict with the scouts and Beane.
In the scene where Beane and Grady, one of the scouts, are having a heated discussion in the hallway. Grady explains there are intangibles that are important to consider when scouting players. What I loved about this interaction is that neither of them is wrong. Intangibles do play a key role in determining the success of a player. Beane even traded Jeremy Giambi, who he signed based on his new process, because he wasn’t working out with the team.
This comes to a head as Beane ends up firing Grady, and Beane questions his process as they A’s go on a losing streak.
Jonah Hill’s character Peter Brand, based on Paul DePodesta, tells Beane that Johnny Damon is not worth the $7.5 million he received from the Boston Red Sox. In the book, Lewis goes into much more detail: “By totaling up the outcomes when Johnny Damon was in the field, and comparing them to the average, Paul was able to see how many runs Damon had saved the team. He was also able to estimate how many runs Damon’s likely replacement, Terrence Long, would cost the team. Some of this you could see with the naked eye, of course. You could see Johnny Damon break the instant the ball left the bat. You could see Terrence Long freeze, or even take off in the wrong direction, when the ball was in mid flight. You didn’t really need Wall Street traders to tell you which one was the better center fielder. The system born on Wall Street simply helped Paul to put a price on the difference.”
This is a long-winded, but I wanted to showcase this excerpt as this is pretty much what the entire book is about. There is a story behind those numbers and how they intersect with the intangibles that scouts are defending.
As of the 2023 season, Beane has yet to win a World Series. The Red Sox implemented his model, even hiring Bill James, and went on to win the World Series in 2004. Beane reminds me of Napster, where while he didn’t experience the success of the World Series, he was the catalyst for disrupting an entire industry.