Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Billy Beane had a favorite saying, which he'd borrowed from the Wall Street investor Warren Buffett: the hardest thing to find is a good investment

the hardest thing to find is a good investment

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why.

Approach

That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone. Every event on a baseball field Paul understood as having an "expected run value." You don't need to be able to calculate expected run values to understand them.

Baseball

The point is not that Billy Beane is infallible; the point is that he has seized upon a system of thought to make what is an inherently uncertain judgment, the future performance of a baseball player, a little less uncertain. He's not a fortune-teller. He's a card counter in a casino.

Billy Beane

The point about Lenny, at least to Billy, was clear: Lenny didn't let his mind screw him up. Billy Beane's failure was not physical but mental. His mind had shoved his talent to one side. He hadn't allowed nature to take its course. It was hardly surprising that it occurred to the older men that what Billy really needed was a shrink. "Some of the guys who are the best are the dumbest," he says. "I don't mean dumbest. I mean they don't have a thought. No system."

Confidence

Billy, said his old teammate J. P. Ricciardi, "could talk a dog off a meat wagon." That's his style: if he doesn't get the answer he wants the first time, he calls again and again until he does. To come between him and what he was after at just that moment would have been as unwise as pitching a tent between a mother bear and her cub.

Convincing

People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence—as if it's inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.

Data

Give the game a chance to come to you and often enough it will.

Give the game a chance to come to you and often enough it will.

If I get a hit, I get the ball. Moyer was one of the few pitchers in baseball who would think about Scott Hatteberg as much as Hatteberg thought about him. Moyer would know that Hatteberg never swung at the first pitch—except to keep a pitcher honest—and so Moyer might just throw a first-pitch strike. But Moyer would also know that Hatteberg knew that Moyer knew. Which brought Hatteberg back to square one.

If I get a hit, I get the ball.

Of course, it didn't matter what McKeon thought about drafting players, as he hadn't built the Marlins but was airdropped into their midst in mid-season. This McKeon guy had that special something that Ringolsby understands—and that guys like Billy Beane never will. That piece of manhood that little nerds will never understand. The bracing thing that Ringolsby can feel in his bones and you, weak-chinned outsider, cannot. The special something that won championships.

Intuition

BILLY BEANE had been surprisingly calm throughout his team's play-off debacle. Before the second game against the Twins, when I'd asked him why he seemed so detached—why he wasn't walking around the parking lot with his white box—he said, "My shit doesn't work in the play-offs. My job is to get us to the play-offs. What happens after that is luck." The postseason partially explained why baseball was so uniquely resistant to the fruits of scientific research: to any purely rational idea about how to run a baseball team. It wasn't just that the game was run by old baseball men who insisted on doing things as they had always been done. It was that the season ended in a giant crapshoot. The play-offs frustrate rational management because, unlike the long regular season, they suffer from the sample size problem. Pete Palmer, the sabermetrician and author of The Hidden Game of Baseball, once calculated that the average difference in baseball due to skill is about one run a game, while the average difference due to luck is about four runs a game. Over a long season the luck evens out, and the skill shines through. But in a series of three out of five, or even four out of seven, anything can happen. In a five-game series, the worst team in baseball will beat the best about 15 percent of the time; the Devil Rays have a prayer against the Yankees. Baseball science may still give a team a slight edge, but that edge is overwhelmed by chance. The baseball season is structured to mock reason.Because science doesn't work in the games that matter most, the people who play them are given one more excuse to revert to barbarism. The game is structured, psychologically (though not financially), as a winner-take-all affair. There isn't much place for the notion that a team that falls short of the World Series has had a great season. At the end of what was now widely viewed as a failed season, all Paul DePodesta could say was, "I hope they continue to believe that our way doesn't work. It buys us a few more years."

Irrationality

Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking—had he the gold? or the gold him? —John Ruskin, Unto This Last Maybe more astonishingly, at least for economic determinists, the teams in baseball's best division, the American League West, finished in inverse order to their payrolls.

Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking—had he the gold? or the gold him? —John Ruskin, Unto This Last

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. There was no longer any need to guess. The goal of the Oakland front office was simply to minimize the risk. Their solution wasn't perfect, it was just better than the hoary alternative, rendering decisions by gut feeling.

Minimize the risk

When the numbers acquire the significance of language," he later wrote, "they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry....And it is not just baseball that these numbers, through a fractured mirror, describe. It is character. It is psychology, it is history, it is power, it is grace, glory, consistency, sacrifice, courage, it is success and failure, it is frustration and bad luck, it is ambition, it is overreaching, it is discipline.And it is victory and defeat, which is all that the idiot sub-conscious really understands." Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It might be that a reporter, seeing every game that the team plays, could sense that difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt it. Certainly the average fan, seeing perhaps a tenth of the team's games, could never gauge two performances that accurately—in fact if you see both 15 games a year, there is a 40% chance that the .275 hitter will have more hits than the .300 hitter in the games that you see. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible—it is a matter of record. gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over-or undervalued, who couldn't? Bad as they may have been, the statistics used to evaluate baseball players were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the value of people who didn't play baseball for a living.

Numbers

It helps put whatever pressure he's feeling into perspective. The doctors had told his father he'd never walk again and the man had not only walked, he'd worked, and not only worked, but played catch. If his father could do that, how hard was this?

Pressure

"It's looking at process rather than outcomes," Paul says. "Too many people make decisions based on outcomes rather than process."

Process

If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done. Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.

Question

It defied the odds; it defied reason. Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball. He used many unreasonable means—anger, passion, even physical intimidation—to do it. He had graduated from college with distinction in economics, but his interest, discouraged by the Harvard economics department, had been on the uneasy border between psychology and economics. He was fascinated by irrationality, and the opportunities it created in human affairs for anyone who resisted it. Attitude is "a subjective thing." Billy's stated goal is to remain "objective." The biggest thing that AVM does is extract the element of luck. Everyone in baseball knows how much luck is involved in the game but they all say, 'The luck evens out.' What AVM was saying is that it doesn't. It's not good enough to say, 'Aw, it just evens out.'"

Reason

"It's not just that he's smarter than the average bear. He's relentless—the most relentless person I have ever known."

Relentlessness

"Every form of strength is also a form of weakness," he once wrote. "Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say." James had observed in baseball what he called a "law of competitive balance." "There exists in the world a negative momentum," he wrote, which acts constantly to reduce the differences between strong teams and weak teams, teams which are ahead and teams which are behind, or good players and poor players. The corollaries are: 1. Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength. 2. The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind. 3. Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards.

Strengths - Weaknesses

1. "No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you're screwed." 2. "The day you say you have to do something, you're screwed. Because you are going to make a bad deal. You can always recover from the player you didn't sign. You may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price." 3. "Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it." 4. "Know exactly who you want and go after him." (Never mind who they say they want to trade.) 5. "Every deal you do will be publicly scrutinized by subjective opinion. If I'm [IBM CEO] Lou Gerstner, I'm not worried that every personnel decision I make is going to wind up on the front page of the business section. Not everyone believes that they know everything about the personal computer. But everyone who ever picked up a bat thinks he knows baseball. To do this well, you have to ignore the newspapers." But they did this less with honest curiosity than in the spirit of a beleaguered visitor to Morocco hiring a tour guide: pay off one so that the seventy-five others will stop trying to trade you their camels for your wife. Which one you pay off is largely irrelevant.

Trading Politics

What he hadn't lost was his ferocious need to win.

Win