"Moneyball," the film, comes at a strange time for the statistical revolution in baseball.
Some background: In 2002, journalist Michael Lewis followed Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane as he and his team attempted to stay competitive with the New York Yankees and other baseball mega-powers on a comparatively shoestring budget. Beane, forced to look for advantages that didn’t involve spending more money, assembled a smart and iconoclastic team of assistants that overturned conventional wisdom about walks, strikeouts, the readiness of high school players and the indefinable idea of grit that still thrills the baseball scout.
For many baseball junkies, especially ones who look at the game at a theoretical level, "Moneyball" was a gateway to a new world. But as the book made clear, Billy Beane didn’t get there first. His work owed a major debt to that of Bill James, the obstreperous and brilliant baseball thinker who made it cool to question the game’s received wisdom. So it goes in the world of new ideas.
Of course, as baseball fans know, the "Moneyball" revolution fizzled. Beane and the Athletics are working on their fifth straight non-winning season, and the draft class of 2002 that was detailed in "Moneyball" hasn’t really panned out. But most agree with Beane when he says now that the advantages he found in baseball’s inefficiencies have largely disappeared. Maybe this would have happened without "Moneyball," but an observer could be forgiven for concluding that the book ruined one of the last advantages of the smart small-market team: superior analysis.
"Moneyball," at its center, is a story about the human mind. Many of the flaws of the old-school approach to baseball weren’t actually about baseball at all: They were about how we tend to think, and how original thinking is discounted all the way up to the moment it becomes impossible to deny.
This is what happened for advanced statistics in baseball. In recent years, a 13-12 pitcher won the American League Cy Young — unimaginable in a pre-"Moneyball" era — and Curtis Granderson this year is mentioned as a possible MVP despite a batting average in the .260s.
The end of the "Moneyball" story circles back to the beginning. When asked in a recent interview what might be next for him when his time in baseball ends, Billy Beane muses about soccer management and consulting, an even bigger market. Beane has options. There are inefficiencies yet to be exploited.
It’s certainly possible — even probable, really — that the insights and instincts celebrated in "Moneyball" will eventually be seen as hidebound, and archaic. As revolutionary insights are adopted by everyone, people learn the wrong lessons, and dilute the immediacy of the original vision.
It’s human nature, and it’s why every political attack ad includes grainy footage and urgent voiceovers; it’s why Facebook incorporated a ticker feature; it’s why no one wants to see another flash mob viral video.
But "Moneyball" proves the history of human thinking is often as fascinating as the history of human action, and that there will always — even in a world as old-fashioned as baseball — eventually be room for new ideas.
Reach the columnist at wmunsil@asu.edu.
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