Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

The Oakland A's, under the management of Billy Beane, found a gap in the baseball skills market that existed because most baseball scouts and managers used traditional methods of selecting players that were outdated and had little relationship with skills that brought success to teams. Traditionally, baseball scouts mainly used batting averages (BA) and Runs batted in (RBI) to sign new players. On-base percentage (OBP) was used too, but it was not given as much premium as RBI and BA. Thus, when looking for players, almost all scouts went for players that scored highly on BA and RBI while ignoring those that scored highly on OBP but had low scores in BA and RBI. However, through analysis of massive amounts of data and reading Bill James’ series of baseball books Baseball Abstracts, Beane and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, found that OBP was the most important factor that determined a team’s success and not BA or RBI.

Since OBP was not valued highly in players by most baseball scouts, Beane and DePodesta discovered that they could build a successful team of players with high OBP score but whom, because most top baseball teams had ignored them, could be paid much lower salaries than their counterparts could in big teams such as New York Yankees. Therefore, they could create a successful team on a much smaller budget than their competitors. Thus, the opportunity that Oakland A discovered was set up by scouts placing less premium on OBP, yet it was the most important skill in determining a team’s success.

The belief that the players’ potential as measured by RBI and BA was more important than a player’s present performance as measured by OBP was adamant in baseball circles. It did not matter that the originator of the prevailing methods of analyzing baseball statistics, Henry Chadwick, had used cricket and not