Moneyball and the reality of numbers.

About technology, business & management issues..

 A couple of days ago I had the opportunity to see the Moneyball movie starring Brad Pitt (what a terrible actor !) based on the book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game. The film tells the story of Billy Beane, baseball team manager of the Oakland Athletics. What they said less tells the story of  Beane's efforts to rebuild the team of the Oakland Athletics after the departure of several of its flagship players (including then-famous Jason Giambi). The limitations that Billy had been unimaginable, not to have a sufficient budget to attract decent players to the team and to compete against financially powerful  teams the Yankees or Red Sox.

The plot revolves around Billy Keane and with the help of a young man, then his assistant in the Management of the team, challenge the establishment in baseball and begin to try to assign value to players who were virtually discarded by other teams, baseball scouts. This new approach was based heavily on statistics, curiously in a sport ruled by numbers, which were not valued among people who made decisions on the team.Thus, Beane assembled a team full of veteran players whose careers debris and were closer to retirement but surprisingly gave a stir in the American League division that year.

 Of course all this was achieved with a payroll of no more than $ 45 million per year (when teams like New York spent more than four times that amount) but which players were squeezed the last drop of performance they had.

The film revolves around the inertia and resistance that Beane met on the way: criticism of the other managers who said that not all decisions on statistics could be but it also should be considered human and sporting items that impacted performance  of the players. At that point the critics were right on  (the same argument of the film confirms that fact on Giambi's brother situation) that Beane just thought that the incidence of these factors was overvalued and that did not allow managers and scouts to see that there were  a  of set attributes much more measurable and less subjective than age, socialization, susceptibility to injury and personal education issues.

Analyzing the film, the plot of it reminded me of some chapters of the book by Ken Auletta: Google The end of the world as we know it. This book tells some of the difficulties the founders of Google faced as they try to convince their customers that there was a real and tangible merely measure  of the performance of their spending on advertising and that this metric would help to diversify and focus the resources the best possible way and not fall into a waste.

The same Auletta tells how the old marketing lords opposed the intentions of measuring performance in advertising spending  that Google promoted, since it would imply that "the magic was over" and therefore there is no way to charge the customers the  "intangible- magic"  concept related to all marketing campaigns that  established companies offer to their customers.

At the end of the movie, Beane’s interview with the owner of the Red Sox who was impressed by the theories and the management of Beane in Oakland and  offered him the post of General Manager of the team. Within the conversation, the owner of the Red Sox to Beane explains the resistance of the baseball world to his ideas was understandable as everyone knows that  revolutionary new ideas are often not welcomed by the medium, as this means that several people lose their benefits, expertise and even their own jobs and therefore  he should not take it so personally.

 At the end Beane decides to reject the offer and decides to stay in Oakland (where he remains to date) but his theories are being applied in some way or another within the organization of baseball and other sports.

A clear example of how lack of resources results in innovation of the ideas of people.