One of my favourite sporting movies is Moneyball. Those outside of the US may not have watched it or even heard of this Oscar nominated picture. It’s a movie about the adaption of innovative saber-metrics which changed how the game of baseball is managed by baseball heads, scouts and insiders.
But once you look deeper, Moneyball is not just about baseball, but the search for a new way to value people who were ordinarily undervalued based on misinformed preconceived ideas.
I believe that there is a championship team of twenty five people that we can afford. Because everyone else in baseball under values them. Like an island of misfit toys.
From wiki, ‘by re-evaluating the strategies that produce wins on the field, the 2002 Athletics, with approximately US$44 million in salary, were competitive with larger market teams such as the New York Yankees, who spent over US$125 million in payroll that same season. Because of the team’s smaller revenues, Oakland is forced to find players undervalued by the market, and their system for finding value in undervalued players has proven itself thus far. This approach brought the A’s to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003′.
The Moneyball notion as it applies to baseball can be seen in this short video which extracts the best parts of the notion from the movie:
Now, the writer Michael Lewis of Moneyball which inspired the movie based on the history of the saber-metric movement back to such people as Bill James, offers a brief but candid account of what Moneyball means in the bigger pitcure such as that on Wall Street or even towards our own intended or unintended biases. I found it illuminating despite its brevity. I hope you like it also:
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
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