Friday March 04, 2005

Moneyball, Statistics and Talent
Late one evening last October I went out to dinner with Hal Stern in Colorado, and, given the time of year, the subject of baseball came up.  We were supposed to talk about OpenSolaris and the ramifications for Services, since Hal is the CTO for Sun's Services organization, but I knew that something was up when Hal asked to sit near the bar, so that he could look over my shoulder (not at me, mind you, but over my shoulder) to see the television coverage of Game 5 of the postseason Yankees Red Sox competition.   I was happy to oblige, but couldn't help but ask why baseball mattered so much to him?

Well, we did talk about OpenSolaris and also about Providence and eating clubs and family and Fenway and about a million other things that you talk about when you're having a good time.  And along the way, Hal had a book suggestion for me:  Moneyball by Michael Lewis.

The next morning, Hal sent me a follow-up email, not just to say thanks but to make sure I heeded his advice to read Moneyball.  (This is one of the valuable lessons I've learned from Hal - even though he's incredibly busy, he always makes the time to follow-up and leave you with an idea or a question.  Wonderful manners.  Must be that east coast education at work.)

So, finally, long overdue, I read Moneyball.  Wow.  Of course, it's old news.  It was published in 2003.  It's been reviewed before.  But as I asked around, I found a whole bunch of people who haven't read it yet.  So, here is my emphatic recommendation.  READ IT.  The opening lines of Moneyball's Preface draw you right in:

"I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?"

For any of you who have wished that we used more statistical analysis in business - and asked better questions - you'll love this book.  It's actually a woven collection of stories - about Billy Beane, Bill James, Paul DePodesta, Scott Hatteberg, Jeremy Brown, Chad Bradford and my favorite, the Greek god of walks.  But mostly it's about a vision and a commitment to think about an old problem differently, to challenge conventional wisdom, to be willing to be laughed at, and to use science (statistics, in this case) to make decisions about staffing and talent.  It's also a potent reminder that one should never use someone else's yardstick to measure talent.  The A's found tremendous contributors where other teams saw only outcasts. From the chapter on "The Jeremy Brown Blue Plate Special" in Moneyball:

"They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that.  The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice.  It's a luxury.  What begins as a failure of imagination ends as a market inefficiency:  when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job."

Michael Lewis has taken a sport that I had always considered Boring (the B intentionally capitalized) and made it absolutely, utterly fascinating.  For any of you that know me really well, there's a line in the Scott Hatteberg chapter that resonates.  Gold star to whoever finds it.

Finally, I loved the underlying commentary about community, and sharing of ideas, and internet as a town square for conversation and problem-solving.   What Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta did with the Oakland A's would not have been possible without standing on the shoulders of giants, nor without the collaboration of different people spread across the country:  From the "Anatomy of An Undervalued Pitcher" chapter in Moneyball:

"The Internet of course had consequences for the search for new baseball knowledge.  One of the things the Internet was good for was gathering together people in different places who shared a common interest.  Internet discussion groups, and Web sites like baseballprimer and baseballprospectus, spring up, created by young men who, as boys, had been seduced by the writings of Bill James."

I think the brilliant story told in Moneyball may just be a drop in the bucket, an early view of the kinds of  "big steps forward" people will be able to take because of  the internet and better access to information.  In the meantime, it's a great read for a rainy, or a sunny, day.  Rainy, here.

(2005-03-04 14:02:09.0) Permalink Comments [4]