Moneyball isn’t just a great baseball story. It’s a great business story. In 2002, Billy Beane, general manager of the low-budget, down-market Oakland A’s, had to rebuild the team after his three best players departed for richer teams.
He had to somehow assemble a contending club at an economical price. Beane knew the traditional metrics for selecting players wouldn’t cut it. Baseball executives had long employed subjective, non-quantitative measures like the “eye-candy test.” Does he look the part? Is he built like Alex Rodriguez? Does he have an attractive girlfriend? Seriously.
Beane could see baseball executives were assigning value to the wrong attributes. So he came up with a different game plan. He dismissed the fuzzy intangibles and made his selections scientifically—by using a few key statistical measures. And his most important measure for hitters was not home runs, RBIs or batting average. It was a player’s ability to get on base – any way he could.
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