Money Ball

Sandra Baah

Business Statistics

Dale Matheny

February 29 2012

The book Moneyball by Michael Lewis is about a former major league baseball player who became the manager of the Oakland A's. It tells the story of how he led the team to success despite their low budget by using computer based analytics to draft players. With the help of Bill James, the Oakland A's came up with a new plan based on statistics to draft players. He went after players nobody wanted due to their low budget and his new plan. Billy led the Oakland Athletics to a successive win seasons by changing the way he measured players. He abandoned the traditional 5 "tool" the other scouts used and adopted empirical analytics. The abandonment of the traditional assessment of players for the analytical approach led to high victory for the Oakland A's despite their low budget.

By applying sabermetrics to baseball the Oakland Athletics found a way to defeat rich teams. Billy Beane had a different approach, he had metrics he used particular metrics to evaluate and pick players. Those metrics are, on base plus slugging, walks and hits per innings pitched, and base runs. James thought the statistics for baseball were inaccurate. James stated that "statistics were not merely inadequate; they lied. And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their games" (Lewis 67). By recognizing this, it helped the Oakland A's find undervalued players because the other scouts were still judging based on only the statistics of the individual players. Billy knew that the other teams using the traditional way were being lied to. This gave Billy an advantage that the other teams did not realize.

Billy Beane did not let lack of money to stop the Oakland A's from winning. Compared to the other major league baseball teams who had a budget of up to four hundred million the Oakland A's only had forty million. Billy Beane did not have enough money to buy the players he really wanted. Despite all these limiting factors it did not stop him from leading the team to a 20 consecutive wins. The Oakland A's were different from other teams. They did not let anything stop them, they did extraordinary things. As their salary decreased they got better, this is very unusual. The new approach; sabermetrics helped the team change and improve in a short about of time. This new approach caused problems for the Oakland A's. It caused problems with the team; Billy and the Oakland scouts. Some people and teams hate sabermetrics and think it does not help with winning.

The new approach helped the Oakland A's succeed because it was ethical. Billy Beane used numbers to evaluate the players. Numbers matter but can be misleading. By looking closely