Analytics is the difference maker in today’s Major League Baseball
By Kent R. Kroeger (March 2, 2023)
My favorite scene in the movie Moneyball is the one where Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane (played by wonderfully Brad Pitt), having just been upbraided by the team’s head scout (played brilliantly by Ken Medlock) for relying too heavily on analytics when making personnel decisions, gives this response:
“My turn. You don’t have a crystal ball. You can’t look at a kid and predict his future, anymore than I can. I’ve sat at those kitchen tables with you and listened to you tell those parents, ‘When I know, I know. And when it comes to your son, I know.’ And you don’t…you don’t.”
Any soul with respect for evidence-based decision making should have jumped out of their seats in that scene. I did.
Yet, oddly enough, I am also an insufferable skeptic on the omnipotence of data analytics when making business decisions, or, as in Beane’s case, in making player personnel decisions for a major league baseball team.
The first baseball team I ever loved was the 1970s Oakland A’s (Vida Blue remains my favorite baseball player of all time). So when a colleague of mine asked me in 2011 what I thought of Moneyball, I said the book and movie made me sick.
