1. Baseball: Field of Ignorance or Intelligence
Moneyball by Michael Lewis, 2004.
Investigates a basic question—how the Oakland A’s win so many games with such a small budget?
A’s 2002 Budget / $40 million
Yankees 2002 Budget / $126 million
Bottom littered with big spenders who spent on the wrong things (buying big names)

2. Major Players Bill James / first noted writer on baseball analytics
Billy Beane / GM for A’s / former player
Paul DePodesta / believed in baseball intelligence
“the Scouts” / gut feel and keen eyes
The Club / baseball “insiders” / media

3. Game Changing Athletic competition to financial one
“Baseball…how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method” (p. xiv)
“…rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why?” (p. xiv)
Measures - “scouts adored high school players, especially pitchers…” Why?

4. Billy’s Search for New Players
Billy “flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul’s laptop.” (p. 37)
Goal was to buy undervalued players, let them gain value, and trade them for new value
Billy wanted to exploit the myths of baseball

5. “Scouts” versus Paul
“It was Paul’s computer that Grady (head of scouts) dwelled on. Grady: “What do you need that for?” Paul: “I’m just looking at stats.” (p. 18)
“Paul was fascinated by irrationality…the human mind played tricks on itself when it relied exclusively on what it saw, and every trick it played was a financial opportunity for someone who saw through the illusion to the reality.” (p. 18)

6. More Paul and BI
“No one in big league baseball cares how often a college player walks; Paul cares about it more than just about anything else.” (p. 33)
“…the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success.”
“The scouts even have a catch phrase for what Billy and Paul are up to: “performance scouting.” Phrase “…in scouting circles, is an insult.” (p. 38)

7. Challenges Data was incomplete and dirty
Needed pitch types, locations, direction and distance of batted balls, pitch counts, etc.
Assigning values to the minute components of a player’s performance
Convincing the “Club” / “baseball men”

8. Business Relevance?
Need to define KPIs which may not be what is currently used
Need clean data
Must answer: “…if gross miscalculations of a person’s value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and TV audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work?”

9. Others Followed
Boston Red Sox hired Bill James, the father of baseball analytics
Many challenges have come since BI has led to success and reduced the art in the sport
You too can follow and improve your discipline