Moneyball: Lessons for Business

This project investigates how salary and performance of offensive players in Major League Baseball are linked. We believe this is an interesting problem because it is traditionally believed that professional athletes play with hopes of earning a high salary, yet it often seems a batter’s performance is not linked to their salary (Jensen). Therefore, it seems as if the link between a player’s performance and their salary is different than their true performance. Performing a statistical analysis of this conundrum will give us great insight as to if it is accurate to say that performance changes salary drastically. Studies that prior statisticians have done differ from this study because their studies focus on salary and team performance rather than on the performance of individual players (Jane). Our study focuses on salary and individual performance in the current season. While there is extensive data on both game performances in the MLB and salaries, we can contribute to the statistical community by comparing how salaries are affected by different performance indicators for randomly selected individual players. Essentially, our hypothesis is an examination into how a batter 's game performance affects salary. We expect that the better a player’s statistics are, the higher their salary will be.

Moneyball, the story of a dynamic change agent who rallied a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives to overturn convention and rethink how Major League Baseball (“MLB”) was managed and played. Its really a book about hustlers. Moneyball consecrated the notion that its noble to win inexpensively, but believe its good to stay a cheap baseball club, because of their fat annual revenue-sharing check they get at the end of the year. Michael Lewis wrote an un-organizational confusion, his misunderstanding of baseball, to his constant interruption of financial and statistical talk, that turned interest in the book away from many.

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

Professional sports are often perceived as one of the last true bastions of capitalism, where player salaries are constrained only by what the market will bear. Since the 1990’s, however, [professional] sports leagues have grown increasingly concerned over the increase in player salaries, not only in terms of the absolute cost required to field a competitive team, but also in terms of parity, or the extent to which teams in a league are fairly evenly matched (Cushman 1).

Therefore Billy Beane decides to set an unconventional strategy in order to be able to compete with other wealthy teams “out there”. His goal setting is based on the strategy he sets for his game in what he calls “an unfair game”. Manager Billy knows that decreasing cost is the main concern of the top executives of his team. The main shareholders and stakeholders have set their goals based on their conservative approaches. To be more specific, the top manager of Oakland Athletic is not willing to take any risk in order to pay more money to recruit better players.

The Oakland A’s were a poor team. They could not afford to shop for costly players like teams who were considered “rich” did. So, the A’s were bound by money to find “bargain” athletes. This problem repeatable showed up in baseball’s history and baseball management continued to handle the problem the same way- by blindly trusting the system. The overall question was how could a poor team improve their standings? How can they overcome the biggest hurdle of money without being financially unstable? Can a team win games without any big names in baseball? Billy Beane, a fruitless baseball player turned thriving general manager, revolutionized the baseball industry by finding a new solution to an old problem.

1. Based on the “Billy Beane: Changing the Game” case, explain how and why the Oakland A’s economic situation after 1995 shaped its:

The A's recent success is attributed to the innovative approach taken by Billy Beane in assembling a baseball team with a very limited amount of financial resources. Billy Beane has built a successful ball club because he has found an efficient and cost effective way of measuring baseball talent thus essentially creating a loophole in this unfair game because winning percentage is a result of talent not

In the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, talks about the traditional methods in how to choose a ball player and it tell also told me about Bill Beane's unsuccessful career as a baseball player. The five tools or abilities that a baseball scout looks for is run, throw, hit, and hit with power. A guy with wheels means a guy could run. A guy with strong arm had a hose. Each time a baseball scout scouted Billy Beane all they saw was a future big league star. Mets had the first pick of the 1980, Major League Baseball draft and they had the choice down two players. One was Beane and the other one was Strawberry. However, Beane had baseball and football scholarship from Stanford University. As draft approach a scout thought teams were scared of Beane

He gives two notable examples of this, citing the team’s acceptance of business-oriented solutions in regard to approaching recruitment over instinctive solutions. In other words, the A’s went for objective qualities versus subjective qualities. These subjective qualities were what organized baseball had always run on, and were limited to “pluses” like the ability to run, hit and throw. By expanding his purview and adding empirical evidence to recruitment, Beane was able to avoid the pitfalls of major teams with more than twice his budget and payroll. His success in honing a team to success “based on the facts” effectively changed the face of

The movie Moneyball follows the story of a former baseball player, Billy Beane, on his journey to bring the Oakland A’s to victory. The Oakland A’s is the team that Billy Beane manages, and in order to bring this team to victory, Billy comes up with a theory that the entire system and wisdom of baseball is incorrect. With this idea in mind and a tight budget, Beane begins to take a new path of baseball by joining forces with Peter Brand, an economics major, and accepting baseball players with disabilities. This new version of the Oakland A’s is what drives not only Beane to hoping for a victory, but what brings the movie to engaging the audience. As a film as a whole, the movie had many moments of suspense, excitement, and humor.

Performance management is one of the most important activities of HR. It is not enough to simply go through the business as usual and much disliked annual exercise of assessing performance and driving rewards based on a performance assessment. The information system will be drive and modifies goals as needed, assesses performance against goals, and provides instant feedback which will give them an indication of their strength and weaknesses thus focusing on skill development and motivate employees to stay with the organisation. However this may lead to Substitution of individual judgments and Challenge the nature of an organisation and the role of management

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball is a fascinating story about a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. The underlying question to this story is where the real discussion should begin. That question is: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? This question can lead into a series of discussions regarding strategy or luck, but the real answers can be found in the leadership of the organization. This leadership is found in the form of

Based on the “Billy Beane: Changing the Game” case, explain how and why the Oakland A’s economic situation after 1995 shaped its:

“At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it