Moneyball Analysis

Moneyball In today's business world, any decision made by a manager can have serious implications on the progress of the organization. In addition to the intense pressure , the manager is also under constant scrutiny from his peers and supervisors. These is why modern baseball General Managers are surrounded with many men to advise his decisions and cut time. Oakland A's GM was able to lead his team to one game away from the World Series with the lowest Player Salary in baseball, with the help of only one man. Moneyball is about this revolutionary and dynamic pairs journey. Keeping all this in mind, any soon-to-be business manager needs to be fully prepared to defend his decision making abilities. The book Moneyball gives an exceptional idea of this process, as the manager of the featured baseball team is face with similar kinds of challenges that other teams in the league do not have to confront. Every Manager in modern world is faced with limitation of recourses. Organizations expect the manager to make effective of decisions with a limited amount of resources on hand. However baseball has a skewed and unjust system. The Yankees have a payroll of over 200 million while the A's had to be competitive with a salary under 50 million. This was the case with Billy Bean, the manager of Oakland A's baseball team. He had to select the best possible players for the club with only a limited amount of money at his disposal. It is very important for a manager to think outside the box in these situations. Billy did just that and more. Billy Bean and his assistant Paul Deposta revolutionized the game of Baseball. Moneyball is about how they took a team which was the laughing stock of the MLB, into a powerhouse, beating teams with over 3 times their payroll. Billy and Paul noticed how scouts looked at a players physical attributes more then what he can do on a baseball field. They condemned common baseball statistics like RBI's because they believed they did not show a baseball players true value. During 2002, an era where players were sought for because they hit "home runs" Paul created his own statistic which Bean trusted religiously. He fired anyone in the organization who was against his movement. 2002 was they year when the A's lost their three best players because other teams offered them more money then Oakland could afford to pay. The only way toe stay competitive was to change, and adopt a way of thinking that was almost an insult to traditional baseball. "There was a bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or what they had seen. 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" (Lewis 22). Michael Lewis is what set apart Billy Bean from other baseball Managers was his ability to make rational unbiased opinions.