More than baseball

Rating: 10/10 (29 April 2012)

Moneyball examines a deeper premise than how the 2002 Oakland A's managed to form a contending baseball team with a small payroll. While there is a lot of baseball in the story, it is not the whole story.
Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A's (still is) during a time when it appeared baseball was ruled by large payrolls. Right away, you are shown how the Oakland team loses three big talents to the more well-healed baseball teams (Yankees, Red Soxs) and now they need to find players to stand a chance to compete but at one of the lowest payroll levels in Major League Baseball. Billy discovers Grant (Jonah Hill) who uses a different, more calculated approach to evaluating talent than the old tried and true method of subjective evaluation by long-time scouts.
The story is crisp, the movie cleanly presented, and well-acted by the two principle actors. Aaron Sorkin's writing fingerprints are all over it. It is fine movie making.
But the story isn't just about baseball, it is about how objective tools are used to decide how the talent is acquired and used. We are seeing more and more of this in our daily lives. If you work for an employer, there is a strong probability that how your efforts are graded are done using a scale that is cold, hard, and unmoving. What was once a series of perceptions and opinions by your boss are now hard straight facts. It is because the humans that manage other humans have a series of preconceived notions of how well you do your job. Humans are fallible, so our evaluations are flawed too.
I once created a computer program to play the board game Monopoly with me. I figured that I should be able to beat it more than it beats me because I wouldn't be able to construct a rich set of logic rules that would beat my cognitive abilities. After playing against it many times, I was surprised to find that it could beat me six out of ten games. Reason? I was subject to making decisions based on gut feel instead of cold hard logic and I made faulty decisions. The computer didn't, so it won more times than not.
Moneyball is the same thing. A roomful of scouts deciding on which players they should go after is flawed and will ignore those that deserve consideration while accepting those that don't. This is expanding to our workplaces as well and we will be accepted or rejected based on firm data than someone's opinion. As a teacher in a high school, that is exactly what testing has done for schools. It is probably coming soon to a workplace near you.