The Sequel to MoneyBall
I recently had lunch with my accounting partner, Darrell Kesslering. He’s a keen athlete and sports fan. Baseball came up in our conversation. I suggested what I thought was an original idea. I wondered why some professional baseball team didn’t assemble all proficient hitters with batting averages in the .700 range. My logic postulated that runs were more important than errors, gold gloves, and a bunch of other non-issues tracked by baseball teams and sports reporters. Darrel suggested I watch the movie called MoneyBall, starring Brad Pitt. So I read the book, MoneyBall, and then watched the movie of the same name. The Oakland Athletics pursued the logic I had suggested (before I articulated the strategy!).
Brad Pitt plays the part of Billy Bean who was a skilled baseball player who failed in professional baseball because he didn’t fit the mold. But Billy Bean did have a set of skills and traits to allow him to pursue a high “on base percentage” strategy (as manager of the Okland A’s) by ignoring conventional baseball strategy and single-mindedly pursuing one baseball trait regardless of the remaining warts on his chosen players. Through the regular baseball season, his strategy worked because the season was long enough to allow statistics to dominate. In the playoffs, luck became as important as statistics, in short series, so his strategy didn’t work as well.
The portrayal of Billy Bean as a riverboat gambler who could bluff his way past other baseball executives was an element of the story which doesn’t resonate with me.
We currently have two high profile series in Canada. The Toronto Blue Jays are competing in the lead up to the World Series and we have just finished a federal election in which the Liberals have earned majority voting control of the national government. The similarities between professional baseball and representative government struck me. The majority of folks ignore the regular season in baseball and the time between elections in government. Then a whole swack of folks pile on bandwagons leading up to the playoffs and the elections. Luck, personality, media, and sound-bites carry disproportionate influence in the playoff and election time frames.
It’s pretty much irrelevant who wins the World Series but it’s pretty much critical who wins the elections. Both baseball and government are designed to sabotage arriving at the right answer. Except as a theoretical exercise, I don’t care how baseball evolves but I do care how government evolves. Even though the conventional baseball factions have continued to disparage and partially ignore Billy Bean’s approach; they did notice some logic and adjusted their metrics enough to be able to acknowledge “on base percentage” as a consideration.
Meanwhile, we haven’t found a Billy Bean for government. I wrote the book “Toward Improving Canada” as a start on adapting metrics to sound logic. Recently, I’ve been upgrading my ideas to be more generally applicable in democratic governments around the world. I’m near completion of “Village Cafe, a buffet of ideas”. I cast myself as the busboy in the Village Cafe. You can star in the sequel to the MoneyBall movie, you can be Billy Bean in the upcoming movie, MoneyGovernment. Join me in upping the ante in leagues of nations around the world.