My translation:
Teams like Houston Rockets/Oakland As that use newer stats aren't getting awesome results. The edge isn't there anymore because everyone else is doing the same thing
Are Greek Bonds Backing the Movie "Moneyball"? The movie "Moneyball" is winning rave reviews. Michael Lewis's 2003 book of the same name is also a great read, though handicapped in spots with the contemporary publishing-industry imperative of the nonfiction work that claims an amazing single insight that explains everything about a topic.
In the film, the handsome Brad Pitt plays Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, who is himself handsome -- maybe Beane could play Pitt in some future flick. The book and the movie both portray Beane as a super-ultra genius for applying the Bill James sabermetric approach to baseball decision-making, then using James-style data crunching to guide the low-rent, underdog A's to a division title in 2002.
Lewis' book stops in that year, which is handy for its thesis. Beane continues to run the Athletics using the moneyball approach: yet Oakland has not finished above .500 in five years, and currently is a dreary 72-88. Nor did the moneyball approach ever take the team into the World Series.
[+] Enlarge
AP Photo/Ben Margot
Billy Beane, who will play Brad Pitt in an upcoming movie.
One possibility is that the whole moneyball idea is hype: that Beane had some beginner's luck, which Lewis, wanting to puff up a book proposal, converted into a claim of a sweeping insight about sports economics. Since Beane took over the A's, there are many MLB teams that have reached the World Series without asserting they possess any stunning conceptual breakthroughs about whom to sign.
It is also possible that Beane fell victim to "commoditization," which happens with increasing speed in a globalized environment. This would mean Beane did in fact have an important insight, but his idea has been copied by most if not all MLB franchises, turning the idea into a mere commodity that, possessed by everyone, confers no advantage.
Here's what your columnist wrote about commoditization in my 2009 book "Sonic Boom": "A generation ago, a company that came up with a novel product might have decades of a business to itself, because it would take that long for other companies to hear about the idea, gear up to copy it, then learn to produce facsimiles close enough in quality that buyers would be happy with them. With each passing year, this process accelerates. Free-flowing information makes it easier for businesses to find out what is being done successfully, and imitate success.
"When IBM pioneered the desktop PC, for years the company had that market nearly to itself; then competitors jumped in, offering similar machines. By 1996, when Dell began to sell its own brand of PCs direct to consumers via the Web, IBM's core idea had been commoditized, transformed from something unique that could only be made by one firm into a commodity made by many. In commodity markets, price governs most decisions -- if competing products are about the same, why not pick the cheapest? The commoditization of the PC led to IBM's departure from that business; IBM pioneered the idea but couldn't be the lowest-cost producer, so bowed out. As the world become more global, commoditization will happen faster and faster."
Commoditization is a reason the international economy grows more productive and simultaneously more turbulent -- when some business has a good idea, the rest of the world learns to imitate that idea with increasing alacrity. In Beane's case, once the book "Moneyball" was published in 2003, the rest of baseball had a road map -- available for $27.95 in a bookstore -- on how to apply sabermetrics to free agency decisions. The idea was commoditized, and the A's sunk back into mediocrity.
