“Moneyball” is over a decade old and most teams have adopted Billy Beane’s formula from those heady years. Or altered it or improved upon it. No matter the case, Beane can’t be doing the same things now that he did in 2002.
As Joe Posnanski writes today, he and the A’s aren’t. Indeed, they’re doing different things. But so too is everyone else and we’ve reached a point in baseball where simply being smarter than the next guy isn’t going to get the job done in 2014 the way it did at times in 2002. Instead, you have to be disciplined. And the A’s are disciplined:
… in real life, Moneyball II is not about being smart. Everybody in baseball can be smart. Moneyball II is about doing smart things. There’s a big difference. The A’s face the same pressures, the same groupthink, the same visual cues as everyone else. They have the same gut reactions to events, and they initially want to respond in the same way as everyone else. To say that they are smarter than everyone else misses the biggest point . . . the A’s are not a testament to genius. They are a testament to doggedly stopping themselves from making the mistakes everyone else makes. In other words: Everybody knows. The Oakland A’s do.
Go read the rest of Joe’s story on how the A’s continue to win even though the revenues are still small and even though everyone else has caught up to them in the brains department.
