How the ‘Moneyball’ Oakland A’s Reinvented Baseball and Beyond: The team showed the sport—and plenty of other businesses—a new way to build a successful team (Jared Diamond, April 16, 2026, WSJ)
Yet for as long as America’s love affair with baseball has lasted, the sport’s practitioners knew shockingly little about how the game was truly played for most of that time. Teams built their rosters while relying on rudimentary statistics like batting average and runs batted in for hitters and win-loss record for pitchers. They deployed strategies like the sacrifice bunt and stolen base with remarkable frequency despite lacking real evidence to justify such usage.
These were simple concepts to understand, but unbeknown to almost everybody for generations, they might have been flawed. Batting average counts every type of hit as equal, even though home runs are clearly worth more than singles. A starter’s record fails to take into account the quality of the teammates around him. Bunting means willingly giving up one of your 27 outs, the most precious resource that exists in the game.
The problem was that until recently, nobody realized that everything they thought they understood about baseball might be wrong.
Analytics removes emotion.