Five Things I Learned from ‘Moneyball’

As soon as I got wind of this movie, starring Brad Pitt and recounting the 2002 Oakland A’s pioneering use of sabermetrics, I knew I would get a blog out of it. But I never got to see the movie until last Saturday night.

Let me back up a minute for those of you not familiar with this concept.

According to Wikipedia, “Sabermetrics is the specialized analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.”

In “Moneyball,” Billy Bean, played by Pitt, travels to visit the Cleveland Indians to try to make some trades. While there, he meets an economics graduate from Yale who introduces Billy to the concept of using statistics to choose which players have the probability to deliver wins to the team.

You know what? Just see the movie, if you haven’t already, because as a girl I’m sure I’m messing up this description. At any rate, here are five lessons I think we can all take away from this story:

1) You need to be willing to listen to unorthodox ideas.

This means we need to get out of our comfort zone, learn new things and be open to new ideas. I talk about this all the time in my blog, so I won’t belabor the point. Open your mind!

2) You need to admit you can’t do it alone.

Billy wanted so badly to win a championship, and even with a payroll five-times smaller than the New York Yankees, he got pretty close. But, his ego didn’t get in his way; he knew that he needed to listen to other ideas and get help to make his dream a reality.