Moneyball Critique
YJean Ligon
Argosy University, Tampa

October 17, 2014

Sabermetric-Based Player Evaluation Shock
In the movie Moneyball, the use of sabermetric-based player evaluation was a shock to other executives in baseball because it was not the rule of thumb for evaluating player performance at the time. The executives where accustom to using their personal biases, human rationale, gut instinct and tying things to performance that made no sense such as an ugly player’s girlfriend. Beane relied on objective evidence, explicitly ignoring anything that could be dismissed as "subjective” (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003). They also treat mere coincidences as facts in which a high probability was applied.
According to Belkin (2002), the true meaning of the word, coincidence is "a surprising concurrence of events, perceived as meaningfully related, with no apparent causal connection." In other words, pure happenstance. Yet by merely noticing a coincidence, we elevate it to something that transcends its definition as pure chance. We are discomforted by the idea of a random universe.

Beane’s effectiveness in His Success
Beane was more effective in his success because he abandoned the baseball heuristics of his day. He applied a non-conventional method that was not widely used. Since his methodology was not popular he was looked upon as being crazy because he was not using the same old method of that time. He valued winning. Therefore he was always evaluating the desirability of any possible alternatives or consequences. He took this approach with every player he brought in or traded. Therefore he exercised value-focused thinking with the use of statistical data. Keeney (1994) defined value-focused thinking as the being designed to focus the decision maker on the essential activities that must occur prior to “solving a decision problem.” The chart