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Kottke had a quick post last week regarding Moneyball. If you haven’t read the book I highly recommend it, if only to gain greater insight into the strategic side of pro sports. I find it interesting how many people tear down the success of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and actively cheer against Jeremy Brown. The critics’ main issue is author Michael Lewis hero-worships Beane, at times to the detriment of every other GM. But the whole point of Moneyball, in my mind, is that certain people (Beane being one of many small-market successes in the MLB) are able to exploit an unbalanced system by creating their own advantages and outsmarting far more capable (or cash-heavy) competitors.

Moneyball, in combination with the rise of fantasy sports, has put the microscope on general managers of every sport. But any GM worth his salt undoubtedly has his own methods, or subscribes to Beane’s school of thought (see: Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Indians, Toronto Blue Jays, all of whom are mentioned in the book for similar approaches). The most misunderstood bit of Moneyball is that everything boils down to this:

Billy Beane loves players with high on-base percentage.

That’s a very black-and-white, shortsighted view, in my opinion. It was the big talking point of the book because that was Beane’s mindset in the 2002 draft. I feel the point of the book is this: The best way to succeed in any business or category is to figure out what’s undervalued versus what is overvalued, and use that to your advantage. Discovering current over/unders is only part of the equation. You must constantly re-evaluate what is undervalued and discover the next undervalued segment.

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The interactive link from Kottke’s article is interesting as well: Ben Fry’s Salary Vs. Performance evaluator. Dragging along the minimal timeline at the top of the tool shows a day-by-day return on investment each ballclub is getting for the amount of money they’re spending. True, this might just be a clever visual but it’s also a real-time calculator of business savvy. Mr. Fry has a whole galaxy of interesting Processing experiments on his site that are well worth a look.