Value For Money

There are ways of telling whether the big bucks shelled out by your team for its star was really worth it. 

The Blind Side was based on the Ravens’ Michael Oher.

You know a revolution has truly become mainstream when it’s winning Golden Globes and Oscar nominations for Sandra Bullock. The movie she stars in, The Blind Side, may look like a typical Hollywood fable of cross-racial uplift. But its origins lie in an idea that’s swept through sports over the past decade and fused the thinking of the athletic and corporate worlds in a profound way.Call it the Moneyball effect, after the title of the 2003 book by Michael Lewis. On the surface a story about, of all the mundane possibilities, baseball statistics, the book is really posing a question: how do you properly value a player?It was a notion that intrigued Lewis, whose background was as a bond trader with Salomon Brothers before he broke into the book-writing world with the definitive tome about 1980s Wall Street, Liar’s Poker.

Despite the impressions given off by this outline, Moneyball is a page-turner full of humanity. Lewis stocks his tale with a cast of iconoclasts, contrarians and outright misfits. They’re all rebelling against a predominant idea– that the traditional way sports teams were run was wrong. Actually, it was more than that. The traditional way sports teams were run was utterly divorced from rationality. If companies were managed in the same way that sports organisations were – on the field itself, not only on the business side of the team – they wouldn’t be companies for very long. Expounding on the sacrosanct authority of coaches, one person in the book memorably asks: “In what other business do you leave the fate of the organisation to a middle manager?”

The Moneyball idea became the lodestar for every sports-loving nerd never good enough to get on the field. Teams began hiring graduates who usually made a beeline for finance jobs. Coinciding with the boom in fantasy sports, “quantitative analysis” became all the rage. New statistical categories emerged out of left field, literally and figuratively

Money Ball Cover
Images: Getty Images

Counter-revolution was inevitable. Traditionalists argued, quite correctly, that these new-school teams looked smart while not winning championships. The stat-heads countered that this was too narrow a definition of success – only one team wins the league every year, so does that make the rest failures? The argument has resolved itself into synthesis – old-school teams still thrive, but also use the new analytic methods to some degree. If anything,it’s the rich clubs of the sports world that have been able to pour resources into evermore exotic number-crunching, robbing the movement of its original insurgent character.

The Blind Side was Lewis’ follow-up, Moneyball taken to America’s football fields. The book tracks the path of a large youth named Michael Oher, eating out of garbage cans on the streets of Memphis. He’s taken in by a white family and finds he has the rare physical gifts to excel at the second-most valued position in the game, the lineman who protects the quarterback. He eventually makes it to college and has just finished his first season in the NFL, a year into a five-year, $14 million contract.

The book unfolds as a family drama, and it’s certainly the angle the film adaptation plays up. But its central point expands on Moneyball – that the prevailing system can overlook Oher’s talent until he crosses to the right side of the tracks.It’s a variation of the latest vogue that you see in the business section of airport bookshops: that success isn’t the direct outcome of innate ability, but of contexts, as put forth in the likes of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers or Geoff Colvin’s rather bluntly named Talent Is Overrated. It’s an idea catching on in wider public policy spheres, particularly education.

Who would’ve thought such a change in society could emanate from sports statistics? I have no doubt that Sandra Bullock thought about this while preparing her acceptance speech.

– Jeff Centenera