Moneyball, a biographical, sports, drama film, was released in 2011 and directed by Bennett Miller. The film was based on Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball. The movie gave a detailed account of the Oakland Athletics baseball team during the 2002 season and the Oakland general manager’s efforts to assemble a competitive team. The Oakland Athletics suffered a big loss to the New York Yankees in 2001 postseason. As a result, Oakland lost many of its star players to free agency and ended up with a weak team with unfavorable financial prospects. The general manager’s efforts to reassemble a competitive team were denied because Oakland had limited payroll. The scouts for the Oakland Athletics followed the old baseball custom of making subjective decisions when selecting the team members. The general manager then met a young, computer whiz with an economics degree from Yale. The general manager decided to appoint him as the new assistant general manager. The assistant general manager had a deep passion for baseball and had the expertise to crunch the numbers for the game. His love for the game made him develop a radical way of understanding baseball statistics. He was a disciple of Bill James, a marginal figure who offered rationalized techniques to analyze baseball. James looked at baseball statistics in a different way, crunching the numbers purely on facts and eliminating subjectivity. James pioneered the nontraditional analysis method called the Sabermetric approach, which derived from SABR— Society for American Baseball Research. The assistant general manager followed the Sabermetric approach by building a prediction model to help the Oakland Athletics select players based on their “on-base percentage” (OBP), a statistic that measured how often a batter reached base for any reason other than fielding error, fielder’s choice, dropped/uncaught third strike, fielder’s obstruction, or catcher’s interference. Rather than relying on the scout’s experience and intuition, the assistant general manager selected players based almost exclusively on OBP. Spoiler Alert: The new team beat all odds, won 20 consecutive games, and set an American League record.

Questions for Discussion
1. How is predictive analytics applied in Moneyball?
2. What is the difference between objective and subjective approaches in decision making?