Moneyball, the critically acclaimed new movie starring Brad Pitt, brings to life Michael Lewis’ best-selling book about the spectacular rise of the Oakland A’s baseball team through masterful use of statistics and mathematical analysis. This would seem to be complete vindication of left-brain thinking over fuzzy-headedness.
After all, the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, defied baseball tradition and was proven right. Conventional baseball wisdom, which favored young power-pitchers and high-profile athletic hitters, relied heavily on intangibles and subjectivity for decision-making. Instead, Beane brought in nerd-like thinking and reams of data. Pitting dull numbers and algorithms against the intuition and experience of his scouting staff, he assembled a team of no-names and has-beens that achieved the longest winning streak in history, despite the lowest payroll in MLB.
Left-brain (logic, analysis, mathematics) 1
Right-brain (intuition, emotion, holistic thinking) 0
Right?
Not so fast.
More to the story
Clearly, Beane’s use of data was absolutely pivotal to the A’s dramatic turnaround. Sabremetrics (the statistical analysis of baseball) has since spread within MLB and is widely credited, for example, as a factor in the Boston Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series.
Beane’s tactics did introduce a welcome and long-overdue measure of objectivity to the realm of player selection—but that’s only part of the story. Several key right-brain factors were also instrumental to Oakland’s success. Here are just a few:
Creativity
Challenging conventional thinking takes creativity. In the movie, a young Yale econ grad named Peter Brand presents a new view of what it takes to win games. Baseball has never lacked for statistics, but Brand addressed them in new ways, looking at relationships like the correlation between getting on base with runs scored. This approach allowed Beane to acquire undervalued players at bargain prices. While the specifics of Brand’s approach are left-brained, the ability to make connections and see things in new ways hails from the right.
Emotion
The movie’s Peter Brand and his real-life inspiration, Harvard-educated Paul dePodesta, were clearly brilliant left-brainers, but it was emotion that drew them to baseball. Love of the game, not rational analysis, led them to forgo traditional number-crunching occupations to work in an environment in which they would clearly be misfits.
Pattern detection and empathy
Beane’s willingness to adopt this radical new approach stems in part from his own experience. Certain skills (“tools”) like pitching, fielding, and running, were supposed to be the surefire elements of success. The more tools, the better the player. Yet Beane himself, a promising “5 tool” player, should have been a superstar, but wasn’t. His failure as a player in the majors haunted him—and puzzled him, allowing him to grasp the wisdom of new thinking early. It also fueled his empathy for underappreciated players who washed out, such as Scott Hatteberg, a former catcher left by elbow surgery unable to throw or bat. Beane retooled him as a first-base player who went on to…well, you’ll just have to see the movie.
Using whole-brain thinking to win
Right-Brain Brands champions right-brain thinking because it is so often devalued and dismissed. It’s easy to see how left-brain skills contributed to the A’s success portrayed in Moneyball. It’s less easy to see the the subtler but vital right-brain contribution. But it is the whole-brained marriage of right- and left-brain thinking that makes for truly winning ways.
