Read time: 3 min
*To breathe a little more life into the words in this post, I recommend you read while listening to the Moneyball Soundtrack.
Also, if you got anything out of this post, I'd love to hear your thoughts at [email protected]
“The batting average is evil. You can’t have a goal where we do everything right and still fail. This is why performance stats like the batting average, is the biggest trap in baseball.”
- Steve Springer
A photo dated 1984 depicts Steve Springer in his early 20’s. To his right is Jeff Innis a sub-marine pitcher. To his left with his arm around his shoulder is Billy Beane. The three of them are in Triple-A Mets uniforms.
In high school, Billy Beane had the attributes that any athlete would dream of. He was tall, and fast. Strong, and equally flexible. When he was chosen by the New York Mets in the first round of the 1980 Major League Baseball Draft, the road to big league baseball seemed relatively unobstructed.
As an amateur prospect, Billy was predicted to be the number one overall pick. Captivated by his physical prowess and athletic ability, many scouts speculated that he was not only a premier prospect but a future Major League All-Star; a 5-tool player who would make the adjustment to Major League Baseball as his body filled out and his fundamentals refined.
Historically, it usually didn't take long for players of his caliber to navigate themselves up through the minor league system, but for Billy, what came next were years of constant struggle, frustration, and self-torment.
Knowing that he had the skills to compete at the highest level, he would end each season wondering when the puzzle pieces would finally begin to fit.
Like the scouts around him, he was beginning to feel the sense of urgency that comes when reality begins to fall short of expectations. It began to influence his performance. In a way, he was the embodiment of pure but unrealized potential. Ultimately, Billy Beane’s professional career as a player would be relatively short.
Both mentally and emotionally exhausted by the daily grind of a minor league player, Billy Beane would meet with the Oakland Athletics general manager Sandy Alderson a day after he was reassigned to minor league camp in April of 1990.
Instead of returning back to Spring training, Billy requested a job as an advanced scout. A few years later, he was promoted to assistant general manager before replacing Alderson as the general manager of Oakland Athletics.
He would eventually go on to revolutionize the way organizations scouted and accessed the performance of players with the use of Sabermetrics and data-driven statistical analysis; an approach that Sandy Alderson had introduced Billy to because of the smaller payroll the Oakland Athletics had compared to other clubs.
Alderson taught Beane how to find value in players that other organizations overlooked through the use of data-driven quantitative analysis.
The strategy for the Oakland Athletics organization was simple. Find undervalued players by identifying counter-intuitive performance indicators like on-base and slugging percentage. By adopting a contrarian perspective, they were able to assemble a team that outperformed their opponents on a smaller budget.
Today, organizations leveraging statisticians is commonplace. Many of these key events were depicted in the Oscar-nominated film, Moneyball.
In a way, Billy’s greatest weakness, his habit of overthinking his performance with constant self-analysis was what made him arguably the most powerful general manager in baseball of his time.
As an athlete, his overanalytical mind would always be an obstacle to the free-flowing instinct of a player who was able to play with trust and reckless abandon. Because of his obsession with detailed performance stats and a definition of success that was predicated on the outcome of his performance, his sense of satisfaction would always be zero-sum.
In his mind, he would only be successful if he had collected positive offensive numbers on the stat sheet. If he hadn’t, it meant that he had failed. As a player, he would always struggle to redefine his sense of success. As a general manager, however, he could be as detailed as he wanted, by completely reversing what professional organizations traditionally valued.
Instead of hits, he would prioritize walks, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and a myriad of other stats that seemed completely counterintuitive to the standard of the last hundred years.
He redefined what success could look like in baseball.
Suddenly, hitters for the Oakland Athletics didn’t need to rely on getting a hit in order to be seen as a valuable asset to a lineup. As a general manager of a Major League Baseball team, Billy had achieved what he had always struggled to do as a player. He redefined his definition of success and transformed how athletic performance was measured. He placed more of the athlete’s process in the hands of the individual player. This empowered his athletes to have more influence over their daily and yearly goals. Now, they were also able to redefine their definition of success, or at least widen the criteria.
The lessons we can learn from Billy Beane can be said in the following.
- Sometimes your greatest weaknesses today has the potential to become your greatest strength tomorrow.
- To the degree that you focus on actions that are within your control, you will develop a mindset that fosters continual improvement which will sustain levels of motivation and perseverance.
- To the degree that you focus on the aspects of a goal within your control, you're granted confidence.
Like baseball, life is a game, and it’s meant to be played. We are all on a path that consists of recurring failures and the prospect of future success.
We have flaws that seemingly hold us back. We struggle to see how we can use them to our own advantage. Our goal is twofold.
To stay in the process of continual learning while focusing on the aspects of our craft that are within our control.
This is how we grow.
Each of us must realize if we want to embody the energy to continue pushing through the resistance that any project or goal has, it will be impossible to do if we’re obsessed with the end result. We must avoid chasing an ideal future that we ultimately have no control over.
Instead, we must learn to focus on the daily process, routine, and task-oriented work of our craft.
The moment success is defined solely by the outcome, success begins to take the shape of a cloud...
...something we can chase but will never catch.
We must keep our heads down, set a pace, and embrace the seemingly mundane moments of our work.
We can start by first clearly defining our goals; goals that are established by us...
Not our parents, society, or what is currently the trend. We must be uniquely connected to our mission.
But first, it is required that we think and act for ourselves. Like Billy, natural talent alone will only take you so far. It's the same for any artist or entrepreneur struggling to create a body of work in hopes of one day creating something that society values.
With any project or goal we pursue there is always an element of uncertainty. The time, energy and focus we spend on a task will always contain the possibility of failure.
Ultimately, our ability to shift our gaze from the outcome to the process will dictate how effective we are at drawing lessons from our mistakes.
To do this, we must redefine what success looks and feels like, and ultimately how we measure it from day to day.
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