Such misattribution of luck protected these hidden gems from discovery until Beane’s statistical approach cut through to the facts.īeane’s rivals also brushed off the A’s unusual success. Competent but counter-stereotypical players such as the “submarine pitcher” Chad Bradford were underestimated because managers concluded that their successes had to be down to mere luck. Over many years, scouts and team managers had built up stereotypes about what good players looked like. What helped swing things Beane’s way was his rivals’ tendency to reach too soon for luck as an explanation for performance in some situations while ignoring it in others. Moneyball is often portrayed as a triumph of data analytics, but that is not sufficient to explain the success of the A’s, because data on players and the techniques for crunching it had been publicly available for decades.

His statistical analysis doesn’t work in the play-offs, he says - that’s down to luck.īeane uses more colorful language, but the point is that Beane is aware that, for all his ingenuity in winning an unfair game, luck or randomness is an inescapable factor in all walks of life - even in baseball.Īnd luck played a part in the A’s story in more ways than one. At one point in Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ book on the improbable winning run of the Oakland A’s in the early 2000s, Billy Beane, general manager of the underfunded baseball outfit, makes a surprising declaration.

The power of lucky