Money and Value Theme Analysis

As its title would suggest, Moneyball studies the role of money in Major League Baseball in the late 20th and early 21st century. Baseball—no less than any other popular, sought-after form of entertainment—is a business, and Michael Lewis (a former Wall Street trader himself) shows how a group of savvy general managers and assistant general managers revolutionized baseball by applying business principles to it.

One of Moneyball’s most important insights into the role of money in baseball is that, in practice, Major League Baseball functions in more or less the same way as the American economy itself. A large number of franchises compete with one another to sign contracts with the most talented players, ensuring that those players will compete on their behalf for many years to come. As with the American economy, however, the competition between franchises is far from fair and equal. The largest, richest franchises, such as the New York Yankees, have a huge advantage over their poorer competitors: they can afford to buy the most sought-after athletes. If the biggest franchises always bought the best players, one would expect that, over time, the biggest franchises would continue to get bigger and better. However, as Lewis shows, big franchises don’t always make good use of their funds and their players. Sometimes, promising players turn out to be bad investments, and sometimes, players with good agents charge the largest franchises an inflated price for their services. In effect, smaller franchises are—to use the market analogy again—startups, using novel strategies, shrewd investments, and pure luck to outcompete their larger, more static rivals. As a result of the occasional incompetence of large franchises and the ingenuity of smaller franchises, such as the Oakland A’s, Major League Baseball remains exciting and entertaining for fans—the richest teams don’t always win. Nevertheless, as Moneyball makes clear, money controls Major League Baseball to a degree that even devoted fans of the sport don’t realize: franchises make draft decisions not out of loyalty, or even due to players’ talents, but based on what their budgets enable them to do. And their success depends on the value they gain from the money they spend.

Evidently, money is the means of achieving success in the world of professional baseball. But Lewis also suggests that, in slightly a different sense, money is the ultimate measure of success. The goal of a Major League franchise is not, in the end, to win the World Series, but to draw fans, sell tickets, attract popular interest, and to boost the general cash value of the franchise. It’s still important for the franchise to win games, but not simply for the intrinsic glory of winning. Indeed, during the era in which Moneyball is set (the 1980s to the early 2000s), many baseball franchises, which had previously been thought of as essentially philanthropic organizations (i.e., money-losers), refocused their strategy and became proper businesses. Understood in this way, Moneyball’s view of baseball can seem somewhat cynical: the goal of the game is not, contrary to what many fans believe, to please fans or maintain loyalty to certain players, except as means to the end of building a profitable business.

Billy and Paul remain controversial figures in the world of organized sports. While their sabermetric management style challenged the conventional wisdom that the richest teams always won, their strategies ultimately made baseball more money-centric than ever before by applying Wall Street derivative tactics to baseball. In the early 2000s, Billy’s unique insight led the Oakland A’s to a successful season, leveling the playing field for a small, underfunded team. But since the early 2000s, and the success of Moneyball itself, many different baseball teams, big and small, have begun making management decisions with the help of sabermetrics, effectively canceling out any advantage that DePodesta’s methods lent to smaller franchises. After leading the A’s to a successful season in 2002, Billy Beane was offered a chance to work for the Red Sox and become the highest-paid general manager in baseball history. To widespread surprise, he turned the Red Sox down, claiming that he’d never make a decision that was “just about the money.” Lewis doesn’t reveal Billy’s precise motives for turning down the contract, but Billy’s decision symbolizes the contradictions of sabermetrics and monetization: although the people who pioneered the use of sabermetrics seemed to be motivated by something more than just a desire for money, their decisions had the effect of clarifying and strengthening the role of money in baseball overall.