The Undoing Project [antikvár]

Introduction THE PROBLEM THAT NEVER GOES AWAY Back in 2003 I published a book, called Moneyball, about the Oakland Athletics' quest to find new and better ways to value baseball players and evaluate baseball strategies. The team had less money to spend on players than other teams, and so its management, out of necessity, set about rethinking the game. In both new and old baseball data—and the work of people outside the game who had analyzed that data—the Oakland front office discovered what amounted to new baseball knowledge. That knowledge allowed them to run circles around the managements of other baseball teams. They found value in players who had been discarded or overlooked, and folly in much of what passed for baseball wisdom. When the book appeared, some baseball experts—entrenched management, talent scouts, journalists—were upset and dismissive, but a lot of readers found the story as interesting as I had. A lot of people saw in Oakland's approach to building a baseball team a more general lesson: If the highly paid, publicly scrutinized employees of a business that had existed since the 1860s could be misunderstood