"Moneyball," Moneyball, and the Church?

So last week, my Twitter feed produced a link to a column by a pretty well-known blogger in progressive-evangelical circles, putting forward the notion that the church needed to embrace the principles laid out in Michael Lewis's best-selling book Moneyball. Being a guy who occasionally traffics in the intersection of sporting culture and faith issues, this naturally caught my eye, but a few "wild pitches" found in the blog column (in terms of its description of Moneyball in its baseball context strictly) put my suspicion antennae on high alert. I made the mistake of acknowledging this on Twitter, which led to my being questioned about the hackles-raising points, which obligated me to respond (albeit tardily), which is resulting in this blog post.

Image: baseballphd.net

For the uninformed, Moneyball is Lewis's account of the 2002 Oakland Athletics under the leadership of general manager Billy Beane (and also the title of the Brad Pitt movie based on the book). This leads to the first "wild pitch" in the column: Beane is general manger of the Athletics in the book, not manager, as the blog post states. This may seem trivial but is desperately important; it is the general manager in most organizations who bears principal responsibility for acquiring players for the team, whether via draft or trade or free agent signing. As a manager, Beane would have had little opportunity to put his ideas into action; even as general manager Beane faced stiff opposition from many parties in the A's organization -- principally the team's scouting staff, steeped in traditional, non-statistical player evaluation beliefs, and the team's actual manager at the time, Art Howe.

Another "wild pitch": I'm not quite sure to what the author is referring when he speaks of "a company called Saber Metrics." I've never heard of it, and I like to think I'm enough of a sports fan that I would have. What I do know of is sabermetrics, not so much a company as a practice of empirical analysis of baseball. (Sabermetrics, or advanced statistical analysis in general, has started to expand to other sports as well, with basketball perhaps being most notable.) The term "sabermetrics" is derived from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research, an organization founded in 1971 and espousing baseball research of all kinds (historical research has long been a strong suit of the group), not just statistical analysis. However, a number of SABR members (most famous of whom are probably Bill James, statistical analytics guru who published occasional editions of the Bill James Baseball Abstract for diehard stat geeks and is now with the Boston Red Sox, and Rob Neyer, sabermetrician and author long affiliated with ESPN.com and now with FOXSports.com) did engage in the use of advanced statistical methods to engage with baseball and its results, including developing new statistics intended to gauge baseball performance more accurately. Beane himself was/is not necessarily a sabermetrician himself, but made the decision to make use of these advanced analytical tools in his role with the Athletics. (More on this later.)

Another "wild pitch" (or at least curveball in the dirt): it's a stretch to say that Beane's teams were or are "playoff contenders ... year after year." While there have been a number of highly successful teams during Beane's tenure, there have been rough years as well (this year's team looks like one of the latter so far). A look a the franchise's history shows that, since Beane took over as GM in 1997 (after first working for the club as a scout), after a slow start, the team peaked around 2001-2002 (the period covered in Lewis's book), declined over time to a pretty rough stretch from 2007-2011, and rebounded with three straight playoff appearances 2012-2014. One could argue that the Tampa Bay Rays (full disclosure; the closest thing I have to a "local" team right now) have had a somewhat more consistent run of success since their playoff breakthrough in 2008, while being run under similar principles (and with maybe even less money).

Another factor to be considered is that for all the success across regular seasons, the team has yet to win a playoff series under Beane's tenure. Beane himself famously acknowledged this with the earthy declaration "my s*** doesn't work in the playoffs," attributing playoff success or failure in general to luck. (He's probably not completely wrong about this, but that's another column, the theological implications of which I'm not sure about.) This isn't a reason to dismiss the success of Beane's work, but should not be forgotten in seeking to apply the concepts elsewhere, including the church.

Now, as far as the actual application of "Moneyball" principles in the church realm, there are definitely possibilities there. But it matters what we understand those principles to be, and even those in baseball tend to get them wrong. For a number of years folks tended to leap to the conclusion that Beane's tactics were about acquiring a specific type of player (for example, one who was particularly skilled at getting on base) at the expense of another (e.g., one who hit a lot of home runs). Beane would have been plenty happy to load his lineup with power hitters, but because other teams with larger budgets could and did pay more for power hitters, Beane needed to find a way to acquire players who could contribute enough to the team without spending sums of money the team's ownership wouldn't approve. Thus, as teams such as the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox loaded up on power hitters, Beane went in search of players skilled at getting on base.

Perhaps the most famous example of this in Moneyball was Scott Hatteberg, a lifetime backup catcher until being signed by Beane for the 2002 season to replace power-hitting Jason Giambi, who was siphoned off as a free agent by the big-bucks Yankees. If you know baseball, you know Giambi was a first baseman, not a catcher, but this didn't faze Beane, who signed Hatteberg anyway and put his coaches in charge of teaching him to play a new position. Hatteberg indeed went on to have a reasonably successful season for the A's in 2002.

At any rate the biggest takeaway from Moneyball in this respect is to "zig where others zag," using one's limited resources most efficiently by prioritizing players with skills less valued by other teams. Of course the problem is accentuated when other teams, particularly teams with bigger budgets than yours, start to appropriate your methods. The Red Sox in particular began to invest more in advanced analytics, to which they could then apply their much larger player-salary budgets. Their run of success from 2004 (their first World Series win in 86 years, as we heard about ad nauseam that year) through 2013 was largely fueled by this combination of analytics and budget, or "Moneyball with money" as some have called it.

Here, I think, is a potential pitfall for applying Moneyball principles in the church. In responding to other teams' appropriation of statistical analysis, Beane has quite notorious for ruthlessly trading "assets" before they reach their free-agent years, in order to guarantee getting some return on the investment the team has made in them. (At this point Beane's methods seem most about the collection of young -- and therefore affordable -- talent, while occasionally taking chances on risky players such as those recovering from injury.) As this year's team struggles, observers expect a "fire sale" of talent to kick in soon, as Beane seeks to retool and reload the young talent in the A's organization rather than pouring resources into a lost season.

If this sounds rather impersonal, well, it is. Players who think they've found a home in Oakland are suddenly shipped across the country without so much as a thank-you card. (Third baseman Josh Donaldson, now with the Toronto Blue Jays, would be a prime example from this past offseason.) Even if one is applying these Moneyball principles to the activities or programs of the church, one had better remember that there are people attached to those activities or programs, people who can't be traded or released. A church simply can't proceed as if personalities are not involved in its activities.  A church may seek efficiency, but it probably shouldn't be "ruthlessly efficient." There is at least some risk of getting caught in a different form of what many outsiders like to charge against megachurches or heavily evangelical churches; treating people as numbers.

Another general principle of Moneyball tactics, not necessarily restricted to Beane and the A's, can be loosely summarized as "don't tie up too much in one player." Even if the A's had chosen to pay the money required to keep Jason Giambi before the 2002 season, they would have blown too much of their budget in doing so, and been unable to sign enough players to field a workable team around Giambi. (The aforementioned Rays pursue this principle almost religiously, while a team like the Red Sox will still splurge on big-ticket players on occasion.) Here is a pretty workable principle for the church. Sinking too much of the church's assets into any one facet of its ministry (too much salary for the pastor, for example, or a budget gobbled up by the music ministry or the preschool or whatever) becomes quickly paralyzed and unable to respond to other ministry needs. Star pastors seeking $65M jets need not apply.

A final thought on Moneyball: the book actually carries a subtitle, "The Art of Winning an Unfair Game." (The "unfair game," of course, is competing against big-dollar teams such as the Yankees or Red Sox.) I don't think anyone seriously wants to suggest that the church is a "game" of any sort, but this might be helpful to consider in thinking of "moneyball" in application to the church. If our objective is not to "win an unfair game," then what is it we're hoping to accomplish in a "moneyball church"? If this becomes a prod to reconsider the mission of the church more generally perhaps it's a helpful thing; if it simply becomes yet another quick-fix for the ailing church then it is probably going to be more destructive than helpful.

Or perhaps the question becomes "with who (or what) are we in competition?" That opens up a whole minefield of questions beyond the scope of this blog, but those questions might actually be useful or needful for churches to consider.

This has gone well beyond the initial scope of the query that prompted this blog, to be sure. Hopefully, though, there are some useful points here for those who might wonder at the unlikely mating of Moneyball and church. Let the discussion continue.


*Note: I do have other reactions to the blog that initiated this whole discussion, ranging from curiosity to abject horror. As they lie (as far as I can see) outside the scope of the Moneyball Church idea I am not addressing them here, and as they lie outside the scope of the sports/faith focus of this blog, they are very unlikely to be addressed here.