Moneyball Podcast

In the podcast, Alan Gatehart discusses the movie Moneyball and how the Oakland Athletics used unique metrics to compete with teams that had more money. The team went through stages of team development, including forming, conflict, storming, norming, and performing. The conflict arose as the traditional scouts and organization members questioned the new approach. Billy, the general manager, had to communicate and set clear expectations with the players. Trust became an issue, but as the team started performing well, everyone began to buy into the new approach. The group norms within the organization were focused on irrelevant factors, but Pete, an assistant GM, introduced a different way of thinking based on statistics. This caused a decrease in group cohesiveness, but ultimately led to success as the team started winning games. Play ball. Hey, guys. I'm Alan Gatehart, and welcome to our podcast, How to Win Off the Field. Today, we'll be talking about the movie Moneyball, which is a baseball movie about the 2002 Oakland Athletics. Some background about the A's, they had much less money than some of the big market teams in Major League Baseball, yet they were still able to compete with other teams and make the playoffs. They were able to do this through safer metrics that other teams had not yet accepted. I'll be discussing this with two of my teammates today. In the two will hold, we have Noah Jones and batting third, Ray Rodman. We'll be analyzing how Billy, being the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, manages the front office, as well as other members of the organization. Let's jump right into the stages of team development. Yeah, so the first stage of the team development, we have forming. Just like the overall process where Billy forms that unique identity, the team was built on different role players who fit certain statistical criteria. It was pretty unique. It was pretty new to the time. It wasn't really based on some of the traditional metrics, like maybe just appearance or how well a player was playing. It was really diving into the statistics. So nobody else really understood it either. Right. That kind of leads into the conflict. Right. Yeah. Unlike other teams, the A's tried to kind of complete a puzzle, while other teams were trying to stack the best players they could. But the A's kind of realized there's one end goal, and they were unique in that way. They also didn't have nearly the budget that some of these teams, like the Yankees, had to just go throw in a bunch of different players. It kind of forced them to look outside of the box. They couldn't really afford those big name players. The movie starts with them losing two of their big name players to a team like the Yankees because they could pay twice the salary. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, like you said, I guess that kind of leads into the storming. That change being brought forth into the organization really caused a lot of the traditional older scouts and everybody around Billy to really kind of question what he was doing and really kind of freak out a little bit. Yeah. The A's, they were the first team to even introduce this at all. And obviously a lot of people that were with them had bounced around the league for a while and had never seen anything like this. So they kind of realized that this was going to be tough for them. They had to adapt, or they were done. So there's a lot of conflict within the organization over the ultimate goals of the team and how to accomplish those. Yeah. I think a good, like, perfect example of that, specifically in the movie, when Billy was talking with the older scout, I don't remember his name, but the two were arguing and Billy even had to fire him because he was so stuck in his own ways like that. Right. Yeah. Essentially he just, he tried to get fired. He kept saying like... He kind of sabotaged himself. He did, yeah. He said, we want to do it this way. It's how we've been doing it for a hundred years or whatever. It wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't. The way the organization was going, they had to change or else, just like that scout, they were done. And then that moves us into the norming aspect where Billy begins to talk to his players more and set clear expectations with them. Right. The players also weren't used to anything like this. Even some of the veteran players, like David Justice, who was a player who had been with the Yankees for a long time and had a lot of success, he was not accustomed to anything like this. So Billy kind of had to set the record straight and say, like, this is what we want from you. This is what we need from you. You're not going to do this thing. You don't need to play for us. Yeah. Honestly, I kind of thought that Billy... It took him a little bit too long to really start communicating with the players in the movie. It was really him and his guy, Pete, who introduced this kind of method and they didn't really... I thought they kind of took too long of a time to really communicate with the players and get them on board. I think that was a lot of the issue, to be honest. Yeah, I agree. It wasn't really until the middle of the movie when the team was kind of hitting a few speed And you've got sports talk radio saying Billy should be fired. Billy this, Billy that. A bunch of negative things about the team before Billy really realizes that he's got to spread what he's trying to do with the rest of the organization and especially the players. Yeah. And I mean, this kind of goes into a different aspect of the trust between the organization and Billy, because while this is happening, the fans are losing trust and faith in him. The coaches, the scouts, especially people like the head scout who he had to fire. So it just shows, this whole aspect just shows the lack of overall trust and knowledge-based trust, especially in Billy as a GM. Yeah, the trust issue went both ways too. I mean, Billy trusted Pete and that's about it. Pete is an assistant GM that Billy trades for from Cleveland Indians. Yeah, it starts with Billy tries to make a trade with the Cleveland Indians at the start of the movie and Pete ends up denying or declining the trade because of logic and statistics that he's using. And this intrigues Billy and Billy ends up buying him from the Indians right after. And now he's gained calculus-based trust in Pete and that's pretty much the only trust he has in anyone. As soon as he saw Pete really demonstrate something outside of the box, he really wanted to get him and it was something that the rest of his staff and other scouts didn't really have. So Pete was pretty unique, I think, to Billy there. Right. Once he gets Pete from the tribe, nobody, not even the fans or the rest of the organization, So Billy really doesn't trust anybody outside of the organization or inside the organization besides Pete. And Pete was a huge factor toward the high performance that season. So heading back to performance here. Yeah. Yeah, we'll go back to the last stage of that team development with the performing. The team really begins to start clicking. Everybody starts buying into Billy's unique approach to managing the team. And they ended up actually going on a 20-game win streak, which showed the success of it overall. Right. That's the American League and MLB record. Right. At the time. Yeah. And that was a record that had been broken for like 60 years when you had firemen saying basically baseball. Now people are starting to buy in. They're starting to understand that, hey, this is something that we can actually use. Yeah. And Billy and Pete, they were sold on it the entire way. But it really took, I think, the team understanding what was going on there to really get them to start clicking and winning games there. Yeah. And after that, the team's clicking. The coaches are finally starting to click. And the media finally gives Billy a little bit of respect. They were pretty harsh on him throughout the whole movie there. Yeah. So the next pitch, we'll be heading into group norms. So a few of the group norms within the organization that were long-standing norms. As you could tell during some meetings that scouts had, the group of scouts that gathered around Billy, they really focused on the same stuff every meeting, even though it's not really something that's going to help get the team the players that they're looking for. They're very old school. So all this new stuff is not something they're interested in changing or anything like that. And looking at group, I thought, pretty irrelevant stuff. I mean, relevant, but some of the things they brought up. They're pretty funny. It's like one guy said a guy didn't have confidence because he has an ugly girlfriend. Yeah. Stuff like that. I don't know how professional that is, really, to be honest with you guys. But it's also clearly not related to on-field performance. Yeah. But nobody stops him because that's just what they've always done. Yeah. That's the stuff they're looking at. So Billy kind of puts his hand up. It's like they're just talking. He does not care what they have to say about that type of stuff. So I guess they started as kind of a homogeneous group composition there. And then until you bring in Pete. And then Pete is really the only guy who has a different line of thinking than all the other scouts. He thinks statistics should be at the forefront, particularly on base percentage. When all the scouts are looking at the players' girlfriends and other stuff off the field that is completely irrelevant. So how do you think that affected the group's cohesiveness, like comparing before and after? Like what do you think? I mean, it definitely decreased the group cohesiveness just because they were so used to each other. I mean, you look at the movie, the scouts, I can't imagine any of them are under the age of 60, 65. Half of them have hearing aids. Yeah. And just to give you an idea, Pete's an economics major from Yale. Right. This is his first real job. And these guys are all 65, 70-year-olds who played baseball however many years ago. And just to give you an idea of how different they really are. Yeah, exactly. Also, some of the players that Billy wants to target said some of the scouts didn't look at it at all. Going back to the off-the-field issues, some of the guys that Billy wants, the scouts don't look at anything on the field but what Billy wants and what Pete wants because they're just so stuck in their norms. They talk about Jeremy Giammi, for example. He has too many problems off the field and he finds his way in the news more often than maybe they want him to. But at the end of the day, breaking the group norms, Pete and Billy want him simply because he gets on base. That's all they care about. Right. He says a couple times, like, why do we want him? Because he gets on base. Very mathematical approach to the whole thing there. Yeah. And one more thought about the group cohesiveness is the group size. So initially, when he brought Pete in, it decreased the cohesiveness because Pete is a completely different thinking guy from the scouts. But after a while, the scouts kind of become irrelevant to Billy and it's just him and Pete making the decisions, which they both are obviously on board with this style of thinking. Right. Right. Yeah. I think just decreasing that group size really helped improve the cohesiveness a little bit, take away from the – a lot of those older scouts were pretty stubborn. And they're stuck in their own ways. And I think decreasing the group size in that regard was a good move from Billy on that. And really, if you think about it, it's just – it's so much easier to have two people agree than 12 or 15 or whatever the number is. Right. Even if – in this scenario, scouting disagreements, sometimes it's like a good thing. You don't want to all be thinking about the same guy and then he turns out to be a bust. But in this situation, where it's pretty clear that Billy and Pete are on the right track and the rest of the guys aren't, I think the cohesiveness that's formed between Billy and Pete is the right move to kind of cut the rest of the group out of the main decisions. Okay. So now let's go to dealing with conflicts. So I think one of the main conflicts throughout the film that I noticed was just the overall conflict with the coaching. And there was definitely some goal incompatibility there between Art, the ace coach, and the general manager, Billy. Art was really – he thought that he was – I mean, as a coach, he had the right to set the lineup, how he liked it, how, you know, he grew up coaching and everything. And Billy was definitely trying something new there. So that caused a lot of issues throughout the entire movie. Yes. I think there's a ton of past conflicts clearly throughout the movie because Art seems to try to just keep everything in status quo and he thinks the goal is to, you know, sneak into the playoffs. And then Billy thinks the goal of the team should be to, like, create a new way of playing baseball and create something that will last. That's more than just sneaking into the playoffs every couple of years. Right. Billy wants to win. Sustain success. Billy wants to sustain success. And that creates a ton of relationship conflict between the two also. There's a few heated verbal exchanges as well as they just generally don't really get along throughout the entire movie. They just don't like each other. I thought it was interesting. In the very end of the film, you kind of saw Art kind of coming around on Billy's method. He put the, what was the guy's? Hattaberg. Yeah. Hattaberg. He wanted him to play. Billy wanted him to play the entire movie. And I think that was really symbolic when Art finally put him in at the end of the game and he hit that home run. So, yeah, I thought that was really interesting. The other issue with Art is with the communication and his lack of motivation because he's on last year's contract and he feels like he has the right to have that contract renewed before they start playing baseball so that he has that safety net to fall back on. He thinks that the only way, he thinks he's not going to get a new contract almost no matter what. He thinks the only way he'll be able to explain himself in job interviews is if he makes a lineup and does stuff that they've been doing for 50 years that every other team in the league does and that Oakland does differently. So he's just worried about himself and how is he going to get something, a job in the next year. Exactly. So that's really my end of the whole being part of the change of an organization in that regard. So he has a lot of personal goals that don't really line up with the goals of the team. Yeah. Another big conflict, which we mentioned a little bit earlier, was with the lead scout who Billy eventually fired. The two main things there were goal incompatibility and differentiation. There's a huge, I mean, going back to Pete, he really brings a new statistical approach to the team, whereas the rest of the scouts, it's not an old school, you know, hard-ass on or whatnot. They want ballplayers. I think there was also something to it where Pete didn't play baseball or have like actual physical baseball experience. I think a lot of those guys had trouble believing he was capable of doing his job because of that. Yeah. They all looked at Pete when he walked in. He does not look like a baseball player. There's this much bigger guy who looks very nerdy and they all, I think, just didn't like him because of that. Yeah. Just because he didn't look like he knew baseball. Yeah. For reference, Pete is played by Jonah Hill. Yeah. So that really tells you something there. As well as Pete, some of the scouts thought that playing was a prerequisite to the job when Pete and Billy were trying to prove otherwise. Yeah. Another, I mean, this isn't as big about conflict, but Johnny Damon, their big-name guy that they were trying to retain over the off-season, but obviously Johnny Damon wanted a lot more money than Oakland could afford. So eventually they figure out with Johnny Damon's agent, him and Billy figure out a way that they would be able to keep Johnny. And eventually the agent calls him back and kind of says, hey, Damon wants a million more dollars than you guys are going to offer him, so you either have to pay or he's walking away. Yeah. That definitely highlights one of the sources of conflict, the scarce resources there. They just don't have the money to pay him. And when they don't have those kind of resources, it really opens the floor up to conflicts. And obviously Damon left the team. Yeah. It kind of hurts Billy as a whole because he's got this whole plan with Damon, and then all of a sudden he's got to scrap that and find something else to use. Yeah. The scarce resources are really the main theme of the movie. They lead to almost all the conflicts, including conflict with the fans, where the fans, they don't really believe in what Billy's doing and what the team are doing. They just won 90-plus games last year. They think they just want to stay in the status quo and sneak into the playoffs. But I even think it's interesting if you watch the beginning of the movie and you look at the spans of the opening day game, there's all these empty seats, and you can tell the fans aren't really bought into the opening day roster. And by the end of the movie, it's pretty much out of the blue. The fans aren't really bought in. Especially during the 20-game win streak, the entire city is backing Billy and what he's done, even though they didn't really start by feeling that way. Yeah. One other conflict, kind of going back to Pete and Billy's meeting with Andy, Billy wants a relief pitcher named Ricardo Vincone, and Pete ends up vetoing it. He really likes Vincone. So at the trade deadline, Billy and Pete, once Pete's brought over, they trade for Vincone, and they have to cut somebody. So Billy really faces some internal conflicts about what he wants to do. I mean, the resources, again, you only have 25 spots. There's only so much you can do. Going back to that scarce resources again, yeah. It hurts, and the guy's devastated, obviously, because it's getting hot, but it's just part of the game. Yeah. Another, at the end of the movie, after Billy kind of revolutionizes the game, Boston's a team that notoriously, they want a winner. The city wants a winner, and they've had success pretty much forever. And they offer him a record-setting deal to become their general manager, and Billy's really conflicted on whether he wants the money or the personal power, because in Oakland, he really has almost all the power to do basically whatever he wants on the baseball side. Right. So just looking at all the different conflicts in the movie, what do you think was like the best option for Billy to use when he was dealing with those different conflicts? Well, if you look at the chart we had in class, just about every one of those conflicts we talked about had a high issue importance, a low relationship importance, because Billy doesn't care about relationship. Right. Yeah. A high relative power, and then high time urgency. So overall, forcing is the best option for just about every single one of these conflicts, and that's the one that he ends up using the most. Right. So I think that works out well. Yeah. I will say the one conflict area where that's not the appropriate thing to use is how he kind of works with Pete. It's a ton of collaboration with Pete, and I mean, they really can't get anywhere without each other. He respects Pete. He doesn't respect a lot of these other guys, but he respects Pete, so he's willing to collaborate. I think he really respected him, and he valued that relationship, and what he brought to the table. So that maybe took that away from forcing, and as you said, maybe brought in some collaboration there. Yeah. He still pushes Pete. He still doesn't collaborate 100% with Pete, but for the most part, it's collaborating. Right. With the next pitch, we'll head on to how Billy exercises power and influence throughout the movie, and we'll start with how he trades Jeremy Giambi and Carlos Pena, who Art, the manager, both really loved him. He played them every single day, and Billy exercises coercive power where he's able to administer negative outcomes on Art because Art isn't doing what he wants, and benching Giambi and Pena. And Giambi, well, he also uses the coercive power over Giambi because there's one scene where they just lost the game, and they've lost however many straight, and Billy walks into the locker room, and they're all celebrating, and Giambi's the one who's behind all this, and he's dancing, and he ends up breaking the stereo, and he's pissed off at Giambi especially, which then makes him just kind of say, okay, I'm just going to trade Giambi. That scene's also in the midst of a losing streak, and it's kind of symbolic in the way that they're losing. It's like, were the scouts right? Giambi often field issues were the main reason they didn't want him, and so were they right? He kind of snaps. I think that also shows his legitimate power, too, because he really shows his authority there. I mean, as soon as he walks in the room and starts slamming stuff, everybody's quiet, dead quiet, and there's not many people in the organization who are able to just go bring stuff and not really face too many consequences. And I believe he also leaves the room by throwing the Gatorade. Yeah, yeah. Gatorade ice and stuff all over the place. Puts it down. Dead silent. Dead silent. I think earns some respect there. Yeah. Another veteran on the team, David Justice, who we touched on a little bit before, but they got hit from the New York Yankees. And there's a scene where Billy, David's hitting in the batting cage, and Billy walks up next to him and kind of sparks a conversation about how Justice has become more of a leader for the team, for the younger guys. It's a very young team, and he's one of the only bets they have. And Billy really relies on his expert power from his playing days. There are a few scenes throughout the movie where Mad Zigzags and other teams are meeting with him, saying, you're going to be a top 10 pick. You're like a surefire all-star. And he fills this out. He barely plays in the big leagues at all. He gives up a full ride to Stanford. Yeah. He doesn't play MLB. Yeah. Right. So he has expert power from his playing days. And he was on successful teams, even though he didn't have personal success. So he knows what it takes from the veterans to help the team win. Yeah. I think he definitely used some expert power with that. And I think it was definitely a crucial moment when he was talking, as you were saying, in the batting cage with Justice there, getting that veteran on board with the plan and communicating that to the younger guys, too. It was really crucial there, I think. Yeah. And this leads up to he doesn't really want to hear it. He says, you know, that batter stuff is for the younger guys, but that's not for me. And then he asks Billy how he's different. And Billy's like, well, you've never been to GM, but what's it like? And he says, fair enough. And then he hears him out. And also, Billy tells him another way he uses probably legitimate power. He tells him, hey, the Yankees are paying half your salary for you to play against them. Yeah, that was really. So that's what the Yankees think of you. They think you're washed and they don't want you, so they're going to pay $3.5 million for you to play against them. Right. Yeah. And that really hits home with David. Yeah. Yeah. And also, Billy also, when they're kind of losing and starting to get into their winning ways, he meets personally with a lot of younger guys trying to boost confidence in the locker room and with each of them. And this is definitely a reciprocity-based approach as, you know, both parties here have something to gain. Billy, as we talked about at the end of the movie, gets a record-breaking offer. You know, that's what he has to gain. That's what he can get to. And the players, I mean, it's hard. It's like a big league. It's very hard. So they have something to fight for if they want to be able to stay in the big league. So Billy's trying to help them do that. Yeah. I know we've been talking a lot about how successful he's been with all these different kinds of powers and everything, but I think it's also important to look at some of the resistance he received when trying to provide some of that influence and power, specifically with Art, I noticed, throughout the movie. I mean, we kind of touched on it earlier, but Hattenberg, that was a big… Hattenberg. Hattenberg. Hattenberg. Yeah. That was a big point there, where Billy wanted him to play first base the entire year, just based on the statistical approach, even though he wasn't really had practice at first. He wasn't really… He's been out of the game. He's also been out of the game for a long time. He quite literally could not throw a baseball overhand. From Art's perspective, you've got to kind of… I mean, yeah, definitely there was some resistance from Art there, rightfully so, I think, both passive and active, by Billy approaching several times, telling him, like, hey, you have to put him in the lineup here, and Art would just say, you're stepping over… Over the line. Yeah, you're abusing your power here. This is my job to manage the team, so… I mean, at first, he was kind of just trying to, like, avoid the issue altogether, but then Billy keeps pressing him on it, and then he just basically completely ignores him and plays who he wants to play, which leads to Billy trading away, paying in geometry. Yeah. That was one of my favorite scenes in the movie, when he said, your plan had it worked today, and he's like, well, now it's in the lineup. Yeah, that was a great… That was one of my favorite scenes. Yeah, I understand that's your lineup. Yeah. Maybe trade it away. Another… One of the most well-known scenes in the movie, and a very major scene, is talking about trade improving tone, but the MLB trade deadline's a very hectic time, and Billy uses reason-based strategy. He's been through a few trade deadlines. He uses reason-based strategy, getting the San Francisco Giants, another team in the league, to look at Benafro, who's a player on the A's. Even though he knows that they don't want him, the Giants and the A's are looking at a mutual player who happens to be Ricardo Rincón. So he feels like, if the Giants are kind of cooling down on getting Rincón, that he'll be able to get him. Yeah, that's only another option would be trading it to Billy and the A's. Right. So he uses his expert power to do it. Yeah. Yeah. But he's been there before. It's not his first rodeo, for sure. Mm-hmm. So going back to the sources of power, one contingency that really enhances Billy's power, particularly over Art, is the substitutability contingency. So once Billy trades Pena and Giambi, there really aren't any other alternatives to play besides Scott Hatterberg, who is Billy's favorite guy, who fits the mold of an open A to best. And Ray, I know there's another contingency that you wanted to touch on. Yeah, I was just going to quickly touch on discretion contingency of power there, which is the freedom to make decisions without getting approval from other people. So Billy definitely, which enhances Billy's power, obviously, there. As one guy puts it early in the movie, Billy answers to ownership and God, and that's it. Exactly. So he's not interested in asking others for their opinion. We've touched on it multiple times just to using that discretion of power against Art just because he is higher up in the ranks. But there is a scene that I do want to point out where he has to get approval from the owner when making the trade. I think at some point there, they call the owner. He doesn't have the money for it. He's got to save. I guess that could kind of reduce it a little bit. But overall, I think mostly it's enhanced in the movie. Billy does kind of try to substitute Billy there again. He tells the owner, he says, I'll pay for him and kill him. But when I sell him again next year, I keep the profit. So he's kind of saying, you know, he's the guy. There are already many other guys like him. That was all fine. Yeah. Okay, so in conclusion, we looked at how Billy manages his different teams throughout the organization. We looked at the four stages of development that he ends up bringing to the Oakland A's and how he changes the group norms overall. We also looked at how Billy deals with conflict, particularly past conflict and relationship conflict. He deals with a lot of goal and compatibility and some communication issues. Yeah, and then finally, we looked at how he exercised power and influence over different members of the organization and the team. So we looked at careers of power examples of that legitimate expert power. And then we looked at also passive and active resistance from other parties as well there. And thank you guys for listening. And again.