Are Winners Overrated?

 “History is written by the Victors,” said Winston Churchill and few of us would disagree. 

Indeed, this would apply not just to history but also to popular culture where a minority of front-runners set the pace and who the rest of us – at least for the most part - look up to and often seek to emulate.  But what gives society’s “winners” (apart from the permission we give them) the special privilege and prerogative to set the bar the way they do?

Yesterday I watched the movie “Moneyball”, a biographical drama about baseball visionary Billy Beane.  As general manager of the Oakland Athletics, Beane is the guy who scouts for and selects the best baseball talent that the club’s money can buy.  In 2002, faced with severe budgetary constraints (relative to teams like the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox), he joined forces with a Yale economics graduate to develop an entirely new way of looking at player selection. 

“The problem with baseball”, asserts his brainy side-kick, “is that clubs buy players when they should be buying wins”.  His hypothesis was that while richer clubs were spending large sums of money on superstars – big hitters, base stealers, the guys who create theatre and build match attendance – a large pool of less explosive but nonetheless competent players  (overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws) were readily available at a lower price.   And so while the club could no longer afford superstars like Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi, it could conceivably “recreate” their influence on the field through a composite of lower profile players.

And so Beane and Brand set about creating a team from, as the latter refers to it, “an island of misfit toys”.  A 37-year-old batting legend past his prime and with less than a year of baseball left in him.  An injured catcher who could no longer excel in his former position but who could bat and keep first base.  A little known pitcher with a highly unorthodox throwing style.  In short, the breakthrough for a cash-strapped club like the Oakland A’s, lay in looking at performance stats from an entirely different angle.  But would it work?

The record reflects that the A’s had the longest winning streak in Baseball history that year – 20 straight wins.  All this at a cost of 250 000 payroll dollars per game while the Yankees were paying over $1.2m apiece for their victories.  It was an extraordinary achievement – one that earned Beane a job offer from the Red Sox worth $12.5m.  Satisfied with being the guy who had turned Baseball selection upside down, he stayed with Oakland.  But In 2004 the Red Sox – who had swiftly embraced Beane’s selection philosophy, broke an 86-year World Series drought.  I was in Boston when it happened – an eye-witness to a euphoria that might have rivaled the end of two World Wars combined.  Two days after the win, 5 million Bostonians lined the city’s streets to welcome their beloved team back from St Louis.

So maybe history isn’t exclusively written by the victors.  Yet such examples are so few and far between that we’re unlikely to see things differently for some time to come.  In the corporate world alone, we’re surrounded by organisations that approach people management the way rich baseball clubs did back in 2001.  To say nothing of flawed education systems and top-heavy, self-interested governmental policy.  The result is almost always the same – the orthodox talent rises to the top while the rarer yet quieter strengths are slowly suffocated before being ejected from the system entirely.

In honour of his achievements and the lesson he has taught me, I dedicate Apple’s legendary advertisement to Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane.