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A lesson from Moneyball
Do we really understand what skills correlate to being successful?
Dave Keelty
March 24, 2025
What’s the central premise of the movie Moneyball? For me, (Spoiler alert) it’s about understanding what really matters in the game of baseball. What actually matters when it comes to winning baseball games. Because, as the book and movie go into, a lot of people who worked in baseball held onto outdated or unchallenged beliefs around what actually matters. As an example, people were caring more about batting percentage, than they were about on base percentage (OBP). The Oakland Athletics (the central team in the story) managed to convince the rest of the baseball world (eventually), that OBP was actually more valuable for teams to win games, and now that is accepted wisdom. You won’t find a team in Major League Baseball that still values batting percentage over OBP.
Some the group with ‘outdated’ beliefs
I was lucky enough to speak with Olympic gold and silver medal winning Volleyball coach, Hugh McCutcheon, a while back. One of the stories he shared with me has stayed with me since, and has significant correlation to the Moneyball story. Hugh was coaching a college volleyball team in the US, and they’d had a poor season. They finished last in their conference. He was doing a post-mortem, looking at the season and where’d they’d been good, where they hadn’t done well etc. In this deep dive for answers, he found a curious piece of data. Despite finishing last, they were the best blocking team in the conference. His interest piqued, he went back to previous seasons and games and looked at their blocking stats and their results, and that of other teams. What he found was that blocking didn’t correlate to teams winning volleyball games, like he thought it did. It brought the question to mind, much like how Moneyball did for Baseball:
What skills actually correlate to being successful, to winning games?
I really like the McCutcheon example, because it highlights his curiosity and openness. And importantly, it didn’t take an outsider to challenge his thinking. He stumbled across it himself in his own quest for growth. As I understood it talking to him, coaching blocking and making that a significant part of training each week was accepted wisdom within the world of volleyball. It would have been easy to look past that data, but he stayed with it and was curious enough to land on something that challenged that accepted wisdom. This is not easy to do. I’ll use this Rick Rubin quote again, because it’s so relevant:
It’s a healthy practice to approach our work with as few accepted rules, starting points, and limitations as possible. Often the standards in our chosen medium are so ubiquitous, we take them for granted. They are invisible and unquestioned. This makes it nearly impossible to think outside the standard paradigm.
So, naturally, the questions I’m leaving you with are the same both the Oakland A’s in Moneyball and Hugh McCutcheon asked themselves. Do you really know, for your chosen sport, activity or situation, what skills really correlate to being successful? Or are you stuck in the standard paradigm? How can you better understand what skills really correlate to being successful? How can you look past the accepted rules, the way things are done, and take a leap forward?
For more on this, but also slightly out of leftfield, check out one of my favourite podcast episodes from the podcast Cautionary Tales. It explores how when you’re forced to get out of the status quo, to think differently about what you do everyday, it can have hugely beneficial outcomes:
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