What ever will become of Big Data now? Is it possible the Kansas City Royals might be able to help you get a raise?
The Royals have now won the World Series. The bunting, stealing, just put-the-ball-in-play Royals. The we-don’t-strike-out-or-hit-many-home-run Royals. The team that rejected the ways of Moneyball sit atop the baseball world.
Is Moneyball dead? The Royals are known as the anti-Moneyball team. Last year, they slayed Billy Beane’s spreadsheet-friendly Oakland A’s; this year, they might have slayed the idea behind them. And I suspect a nation of underpaid workers may have secretly cheered the Royals on, so perhaps we should pick up some KC Royals tickets for next season to show our appreciation! After all, they saved us quite a bit!
The Royals play smallball. The kind of baseball you learned in Little League and then — if you played on in life — forgot by college. They won the World Series on a low-percentage, high-risk play that would have made a data slave like the Yankees’ Joe Girardi cringe–what was essentially a steal of home that risked the final out of the game.
Professional sports are copycat leagues. You can bet plenty of teams are today trying to figure out how they can play Royalball.
What does this have to do with your money? Last year, when the Royals screwed up the Oakland A’s best chance to finally win a World Series, I wrote about sports’ biggest, newest rivalry — the analytics crowd vs the data haters — and I came up with five reasons I think people irrationally hate Billy Bean and Moneyball.
When my book The Plateau Effect came out, I was (a bit unfairly) cast as king of the Big Data Haters. That’s silly, of course. I love data. Some of my best friends are data. I do hate it being abused, however, particularly when it’s being abused to hurt people.
I think many people who believe that spreadsheets don’t lie have missed the reality that in most companies data is used primarily for cost cutting, not to find and reward hidden value. (In a piece I wrote recently for CNBC, I explored the concept in detail — basically, data helps defense more than offense, and at your company, it helps owners a lot more than workers).
So there is built up dislike and distrust of analytics. In sports, that plays out this way: that manager who goes with his gut over his head? He’s an idiot. At work, like this: Everybody loves that employee, but her rating dipped to 3.9 last quarter, so she has to go.
The head vs. heart debate has many tentacles and But to get to the point: This is a false binary. You’re cheating yourself if you reject either. Moneyball is just a word, of course, and I could argue that the Royals were just playing a more advanced form of it (Slate did a lovely job of this last week). The Royals have found hidden value doing things that Billy Beane-imitators have long dismissed, things like doing anything to put the ball in play and avoid a strikeout, and that gave them their advantage. At a bare minimum, any data lover should be humbled by this, and realize that even spreadsheets have blind spots.
Last year, the Royals’ season ended with a runner rounding third who stopped because heading home would have been a low-percentage play. This year (while admittedly playing with house money), the Royals won by taking a very similar chance — and the element of surprise forced a defensive error.
I played baseball for 20-something years, and I can promise you this: You can’t fit into a spreadsheet what it does to a team when an offense constantly puts pressure on a defense like that. The offense starts to feel invincible. The defense gets scared. The Royals gave other teams the yips, and it happened again and again in these playoffs. Maybe you can believe that they were lucky. I believe they were making the most of a mystery ingredient. But … they also had scouting reports indicating the Mets defense was shaky, and putting pressure on them could force some mistakes. It did.
Head and heart, working together. That’s how all good decisions are made.
Did the Royals kill Moneyball? Of course not. As I wrote last year, the basic premise of using data to find hidden value is so obvious it should never be controversial. But I hope these last two years have humbled the spreadsheet tyrants just a little bit. They sure need it. Maybe you can’t reduce a baseball player, or a worker, to a single number like “Wins Above Replacement” after all.
Maybe there’s a little more going on than meets the eye. Maybe, just maybe, the hidden value you seek is something that can’t be quantified.
And maybe the next time a consultant suggests a small cost savings for something that kills your workers’ spirits, you’ll think of the Royals and perhaps come up with a different calculation.
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