When Illness Intrudes, Up Your Game

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“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.”

That’s the opening pitch to Moneyball, a movie I watched with my son on Netflix last week (the quote is from baseball legend Mickey Mantle). It’s based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which traces the true story of the Oakland A’s remarkable 2002 season.

General manager Billy Beane, despite being severely constrained by a shoestring budget, was determined to field a competitive team. Assistant GM and data-hound Paul DePodesta convinced Beane that traditional performance measures, like batting average and home runs, provided a poor overall picture of a player’s worth. Together they latched onto a revolutionary way of evaluating baseball players by drilling deeply into all aspects of player data, in the process constructing novel metrics such as “expected run value” and “on-base percentage”.

By crunching that data they discovered unrealized value in a number of players — players misunderstood and overlooked by other teams — and then used that intel to cobble together a roster devoid of traditional stars.

It paid off in spades: the A’s won a record number of games (including an unprecedented twenty…