Dear Reader Letter

Dear Reader,

I hope you’ve been able to follow and learn from my investigation of what it takes to win in Major League Baseball. I hope that it got you thinking about the ever-changing nature of the game as much as Moneyball got me thinking.

This was the first time I’d read Moneyball, I’d seen the movie multiple times, but never gotten around to reading the book. So, when I had the opportunity to do so, I jumped at the chance. I think, in retrospect, the book is better than the movie, as it really exposed the business end of baseball, it’s inefficiencies, how it was being changed, and the reaction to that change, better than the movie did. As I read the book, I was intrigued by the new methods that the A’s took to win ball games (as was the point of the book), and I thought that I might be interested to look at what other teams did. As I thought more and more about it, I realized that now, thanks to Billy Beane, every team does what he did, they use every single number and statistic they can get their hands on to find the best players in baseball. So, poor teams no longer had that advantage. Yet, I’m a fan of the Kansas City Royals, one of the poorest teams in baseball, and they continue to win at an incredible rate. So, with my project, I decided to focus on the revolution started by Moneyball and the repercussions that has had in the way small market teams try to win.

My golden thread was rather simple. I felt that this was a pretty linear revolution, with one event leading to the other. So, I decided to use a timeline of sorts throughout my paper and the four genres that accompanied it. The first date was June 4, 2002, I felt that was the true start of the revolution, as it was the day of the MLB draft when Billy first put his principles of evaluating players to use. I then went to November after the 2002 season, this was when the Red Sox offered Billy a huge contract to be their general manager, which to me, signaled that the ideas of Moneyball had truly arrived and been accepted by the rest of baseball. From there I used points throughout the next twelve or thirteen years in which Moneyball experienced big events. My final date was the the first of October, 2014. This was more or less the death of Billy Beane’s Moneyball. It was the day the Royals beat the Athletics in the playoffs using everything that Beane so despised about baseball against him. This seemed a fitting end to the revolution he started over a decade ago.

Best,

Zach Anderson