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The movie ‘Moneyball’, starring Brad Pitt and co-written by Aaron Sorkin, deals with Oakland Athletic’s General Manager Billy Beane’s challenge to overcome his team’s financial disadvantage in Major League Baseball.
While being a very good and enjoyable movie, it prompted me to think about how Beane’s approach would fit in with cricket and how much it is needed. Beane’s approach – to not spoil the movie – is to use a modernised computer generated statistical analysis to draft a team.
The main difference between cricket and baseball is that baseball’s regular season is 162 matches for 30 teams which means 2430 games in a six month period (and we whinge about the amount of cricket played in a whole year). This provides a massive sample size that cricket is not able to provide – except maybe in the IPL.
The scene between Beane and the A’s head scout, Grady Fuson, encompasses the main conflict of old ways versus new ways. Fuson uses terms and clichés like intuition and “gut feeling” which is very reminiscent of clichés in cricket like “dig in” and “blood” youngsters. Beane wishes to use sabermetrics.
Has anyone ever stopped to question the validity of these notions? We learn these concepts as juniors and just automatically accept the wisdom behind these ideas.
Received wisdom and group think are not always the best way. Roy and HG have made careers making fun of the banal and stupid ideas sports fans and people hold.
The idea that you have to weaken a team and lower its chances of success by sacking one of its older players so a younger, and less productive player can play seems counter productive. Losing a game now so you can win a game in the future is pointless. The end result is the same – you’ve gained nothing.
If the younger player can contribute more than the older player immediately then of course he should be in the team. But if the younger player is left out of the team for another two years, he won’t disappear or suddenly become old himself. If a cricketer gets to first class level he’s not going to suddenly stop playing because he was overlooked for a team.
Cricket has faced many new versus old arguments. When international limited overs cricket emerged in the 1970’s the claims from many of the older generation that it would destroy Test cricket proved false.
One day cricket improved fielding, throwing, running between wickets and run rates. All positives for Test cricket.
Today many people blame Twenty20 for the decline in Australia’s Test performances but overlook England is the number 1 ranked country for both Test AND T20 or that batsmen who have struggled recently like Clarke and Ponting are not in the T20 team or that Hussey who is in the T20 team has performed well in Tests as well.
Critics who complain that Australian batsmen can’t “dig in” fail to mention that in the past Ashes series the three Tests we lost England had a much higher run rate and the Test we won in Perth Australia had a higher run rate. Or that someone like Justin Langer who started off as a notoriously slower score and was dropped came back to be a pretty fast scoring opener.
Bowlers in the modern era just see batsmen who refuse to punish bad balls as easy targets and they know they can attack the batsman with impunity.
It doesn’t matter if you bowl many bad balls in trying to bowl the perfect delivery – they’re not going to be scored off, all the bowler needs is one great delivery to get a wicket.
But no issue in cricket, especially Australian cricket, represents the outdated and antiquated ideas than that of always batting first.
It’s accepted thinking that you should bat first and more often than not it’s the right decision. But there’s a massive difference between something that is right 60% of the time and 100%.
People remember Ponting’s decision to bowl first at Edgbaston 2005 but forget his decision to bat first on a green Headingly pitch in 2010 against Pakistan – a team with an excellent bowling attack but a terrible batting lineup.
Wouldn’t a statistical analysis shown that the smart idea would have been to put Pakistan in first?
While I don’t know if John Buchanan used statistics extensively, the way he has been demonised by ex-players, most notably Warne, shows how Australian cricket is still stuck in a semi-professional era.
While Buchanan had the likes of Warne, McGrath, Ponting, Hayden, Gilchrist he also managed to get great performances out of the lesser names.
Australia’s win in India in 2004 neither Warne nor McGrath were our top bowler. Jason Gillespie was the star, and had good support from Kasprowicz.
In the 2006-07 5-0 Ashes neither Warne nor McGrath was our top bowler. Stuart Clark was.
If you go back and look at performances under Buchanan it just wasn’t the big names doing well, the lesser names made big contributions and that is something that just didn’t happen under the more player friendly Nielsen.
Many people have suggested that coaches are the problem like Greg Mathews during the 2009 Ashes SBS commentary. Mathews suggested that players should just give each other advice in the nets and go back to the way they played during his day.
Ultimately the resistance to change in sport is not about what is the best way to win or run a competition but about protecting and preserving our nostalgic and romantic ideas about the sport we love. Sport represents the past more than it represents the future.
Many people have criticised ‘Moneyball’ ideas and it’s impact on baseball but to a young kid these criticism are foreign and by the time he hits middle-age he will be nostalgic about the ‘Moneyball’ era and resisting whatever new ideas are currently challenging baseball.
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