The talent scouts inside baseball had become complacent, institutionalised incapable of exceeding expectations .
The talent existed but it had been misunderstood , misallocated and mismanaged. The back office of the Oakland A’s were able to leverage this new knowledge inside a 160 year old industry.
Billy Beane the then GM of the Oakland A’s , genius, to see untapped potential, where others only saw misfits and castoffs . In the early 2000 Beane was able to assemble a championship winning side with a budget just a quarter of the size of his rivals .
In 2003 Michael Lewis the financial journalist author of liars poker and the big short published Moneyball the Art of Winning An unfair Game to critical acclaim .
In 2011 Moneyball the film was released and became an instant Hollywood blockbuster reaching a mass audience
According to Lewis in his later book the Undoing Project even he misunderstood the true message behind Moneyball . This was not a story about big data or better analytics . Moneyball was fundamentally about systematic predictable cognitive BIAS. .