I want to continue with my Moneyball inspired posts in the “Stats Lie” series as the Oakland A’s are currently enjoying a miracle season once again and start their playoff run tomorrow. The team is once again doing things that nobody thought they had any chance of doing.
In the book Moneyball, probably my favorite line comes from an old school scout during a conversation where the Oakland scouting brain trust is preparing for the upcoming draft. A player is proposed that is under the radar, but that has produced in college in the ways that statistically translate to the pro’s the best given history. The problem was that he was fat. He was a pudgy and overweight catcher.
When the general manager says that he wants to draft this player in the first round this old time scout responds,
“This kid wears a large pair of underwear.” (Kindle Loc. 685)
The following conversation is hysterical, but the point was that potential greatness was being dismissed because this player didn’t fit the mold. He didn’t look the part. He didn’t pass the “eye test.” The player went on to do fairly well, being the fastest to accelerate through the minors of all the draft picks, despite not panning out in the big leagues. But he was a symbolic figure in the moneyball revolution.
I’ve been writing about the hermeneutics of measurements. Numbers sometimes tell the story. Sometimes they don’t. The question is how do we know we are paying attention to the right things. When is the eye test reliable? When is it not? Measurement, especially in non-profit and ministry landscapes, is an art form and more about vision and meaning than about quantity and assessing linear progress.
When questioned about what he was seeing and why he wasn’t being swayed by the traditional eye tests, Billy Beane (the subject of the book) says,
“That’s all right. We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.” (Kindle 733-34)
I love this. We need to blend what we see, but not allow ourselves to be victimized by what we see. This is the heart of a proper hermeneutic of measurements. We must expand our vision to see outside the limitations of tradition and bias. We must blend perspectives and see from different angles to that we don’t allow ourselves to be victimized by our instinctive eye tests which are so often driven by our own biases and our own stories. Instead of our instincts driving our interpretations, they become one factor of many so that we aren’t victimized by them as we settle for overly simplistic or black or white solutions.
Moneyball is the story of how one team had to break free from traditional perspectives and biases to see meaning in things that were previously invisible. This is a journey we all need to be on. We can’t let ourselves settle for “large underwear” approaches to discerning what’s happening around us or what potential people may have. Let’s strive for more.
