Winning against the odds

How serious a subject is sport? We know it is dramatic and revealing, but beneath the veneer of action and celebrity does sport justify a more considered analytical approach? There is a dual aspect here: does thinking have much to do with winning, and, if so, can the lessons of victory enhance our thinking about other, more ‘highbrow’ spheres?

Michael Lewis — formerly of Salomon Brothers on Wall Street and this magazine — is at the forefront of those sportswriters who answer ‘yes’ to both questions. The heroes of his intimately researched sports books are the philosopher kings of sports coaching, men with original minds who rise above cliché-ridden sports chat. When brain defeats brawn in one of Michael Lewis’s sports books, you can almost hear the prose style lift off.

In Moneyball, Lewis’s brilliant bestseller about baseball, the object of his admiration was Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland Athletics and leftfield strategist. Beane took a poor, unfashionable team and enabled it to compete with, and often beat, teams with four times the cash and ten times the glamour. Beane had found a new way to win in an old sport. Other teams quickly imitated Moneyball methods and also succeeded against the odds.

The book also became a metaphor that extended beyond the sporting world — an example of how the scientific method could revolutionise unreformed but apparently sophisticated businesses. Whatever your profession, if you were analytical and unafraid to re-examine conventional wisdom, Moneyball was a pretty handy book to have up your sleeve.

There is also free-marketeer strand to Lewis’s sporting theory. Sports, like trading markets, occasionally throw up inefficient ‘blind spots’, areas where received wisdom underestimates the true value of a ‘piece’ of the strategic jigsaw.