Bureaucracy Goes to Bat

While watching Moneyball this weekend, I saw parallels between the A’s scouting department and some of the issues seen in bureaucracies we’ve talked about this semester. 

One issue within the scouting department was the measurement problem. Most scouts relied on qualitative characteristics like intangibles and physical attributes, along with traditional stats like batting average to evaluate players. However, these methods failed to capture a player’s actual value, as Peter Brand (who graduated from Yale with an Econ degree) pointed out using sabermetrics. This is similar to how school districts use standardized test scores to evaluate student performance, which we know fails to capture a student’s true academic ability, and can lead to an inefficient allocation of resources. 

In a very loose sense, the A’s scouting department could be collectively viewed as monopoly suppliers of their good: recommendations on which players to sign/draft/trade for. In the traditional model, the only ones fit for the scouting job were those with superior expertise and experience in the sport. This introduced information asymmetry, where management had to trust scouts’ subjective evaluations without an independent way to verify their accuracy. It was then easy for the scouts to blame inefficient outcomes (i.e., losing seasons) on their small budget compared to large-market teams. They argued they simply couldn’t compete without a larger budget. 

Billy Beane and Peter Brand tackled the measurement and supply within their front office by utilizing more tangible units of output (OBP, FIP, WAR, etc.) which gave an alternative source of information separate from the scouting department’s subjective opinions. This led to a more efficient outcome for the A’s (a record-breaking season) and the implementation of analytics-based evaluations across the league.