The Social Media Strategist: Build a Successful Program from the Inside Out

CHAPTER 11MONEYBALL: WINNING BIG BY GOING SMALL

For baseball nuts, perhaps the seminal book of the past decade was Michael Lewis’s 2003 study, Moneyball (the film adaptation, starring Brad Pitt, was released in 2011). Lewis documented how the small-market, small-budget Oakland A’s were able to be competitive in an American League environment that favored big-market, big-budget teams like the New York Yankees. In 2002, the A’s payroll was $41 million; the Yankees’ payroll was more than $125 million.¹ Yet each team won 103 games while losing only 59. In a sport in which most fans and analysts assumed that spending money and boosting payroll was the key to playing winning baseball, the A’s managed to be the exception to the rule, seemingly disproving ...