Why “Moneyball” worked while DOGE failed

Plus Greater France, great nuclear programs, and a great House recruit

Apic

I want to flag the recently announced congressional bid of Paige Cognetti, the mayor of Scranton who has a cool launch video. I’ve talked to her at a few post-election gatherings, and I think she’s smart and sees the field accurately.

She’s facing an uphill battle in Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District. Obama won this district handily in 2012, but Trump flipped it in 2016, held onto it in 2020, and had his best race yet there in 2024. Realignments start at the top and filter down ballot, so in 2016, Democrats carried it in all the non-presidential statewide races. Fetterman carried it narrowly in 2022, but McCormick won it pretty comfortably by 2024. All those ancestral Dem voters mean it’s winnable by a savvy, appealing Democrat like Cognetti, but it won’t be easy. It’s a huge recruiting coup for Hakeem Jeffries and the D.C.C.C. to get her to gamble on a race in a district where Trump won 54 percent of the vote rather than position herself for something like state auditor.

We hope Slow Boring readers will consider throwing some money her way, not only to help win but also to show the world that we’re paying attention to the question of how to beat Republicans in red districts, not just win primaries in New York City.

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David Olson: What do you make of sports becoming nerdier and more analytically driven than ever at the same time that regard for expertise and empirical rigor has collapsed everywhere else?

If you think about the famous scene from “Moneyball” where Billy Beane is trying to pitch his new analytics-based strategy for player acquisition to the room full of old-fart, know-nothing scouts, it’s important to understand that from the standpoint of baseball conventional wisdom those guys were the experts. The Peter Brand character, played by Jonah Hill and based largely on Paul DePodesta, is the guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The real DePodesta studied economics at Harvard rather than at Yale, but more to the point, the real DePodesta played college baseball and football. That’s not the same as the pro baseball experience of the old farts in the room, but it’s something. The filmmakers, to heighten the point, transform DePodesta into the plainly unathletic Brand to emphasize the contrast. This guy doesn’t know the first thing about playing ball!

And artistic liberties aside, that is sort of the story here. Bill James is a kid from Kansas who did a brief stint in the army before getting degrees in English and economics from the University of Kansas. He’s an obsessive baseball fan who starts putting his quantitative skills to work to assess player performance and writing articles about it for a very small audience. One of those early readers is Daniel Okrent, a Jewish journalist who invented Rotisserie League Baseball but was never a high-level athlete. Okrent touts James in Sports Illustrated and James’s work becomes well known to the nerdier cohort of baseball fans. For example, my dad bought the mid-eighties “Baseball Abstracts” and I loved to read them when I was a kid. Eventually, that cohort of nerdy baseball fans grows up and start becoming the next generation of people who write about sports and (in cases like DePodesta) actually get management roles.

Because the analytics revolution succeeded, we now think of listening to people like that as an example of caring about expertise and empiricism.

But I think it’s crucial to understand that thirty years ago that’s not at all how it was understood. James was a successful and well-known writer by the mid-1990s and I’m sure an actual room of baseball decision-makers would not have been as slack-jawed and incredulous as the guys in the movie are depicted at the assertion that on-base percentage is the most important thing. It’s not that they never would have heard of these ideas. It’s that they would have heard of these ideas and rejected them as the fantasies of smart generalists who fundamentally didn’t know what they were talking about. The idea that you shouldn’t draft a player who has an ugly girlfriend because that bespeaks a lack of confidence that will make him unable to hit major league pitching is played for laughs. And it’s funny. But this kind of armchair psychology is not totally insane. It’s easy to imagine an experienced baseball hand who played professionals and has been around professional ballplayers all his life feeling really deeply and profoundly that some stathead cannot possibly comprehend the pressure you are under up there at the plate with the lights on and the crowd roaring.

It just turns out that this is mostly wrong. Smart nerds who don’t know anything about how to play baseball can nonetheless be very good at assessing baseball players.

My guess is that if you asked the DOGE guys, they’d say they’re big fans of “Moneyball” and see themselves very much in this mold — smart outsiders who can do a much better job than the entrenched group of insiders provided they get the strong backing they need. Donald Trump in the Billy Beane role does not personally need to be a smart quant; he just needs to be willing to be a bit of a jerk — as Beane certainly is in the movie version — to make sure that the job gets done.

Now obviously there are also a lot of differences, notably including the fact that DOGE completely failed. One question that raises is what are the circumstances under which a bunch of smart outsiders can outperform “the experts” and what are the circumstances where domain knowledge and experience matter. Another question, though, is whether a genuinely “Moneyball”-esque approach to something features openness about the possibility of failure, a willingness to experiment, but then also a willingness to learn from failure and adjust one’s models. This is easier to do in sports or finance where you either win or you lose. In politics, there are strong incentives to use bluster and spin to cover up for failures and I don’t see any sign that DOGE-enthusiasts have been willing to look in any remotely serious way at what they got wrong. Obviously Elon Musk does not handle rocket development in the same cavalier way. Some of the launches fail, but he works hard at fixing problems.

But then you get the even bigger asymmetry. There is a fine line between “empower smart outsiders to question the power and credentials of insider experts” and “empower idiots.” The DOGE guys really were a smart and impressive bunch who sadly lacked the patience to learn anything about the federal budget. Guys like R.F.K. Jr. and Peter Navarro are not smart outsiders kicking the tires on public health and trade theory, they’re idiots.

Dan: What's the alternate history where Germany, France, Italy, and Benelux (and Switzerland?) are a united polity?

A. Western Rome that persisted?

B. Carolingian Empire with different inheritance laws?

C. Napoleonic era?

D. Post WW2?

E. Possible future?