The Oakland A's, like most teams at the time, were run almost entirely by former players. Billy Bean and Paul D. Podesta set out to course correct with an eye towards saving money. They found that conventional decision-making in baseball had evolved with an eye toward avoiding humiliation.
No — but he does have a knack for stumbling into the perfect moment, including the recent FTX debacle. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, we revisit the book that launched the analytics revolution.