The art of winning an unfair game

On the train back from meeting another council that was trying to reconcile the irresistible force of cuts with the immovable object of support for its poorest people and places, I started reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis.

Moneyball explains how the unfancied Oakland A’s baseball team challenged the dominance of much more expensively assembled teams by playing a very different and much smarter strategic game.

I started reading the book as a distraction from the issues of neighbourhood renewal in an age of austerity. More specifically, I picked it up because one of baseball’s converts to the ‘Moneyball philosophy’, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, recently bought Liverpool Football Club, my home team.

Within a few chapters, I realised that there were some basic truths about ‘the art of winning an unfair game’ – the book’s subtitle – which apply to the issue of poor neighbourhoods. For players, read places, and the book gets very interesting.

The Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane achieved what, in policy terms, we might call ‘radical efficiency’ – doing much more, with a lot less. Certainly with a lot less than the game’s established clubs who could out-spend him by factors of ten.

He did this by building a successful team from a unique starting point. Clubs had traditionally recruited players on the assumed wisdom of scouts. The problem was that scouts tended to project their own ambitions onto players, by assuming they could ‘train the kid up’ in areas where they were deficient to make them great all-rounders.

Instead of taking an analytical look at their strengths and shortcomings, they imagined that the amateur they spotted would one day get a home run in the World Series. Very occasionally, this happened. In the vast, vast majority of cases, the player never fulfilled the dreams foisted upon them.

Beane did something very different: he focused on the one or maybe two things that a player had proved he could do best, and made full use of that strength. He recognised that the best indication of future achievement was past performance, not dreamy projection. As Lewis puts it, ‘a young player is not what he looks like, or what he might become, but what he has done’.

He was then able to assemble a team of players who excelled in one of or two areas. Almost invariably they were much cheaper than most other players because they didn’t have a general range of skills or, more significantly, because their particular skill was chronically under-valued. Many doubted his methods, but he took the A’s to heights they had never reached before.

The link back to neighbourhoods is that we often start, like the scouts, from a deficit model of analysis: listing all the things an area doesn’t have and all the things it cannot do. And then developing strategies for making the place into something different, better, more all-rounded.

Actually this is difficult enough in a time of investment and economic growth, and even more challenging in a period of austerity. Clearly, places need to keep developing new skills and capacities to survive, but we should put equal if not greater emphasis on fully utilising their existing strengths, including physical assets, community links and networks, and local public services.

In a recent article, CLES-New Start Director Neil McInroy highlighted the ’emerging crisis in local economic policy and strategy’. As he pointed out, some places lost their original economic rationale 30 years ago. Despite a lot of regeneration activity in that time, many ‘are still trying to find a new economic destiny’. Cuts and competition for what little funding exists will make life even harder for many places for the foreseeable future.

Beane shaped the Oakland A’s new economic and sporting destiny by spotting and unlocking his players’ existing skills, especially those which were under-valued in the market. He showed that, at least sometimes, it is possible for players, and hopefully places, to win at an unfair game.