Ethical Issues In Baseball
From the beginning of the movie we can tell that the Oakland Athletics have many symptoms. Right away we can see that in 2001 Oakland lost the ALCS and immediately after the team switches gears into how they are losing their three big players. Both of these are symptoms. Another one is the fact that they do not have the funds to get these contracts back. When Billy goes to the owner about this he tells him he has no more money for him. Next we have the fact that the scouts and managers do not follow the new strategy that Billy is trying to bring in. Later in the movie we see the whole baseball world criticizing what they are trying to do, no one seems to believe in what they are doing besides Billy and Peter.
Problem and Cause
The problems that cause the above symptoms are the fact that he changes to Bill James logic of sabermetrics. The idea that he choose a strategy to base his whole team off of that …show more content…
has never be prove or tested in the real world. Another problem the organization had was the fact that they had a lack of resources. The last big problem the organization had was that there was poor communication within the organization. The fact that they did not have overlapping tasks was a problem. People did not communicate about things that they should have been and discussing them till they make the best possible decision. The just went and made the decision that they thought was the best for the team. All these problems can relate to one cause, the one cause of all these problems is the fact that Oakland was trying to run a mechanistic organization when they should have been running an organic one. We can see that by making the organizational change to a more organic style most of their problems within their control go away. They team actually acts like a team is supposed to.
How Does the Organization Effect the Main Characters (Billy and Peter)? When watching this movie or reading about the things that took place in the year 2001 and 2002 for the Oakland Athletics it is incredibly clear that the organizations effected Billy Beane and Peter Brand a lot. We see this right from the start of the movie, the scene when Billy goes and talks to the owner. The owner said he could not give him more money then what they already had. This is the largest thing that impacts our main characters, the lack of resources that the Oakland Athletics had. If the Athletics had a large budget like the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers Billy would have never implemented sabermetrics. If they were a large budget team there would be no interesting story to read, it would just be another year in the MLB. Not only does the budget effect the main characters but the organizational staff affect them a lot as well. “Organizations must react rapidly to evolving environments by engaging in change, ranging from minor adjustments to radical transformation. Many obstacles are encountered on the path towards achieving positive organizational outcomes, among which resistance to change” (Appelbaum, 2015, p. 1). Throughout the beginning of this movie we see staff members continually disagree with Billy and Peter or being ‘resistance to change’. Whether it is a scout telling them off because the idea does not account for the human factor or it is the manager not playing players like they should be. Every step of the way until they started winning games people criticised what they were doing and thought it would never work. The organization is what started the problem and the organization continued to affect Billy and Peter when they were trying to fix the problem.
What Drives Change? “Due to the rapidly changing global economy, businesses need to consider a serious change in strategy” (Switzer, 2008, p. 1). Business and organizations in our day in age need to change to be able to compete with organizations around them. By not changing your organization you might not notice immediate effects but it will impact you in the long run. Many companies have folded because they refused to change their organization strategy and acknowledge the changing the world. Our world is evolving every day and if you do not change with it it will leave to behind. Although the MLB is not directly related to the business world it is similar in certain ways. Yes, the structure of most MLB teams has not changed to much in the couple centuries but any team is always looking for a way to out preform and beat the opposition. This could potential mean that teams are willing to change their organizational structure if it means they will become a strong and more competitive team. Billy and Peter are driven to change their organizational structure for many reason but the biggest reason is the fact that they want to win. They do not want to win a couple games and have a good season like most people expect them to do, they want to win it all. So what drives the change in organizational structure for the Oakland Athletics? The fact that they want to beat teams that they should not even be competitive with. They want their small budget organization to be competitive with large budget teams. Billy and Peter are hoping that the changes they are making will give them a competitive advantage. Now this again relates to the fact that Oakland does not have a lot of resources. So Oakland’s lack of resources also plays a part in what drive the change.
Are the Changes Sustainable? The changes Billy and Peter made to the organization, that followed sabermetrics, I believe to be somewhat sustainable. Being a low budget team means that you are often scrapping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to players. Sabermetrics allows for a team to see attributes in players that other teams would look over. Essentially it allows Oakland to find there diamond in the rough. But there are several problems that make this method unsustainable. First off when signing free agents that are overlooked by other teams you can often sign them for a small contract. The major issue with this is that usually teams will not sign these risky players to more than a one year deal. This makes perfect sense because if it does not pan out you do not want to be paying a player that can play no matter how small his contract is. Now if the player that you signed to a one year deal does shines in your program and does really well the chances of him coming back for the same amount of money is very unlikely. If a player plays good he is reward with more money. If the team he is currently playing for does not have more money he will go to the next team willing to pay him even a little more. Oakland will continue to struggle with this fact, they will sign players with their method and if they do well they will often leave in the years to come. They will continue to be seen as the rich teams farm programs, when they final develop a talented player a rich team will come and take him. By this logic Oakland will have to redesign there team every year and eventually they will run out of diamonds in the rough. The second and largest problem with the changes Billy and Peter made is human error. “Human error is the subject of research in almost every industry and profession of our times. This term is part of our daily language and intuitively understood by most people” (Hansen, 2006, p. 1). Human error is all around us and impacts our lives on a daily bases. Sabermetrics is a statically way of evaluating players which is great but it does not calculate human error. In sports there are many ways human error can destroy a player or make a player great. In the movie we see a player by the name of Jeremy Giambi, now this man is a talented player and could be a star in the league one day. But Jeremy has issues off the field, he like to party. This is an old situation when a good player comes up and cares more about his outside life then the game. Jeremy did not have the drive in him, he did not want to be the best. As we have all seen character really can make or break a player. So even if the statistics part of sabermetrics worked human error would wreck the method and make it imperfect. At the end of the day there is a reason why all-stars get paid the amount of money they do. It could be because they know how to perform under pressure or that they have the mental drive to want to be the best in the world. They get paid a lot of money because of their ability to play the game and other get paid dimes compared to them because they do not have the ability that the all-stars do. Large budget teams continually show up in the playoffs because of their all-stars and low budget teams do not show up in playoffs because there players simple do not have the ability to compete with all-stars. Yes sabermetrics is a way to put together a half decent team and for that reason it is sustainable. But for them to win it all the stars would need to align and luck would have to be on their side, for that reason I believe sabermetrics is not sustainable.
What is the role of ethical values? Ethics plays a very important role in or world today and is increasingly becoming more important.
“A number of signs indicate a growing interest in ethical issues throughout business…” (Schlegelmilch, 1990, p. 1). Ethics is what holds people from doing things that are wrong but are still legal. There is a large grey area between law and what is right, ethics is what helps us stay out of that grey area. Just like in business there is ethics in baseball. One of the largest ethical issues in baseball is the amount of money that is paid to players every year. The top played player in the 2015 season was Clayton Kershaw he got paid $32,571,428 last year, which includes his signing bonus but does not include any endorsement deals. This is a huge ethical problem, why are we paying people this much to play a child’s game? This money could help thousands of people who are struggling to live day to day. But instead we are giving it to an egotistical baseball players. I enjoy watching baseball just as much as the next guy but is it real necessary to be paying players this
much. In the movie we see many main places where people do things that most would consider unethical. In Moneyball Billy seems to violate most people’s ethics through trading players. First we will discuss how Billy traded away two players in the organization. Jeremy Giambi is traded away more because we was not a good fit in the team. The large ethical issue was the fact that we traded away Carlos Pena. Pena was a top prospect and future all-star player in most people’s minds Billy was crazy for trading him. Even Peter was not too happy with this decision. Why did Billy do it and what was unethical about it? He traded Pena away because Art Howe, the manager continue to start him on first and Billy did not want this to happen. In the movie Billy talks to Art and asks him to start Scott Hatteberg instead of Pena but Art says no and because Billy has no control of the lineup card there is nothing he can do about it. Billy does not have control of who plays but he does have control of who is on the team. So he goes behind Art’s back and trades away Pena and send down all of their other options so Art is forced to start Scott. Too many going behind Art’s back seem unethical but it is allowed in baseball. Yes, the general manager and the manager should work together on putting the best possible team on the field but they do not have to. At the end of the day they are supposed to do what makes the team better and that is what Billy does. Just because Billy was acting in the best interest of the team does not make what he did ethical. The last situation we will talk about is how Billy traded the players. In the movie there is a scene where Billy is dealing players and trying to get a player named Ricardo Rincon. Through this process he calls a total of three managers and ends up offering one player too two different teams. Peter seems shocked and tells Billy that we just offered this player to another team but Billy does not seem to care. Offering a player too two teams seems unethical. Ethically you should offer the player to one team and allow them to make a decision before turning around and offering the same player to another team. It is competitive market but that doesn’t excuse ethics. The role of ethics plays an important role in all of our lives. In sports people are supposed to think ethically just like everyone else is. Although there are ethical things in baseball they are often broke because people will do anything to win. Competition in baseball is huge so staff need to do anything to win and it is acceptable to act unethically. So even though ethics are there people do not really care about them when it comes to the sporting world.
Conclusion
Money causes a lot of problems in our world and it forces us to do things that we would not normally do. In the case of the Oakland Athletics in 2002 it forced them to undergo many structural changes. In Moneyball we witness the changes that were made to the organization and the success that came from it. The major change that was made was that the top managerial staff decided to adopt sabermetrics. This caused the organization to switch from a mechanistic organization to an organic one. It brought the players and staff closer than ever before and allowed them their low budget team to compete with high budget teams. It took the Athletics to the next level and made them a competitor against teams that have three times the payroll they do. In this case sabermetrics worked and it put together a good team but I think that had a lot of luck to it. The method does not calculate for human error which has a huge impact on how players before year to year. At the end of the day it was a good strategy for a low budget team to implement because it looked into players and found hidden ability. But there is a reason why players get paid the amount they do and there is a reason why Oakland is not a consistent team like the high budget teams. Baseball will be an unfair sport and it will continue to favour teams with more money until they implement a salary cap or something along those lines. Oakland tried to find their competitive advantage that would set them with the big money teams, but the method they selected was flawed and had many holes in it.
Problem and Cause
The problems that cause the above symptoms are the fact that he changes to Bill James logic of sabermetrics. The idea that he choose a strategy to base his whole team off of that …show more content…
has never be prove or tested in the real world. Another problem the organization had was the fact that they had a lack of resources. The last big problem the organization had was that there was poor communication within the organization. The fact that they did not have overlapping tasks was a problem. People did not communicate about things that they should have been and discussing them till they make the best possible decision. The just went and made the decision that they thought was the best for the team. All these problems can relate to one cause, the one cause of all these problems is the fact that Oakland was trying to run a mechanistic organization when they should have been running an organic one. We can see that by making the organizational change to a more organic style most of their problems within their control go away. They team actually acts like a team is supposed to.
How Does the Organization Effect the Main Characters (Billy and Peter)? When watching this movie or reading about the things that took place in the year 2001 and 2002 for the Oakland Athletics it is incredibly clear that the organizations effected Billy Beane and Peter Brand a lot. We see this right from the start of the movie, the scene when Billy goes and talks to the owner. The owner said he could not give him more money then what they already had. This is the largest thing that impacts our main characters, the lack of resources that the Oakland Athletics had. If the Athletics had a large budget like the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers Billy would have never implemented sabermetrics. If they were a large budget team there would be no interesting story to read, it would just be another year in the MLB. Not only does the budget effect the main characters but the organizational staff affect them a lot as well. “Organizations must react rapidly to evolving environments by engaging in change, ranging from minor adjustments to radical transformation. Many obstacles are encountered on the path towards achieving positive organizational outcomes, among which resistance to change” (Appelbaum, 2015, p. 1). Throughout the beginning of this movie we see staff members continually disagree with Billy and Peter or being ‘resistance to change’. Whether it is a scout telling them off because the idea does not account for the human factor or it is the manager not playing players like they should be. Every step of the way until they started winning games people criticised what they were doing and thought it would never work. The organization is what started the problem and the organization continued to affect Billy and Peter when they were trying to fix the problem.
What Drives Change? “Due to the rapidly changing global economy, businesses need to consider a serious change in strategy” (Switzer, 2008, p. 1). Business and organizations in our day in age need to change to be able to compete with organizations around them. By not changing your organization you might not notice immediate effects but it will impact you in the long run. Many companies have folded because they refused to change their organization strategy and acknowledge the changing the world. Our world is evolving every day and if you do not change with it it will leave to behind. Although the MLB is not directly related to the business world it is similar in certain ways. Yes, the structure of most MLB teams has not changed to much in the couple centuries but any team is always looking for a way to out preform and beat the opposition. This could potential mean that teams are willing to change their organizational structure if it means they will become a strong and more competitive team. Billy and Peter are driven to change their organizational structure for many reason but the biggest reason is the fact that they want to win. They do not want to win a couple games and have a good season like most people expect them to do, they want to win it all. So what drives the change in organizational structure for the Oakland Athletics? The fact that they want to beat teams that they should not even be competitive with. They want their small budget organization to be competitive with large budget teams. Billy and Peter are hoping that the changes they are making will give them a competitive advantage. Now this again relates to the fact that Oakland does not have a lot of resources. So Oakland’s lack of resources also plays a part in what drive the change.
Are the Changes Sustainable? The changes Billy and Peter made to the organization, that followed sabermetrics, I believe to be somewhat sustainable. Being a low budget team means that you are often scrapping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to players. Sabermetrics allows for a team to see attributes in players that other teams would look over. Essentially it allows Oakland to find there diamond in the rough. But there are several problems that make this method unsustainable. First off when signing free agents that are overlooked by other teams you can often sign them for a small contract. The major issue with this is that usually teams will not sign these risky players to more than a one year deal. This makes perfect sense because if it does not pan out you do not want to be paying a player that can play no matter how small his contract is. Now if the player that you signed to a one year deal does shines in your program and does really well the chances of him coming back for the same amount of money is very unlikely. If a player plays good he is reward with more money. If the team he is currently playing for does not have more money he will go to the next team willing to pay him even a little more. Oakland will continue to struggle with this fact, they will sign players with their method and if they do well they will often leave in the years to come. They will continue to be seen as the rich teams farm programs, when they final develop a talented player a rich team will come and take him. By this logic Oakland will have to redesign there team every year and eventually they will run out of diamonds in the rough. The second and largest problem with the changes Billy and Peter made is human error. “Human error is the subject of research in almost every industry and profession of our times. This term is part of our daily language and intuitively understood by most people” (Hansen, 2006, p. 1). Human error is all around us and impacts our lives on a daily bases. Sabermetrics is a statically way of evaluating players which is great but it does not calculate human error. In sports there are many ways human error can destroy a player or make a player great. In the movie we see a player by the name of Jeremy Giambi, now this man is a talented player and could be a star in the league one day. But Jeremy has issues off the field, he like to party. This is an old situation when a good player comes up and cares more about his outside life then the game. Jeremy did not have the drive in him, he did not want to be the best. As we have all seen character really can make or break a player. So even if the statistics part of sabermetrics worked human error would wreck the method and make it imperfect. At the end of the day there is a reason why all-stars get paid the amount of money they do. It could be because they know how to perform under pressure or that they have the mental drive to want to be the best in the world. They get paid a lot of money because of their ability to play the game and other get paid dimes compared to them because they do not have the ability that the all-stars do. Large budget teams continually show up in the playoffs because of their all-stars and low budget teams do not show up in playoffs because there players simple do not have the ability to compete with all-stars. Yes sabermetrics is a way to put together a half decent team and for that reason it is sustainable. But for them to win it all the stars would need to align and luck would have to be on their side, for that reason I believe sabermetrics is not sustainable.
What is the role of ethical values? Ethics plays a very important role in or world today and is increasingly becoming more important.
“A number of signs indicate a growing interest in ethical issues throughout business…” (Schlegelmilch, 1990, p. 1). Ethics is what holds people from doing things that are wrong but are still legal. There is a large grey area between law and what is right, ethics is what helps us stay out of that grey area. Just like in business there is ethics in baseball. One of the largest ethical issues in baseball is the amount of money that is paid to players every year. The top played player in the 2015 season was Clayton Kershaw he got paid $32,571,428 last year, which includes his signing bonus but does not include any endorsement deals. This is a huge ethical problem, why are we paying people this much to play a child’s game? This money could help thousands of people who are struggling to live day to day. But instead we are giving it to an egotistical baseball players. I enjoy watching baseball just as much as the next guy but is it real necessary to be paying players this
much. In the movie we see many main places where people do things that most would consider unethical. In Moneyball Billy seems to violate most people’s ethics through trading players. First we will discuss how Billy traded away two players in the organization. Jeremy Giambi is traded away more because we was not a good fit in the team. The large ethical issue was the fact that we traded away Carlos Pena. Pena was a top prospect and future all-star player in most people’s minds Billy was crazy for trading him. Even Peter was not too happy with this decision. Why did Billy do it and what was unethical about it? He traded Pena away because Art Howe, the manager continue to start him on first and Billy did not want this to happen. In the movie Billy talks to Art and asks him to start Scott Hatteberg instead of Pena but Art says no and because Billy has no control of the lineup card there is nothing he can do about it. Billy does not have control of who plays but he does have control of who is on the team. So he goes behind Art’s back and trades away Pena and send down all of their other options so Art is forced to start Scott. Too many going behind Art’s back seem unethical but it is allowed in baseball. Yes, the general manager and the manager should work together on putting the best possible team on the field but they do not have to. At the end of the day they are supposed to do what makes the team better and that is what Billy does. Just because Billy was acting in the best interest of the team does not make what he did ethical. The last situation we will talk about is how Billy traded the players. In the movie there is a scene where Billy is dealing players and trying to get a player named Ricardo Rincon. Through this process he calls a total of three managers and ends up offering one player too two different teams. Peter seems shocked and tells Billy that we just offered this player to another team but Billy does not seem to care. Offering a player too two teams seems unethical. Ethically you should offer the player to one team and allow them to make a decision before turning around and offering the same player to another team. It is competitive market but that doesn’t excuse ethics. The role of ethics plays an important role in all of our lives. In sports people are supposed to think ethically just like everyone else is. Although there are ethical things in baseball they are often broke because people will do anything to win. Competition in baseball is huge so staff need to do anything to win and it is acceptable to act unethically. So even though ethics are there people do not really care about them when it comes to the sporting world.
Conclusion
Money causes a lot of problems in our world and it forces us to do things that we would not normally do. In the case of the Oakland Athletics in 2002 it forced them to undergo many structural changes. In Moneyball we witness the changes that were made to the organization and the success that came from it. The major change that was made was that the top managerial staff decided to adopt sabermetrics. This caused the organization to switch from a mechanistic organization to an organic one. It brought the players and staff closer than ever before and allowed them their low budget team to compete with high budget teams. It took the Athletics to the next level and made them a competitor against teams that have three times the payroll they do. In this case sabermetrics worked and it put together a good team but I think that had a lot of luck to it. The method does not calculate for human error which has a huge impact on how players before year to year. At the end of the day it was a good strategy for a low budget team to implement because it looked into players and found hidden ability. But there is a reason why players get paid the amount they do and there is a reason why Oakland is not a consistent team like the high budget teams. Baseball will be an unfair sport and it will continue to favour teams with more money until they implement a salary cap or something along those lines. Oakland tried to find their competitive advantage that would set them with the big money teams, but the method they selected was flawed and had many holes in it.