Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game

The 2003 sports novel “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, is the true story of Oakland Athletics, an American professional baseball team, as they try to build a competitive team with a limited financial budget. The General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane, realizes that his team can never compete in free agency against teams with twice as large budgets and begins to implement a sabermetric approach. Sabermetrics is identifying and exploiting market inefficiencies in baseball by finding players that are undervalued in the league. The economic system utilized in the book is essentially command but we do see components that match the definition of traditional and pure markets. The story also discusses the command system in that players are owned by teams as well as the fact that teams control almost every aspect of their lives.
Another small aspect of the economy also follows the pure market system as the players can negotiate salaries when they reach free agency. The question of what is produced is dictated by the teams and their front offices. The main resource in Moneyball is cash, as it provides a team with the purchasing power to acquire and sell players, draft picks to acquire young prospects and roster players for key positions. This means that what is produced by the teams in Moneyball is heavily dependent on scarcity as teams will produce the players that they are lacking on their major league rosters in an attempt to fill these