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65 Ark. L. Rev. 837 (2012)
Moneyball Lawyering

handle is hein.journals/arklr65 and id is 863 raw text is: Moneyball Lawyering Charles J. Snyder* 1. INTRODUCTION We're blending what we see but we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see. - Billy Beane' The above quotation comes from Moneyball, Michael Lewis's now famous book about how Billy Beane made the Oakland Athletics (the A's) competitive despite having one of baseball's lowest payrolls.2 Combined with the book's success, a popular movie of the same name has made Moneyball's basic outlines relatively well-known.3 As Lewis writes, Moneyball seeks to answer an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?4 Throughout the book, readers come to see that Beane and the A's did it largely by ignoring or rejecting baseball's conventional wisdom, relying instead on statistical measures of performance and value. Reviewers have referred to Moneyball as one of the most enjoyable *Litigation Associate, Reed Smith LLP. The author would like to thank Professor Russell Korobkin for his feedback and members of the editorial board of, the Arkansas Law Review for their thoughtful work improving the article. The author would also like to thank Rachelle Minix, Stephen Minix, Lynne Lasry, Allen Snyder, Kevin Sanders, and Parker Tresemer for their various contributions. All errors are my own. 1. MICHAEL LEWIS, MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME 37 (2003). 2. See generally id. 3. MONEYBALL (Columbia Pictures 2011). 4. LEWIs, supra note 1, at xi. 5. See generally LEWIS, supra note 1. Although Beane gets much of the credit for this approach, it should be noted that the movement's intellectual forefather is Bill James. See id. at 64-96. James wrote most of his pioneering work about the use and misuse of statistics in baseball while employed as a night watchman at a pork and beans factory. See id. at 64-65. 837

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