I saw the movie Moneyball first, and loved it.

The book is even better.

In it, Michael Lewis follows the front-office of the Oakland A’s to examine how a professional baseball team can be assembled, managed and run more rationally, more scientifically, more efficiently — and therefore more inexpensively.

After building and showing the merits of this case on page after page and chapter after chapter, the most fascinating thing for me was how, following the book’s publication, so many people responded to this central thesis of the book so irrationally. This is covered in the chapter called “Afterword: Inside Baseball’s Religious War.”

This response strikes me as a fascinating — or depressing — case study of how people can so stubbornly refuse to accept the truth of a thing, even when it is so clearly supported by facts, data and solid information.

For more reflections about this phenomenon in a different context, see the One Space, Not Two post at another page on this blog.

• #baseball
• #rationality
• #statistics