Psychology and Talent Theme Analysis

In a way, Moneyball is about the hundreds of millions of dollars that professional sports franchises spend answering the question, “What is a good athlete?” Talent scouts traditionally measured ballplayers’ talents based on the simplest, most tangible criteria: speed, strength, reflexes, and agility. One of the book’s key insights, however, is that athletic talent isn’t just a matter of physique: often, the most talented players have a certain psychological profile that enables them to maintain their focus and withstand the pressures of professional sports. Having established the importance of psychology in baseball, the book poses a challenging question: is it possible to use statistics to measure one’s psychological aptitude for the game?

Over the course of the book, Michael Lewis establishes the vital importance of psychology—in particular, drive, ambition, and concentration—in athletic success. A good baseball player must be ambitious; he must have a strong desire to push himself hard and improve in the face of adversity. Baseball players must also have the concentration to focus on winning long, exhausting baseball games. While traditional scouts and coaches may recognize the importance of psychological factors like ambition and concentration in building a talented athlete, the book argues that talent also requires many other psychological qualities that the world of baseball wrongly ignores. For instance, Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta realize that the most successful, talented baseball players are often the most cautious—the hitters who don’t swing at balls in the strike zone. They also recognize that good pitchers need to be good at reading hitters and deciding how to handle them. While there’s nothing revolutionary about this idea, Billy and Paul attach so much value to the ability to read hitters that they draft pitchers with unusually slow pitch speeds.

Billy says on more than one occasion that every aspect of a player’s talent, physical and psychological, can be represented in some concrete number, but Moneyball challenges and complicates Billy’s claim by suggesting that some aspects of a player’s talent (particularly their psychological aptitude for the game) cannot be measured. Toward the end of the book, for example, we learn about the career of Chad Bradford, a pitcher who, contrary to every rational, statistical expectation, developed an unexpected talent late in his career and went on to become one of the best players for the Oakland A’s. To the extent that anyone can understand why Chad succeeded, Lewis suggests that he succeeded because of his incredible optimism and hope. Once Chad began pitching well, sabermetrically-minded general managers like Billy Beane could see his talent clearly. But no sabermetric measures can explain why, exactly, Chad had the psychological talent necessary to change up his game and become a great pitcher. Moneyball ends, then, with a conflicted view of talent and psychology. Statistics give some information about what an athlete does, but, in order to fully understand these numbers, one must look to that athlete’s intangible psychological qualities—an important but indecipherable component of their talent. Yogi Berra put it best: ninety percent of baseball is half mental.