The Oakland Athletics: Strategy & Metrics for a Budget

This case considers Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane’s data driven and, in baseball circles unconventional, approach to winning games over the duration of the long Major League Baseball season. Beane’s critical approach to crafting strategy within his small payroll budget built on a reconsideration of the game’s most fundamental offensive metric – batting average – as put forth by Sabermatrician Bill James that required a profound cultural shift within all parts of the Athletics organization, including players, managers, coaches, and scouts.

The case introduces students to the fundamentals of data analytic thinking. Students learn to (1) carefully articulate the business ask, (2) reason carefully from the “ask,” through metrics and models, and outputs; and (3) evaluate outputs from models to (4) develop a plan for action. In this case students consider the logic Beane used to set strategy and articulate the metric to evaluate and acquire the players who would ultimately implement his strategy on the field.

This case is the first in a series of cases for the second year MBA course "Managing with Data Science." The course provides MBA students with no programming experience an introduction to the field of data science and its applications in business.