Moneyball 2.0: What are you undervaluing?

The Brewers won their first World Series on Wednesday, October 28, beating the Rays in five games. They did it from baseball’s smallest market, with a payroll that ranked 19th as of August 31. As a lifelong Reds fan, I’ve watched Milwaukee do this to us for years. They clinched their playoff spot in September by beating us 20 to 0. They keep finding the right players, then getting more out of them than anyone else saw.

I was enamored with what Billy Beane and the A’s were doing when Moneyball first came along. They built teams around players the market undervalued, going against deeply held beliefs about what a good player looked like because the evidence pointed somewhere else. Getting on base seems like an obvious thing to value now. At the time, recognizing how poorly the market priced it gave Oakland a different way to compete, and it changed what the rest of baseball paid attention to.

Milwaukee is pushing that thinking further, into what others have called Moneyball 2.0. The original Moneyball found value the market had missed. The next advance, described in Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik’s The MVP Machine, is understanding players deeply enough to develop them beyond what their records suggest.

Moneyball 2.0 is finding and developing potential that current performance doesn’t reveal.

Pat Murphy, the Brewers’ manager, put it his own way in May. Players can spend years trying to establish themselves before an opportunity brings out something others haven’t seen. “That’s how we do business, some of it out of necessity.”

Two things stand out in how Milwaukee does it. The value shows up in combinations: a pitch that makes sense alongside another one, a hitter whose approach changes with the situation, a third baseman whose range helps the rookie beside him. And the club develops that value through the whole organization, connecting what scouts, analysts and coaches learn about a player to what they do with him.

Every team can see much of the same data. The difference is what Milwaukee chooses to examine, how it reads what it finds and how that turns into decisions across the club. That takes real investment. Despite the smaller payroll, the Brewers rank in the top 10 in both scouting and analytics department size, according to Baseball America. Scouts spot something worth investigating, analysts examine it in depth, and coaches help a player put it to work.

The tools include KinaTrax, which uses AI to turn camera footage into detailed measurements of how players move. The club’s minor-league technology operations posting lists it alongside Hawkeye, Trackman and other tracking systems. The team still has to decide what those measurements mean and what a player should do differently.

The data and AI capability are available. The advantage comes from what you see in it and how you put it to work.

Understand which pitches work for a player, where he should throw them and how each one affects the others, and you might see a very different player, with a different idea of how to develop him.

The pitch you’d have cut

Last season, Quinn Priester’s cutter looked like a pitch you’d stop throwing. It got hit hard and rated poorly on its own. But in a July 2025 analysis, Matthew Trueblood showed how it followed the slider’s early path before the two pitches broke apart, which made the slider harder to recognize before a hitter committed to swinging.

Priester’s slider was drawing misses on 35.1% of swings at that point, up from 25.4% the previous season. Moving toward the middle of the rubber and raising his arm slot helped the two pitches work together. Look at the cutter’s numbers alone, cut it, and you undermine the slider you wanted to keep.

The hits that go the other way

At the plate, Brewers offense and strategy coordinator Jason Lane describes letting the ball travel deeper, so hitters have longer to recognize the pitch and can use the whole field. That matters when defenses shade toward the pull side and leave room the other way. Trying to pull everything forces an earlier decision and leads hitters to chase.

In Ben Lindbergh’s June 2026 analysis of results since 2020, 31.0% of Milwaukee’s balls in play became hits with runners in scoring position, compared with 28.8% without. Their pull-rate ranking rose from 28th to 14th in those situations, when they saw fewer fastballs. The numbers don’t settle on one explanation. Lane’s account shows the depth of the thinking: recognize the pitch, read the situation and use the field, rather than lock every hitter into one approach.

The third baseman and the rookie

On defense, Sports Info Solutions credited Joey Ortiz with seven Defensive Runs Saved in just 58 games at third base this season. His value there also depends on who’s next to him. With rookie Cooper Pratt at shortstop, Ortiz’s range to his left takes pressure off Pratt. Evaluate each player separately and you miss how one player’s strength helps the other do his job.

Where in your business could you apply Moneyball 2.0?

So what are you undervaluing? Most businesses get judged the way the whole industry judges them: the same metrics, each part on its own. Those numbers describe what your business delivered. The potential the Brewers go after sits underneath them, at a finer grain than your reports carry and in combinations across the business that nobody’s paid to notice. The technology to see it exists in your industry too. Three questions to start:

1. How could you use the most innovative technology available in your industry to capture and analyze the performance of your business in greater detail and context?
2. What would it look like to understand what drives performance in your business as deeply as the Brewers understand their players, individually and in combination?
3. What could that understanding allow you to systematically build that competitors couldn’t easily match, even with more money and resources?