They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives

There is a reason for this the world does not want to acknowledge it either

I wrote a book about this, called Moneyball

It was ostensibly about baseball but was in fact about something else

There are poor teams and rich teams in professional baseball and they spend radically different sums of money on their players

When I wrote my book the richest team the New York Yankees, was then spending about $120 million on its 25 players

The poorest team, the Oakland A's

They was spending about $30 million

And yet the Oakland team was winning more games or as many games as the New York Yankees

Then more games than every other team all of them were richer than they were

This isn't supposed to happen. In theory rich teams should buy the best players and win all the time

But the Oakland team had figured something out that no one else figured out the rich teams didn't really understand

who the best baseball players were. The players were misvalued

And the biggest single reason they were misvalued was that the experts did not pay sufficient attention to the role of luck in baseball success

Players got given credit for things they did that depended on the performance of others pitchers got paid for winning games hitters got paid for knocking in runners on base

Players got blamed and credited for events beyond their control

Where balls that got hit happened to land on the field, for example

So forget baseball, forget sports

Here you had these corporate employees, paid millions of dollars a year

They were doing exactly the same job that people in their business done for more than one century