What Baseball Can Teach Government

G. T. Bynum & Preston Doerflinger

The baseball book and movie “Moneyball” have a great scene about management evaluating prospective players for the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 roster.

In the movie, player scouts huddle in a conference room obsessing over players’ individual traits: Batting stance, swing style, throwing motion — even looks.

General manager Billy Beane is unimpressed. Beane, played by Brad Pitt, criticizes scouts for failing to recognize that Oakland, a small market team with limited resources, won’t succeed if it develops rosters as it has in the past.

A frustrated scout complains: “With all due respect, we’ve been doing this a long time … let us do our jobs.”

Beane disagrees, declaring: “You’re just talking like this is business as usual — we’ve got to think differently.”

That season, Beane’s staff reinvented player evaluation. Using strategic, data-driven metrics to guide roster selection, Oakland won its division, set a win-streak record and stayed competitive with teams boasting player payrolls nearly three times their size. Today, every team in baseball uses Beane’s “moneyball” approach.

City and state governments in Oklahoma face challenges similar to those Beane faced in 2002. Demands for core government services are increasing, but limited revenue exists to meet them. Needs may go unmet unless government takes new approaches to budgeting its limited resources.

For decades, government budgeting has focused too much on what is spent instead of the outcome of that spending. It’s not that different than baseball scouting of yesteryear that focused more on batting stances and throwing motions than whether players got on base, scored runs and helped teams win.

That’s why we, in our roles at Tulsa City Hall and the state Capitol, are encouraging new, data-informed, outcome-driven approaches to budgeting. Many call it moneyball government, and it may well be the next great wave of government reform since it positively affects all areas of public policy.

The city of Tulsa, through a national fellowship, is bringing moneyball approaches to city operations. This should help the city overcome ongoing budget challenges by rethinking how to fund and measure effectiveness of city services.

Moneyball government acknowledges that taxpayer resources are finite and encourages policymakers to more intelligently use resources they have rather than seeking more tax revenue.

In state government, this approach has already started. Implementation of performance budgeting — a more formal term for moneyball government — began in September, when agencies were required to begin submitting annual budget and program performance data in a format aligned with measurable statewide goals.

Reviewing this data holistically allows us to look across all agencies and determine whether resources allocated to specific goals are effectively helping reach those goals. If they aren’t, the state can repurpose spending to better meet those goals based on objective data instead of gut feelings and arbitrary figures.

It’s similar to moneyball baseball, which sets measurable team goals and uses sophisticated player data analysis to build rosters designed to meet those goals for optimum monetary value. Used in government budgeting, this smarter, more conservative approach can improve government services and, ultimately, the lives of Oklahomans.

Let’s get one thing straight: No one will ever mistake this Tulsa city councilor or Oklahoma state finance secretary for Brad Pitt. That said, we’ve each felt somewhat like Billy Beane during our efforts to transform how our colleagues approach fiscal policy. Beane had to overcome early resistance from the status quo, but he emerged with a more effective model his colleagues have all since adopted.

The city of Tulsa and state of Oklahoma have a similar opportunity to lead the way toward greater efficiency and effectiveness. Citizens should encourage both governments to do so.

G.T. Bynum represents District 9 on the Tulsa City Council. Preston Doerflinger serves as Gov. Mary Fallin’s secretary of finance and was previously the elected Tulsa city auditor.