Cleveland Browns' Paul DePodesta touts 'Moneyball' approach

Paul DePodesta's "psychological epiphany" didn't come at the top of the mountaintop in Tibet.

It came at a blackjack table in Las Vegas.

It was the late 1990s and DePodesta was working for the Cleveland Indians as a special assistant to general manager John Hart. It was a Friday night, the casino was packed, and DePodesta was seated on the third-base side of the blackjack table, across from a player who was throwing away money faster than Sam Bankman-Fried at a timeshare presentation.

"He was losing money hand over fist, and it seemed like every 15 minutes he was dipping into his pocket for more cash," DePodesta said.

On one particular hand, the dealer dealt the struggling player two cards, which added up to 17. As she went to deal the next round, she passed over him and he stopped her and said, "No, I want to hit."

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Absolutely," he said.

She produced the card and, sure enough, it was a 4.

"The place goes crazy," DePodesta said. "Everyone's hooting and hollering. High-fives all around. And the dealer looked at the player with total sincerity and said, 'Nice hit!'"

"I thought to myself, 'Nice hit?'" I mean, just because it worked didn't justify the decision."

DePodesta spent the rest of the weekend wandering around the casino — "Largely because I'd lost all my money playing blackjack," he said — while thinking about how the casino worked.

"What struck me was that while the casino is certainly concerned with outcomes, the way they achieve those outcomes is with an absolute laser-like focus on process," he said.

That process included guaranteeing favorable odds on the table games, obviously, but it also included the carpeting, lighting, the way you navigate through the property and even the pit boss.

"They believe if they're vigilant about sticking to that process, in the long run, they're going to win," he said. "And in case you haven't noticed, they normally do."

So, DePodesta started thinking about how we might be able to take a similar mindset and bring it into baseball.

Soon afterward, Oakland A's GM Billy Beane called DePodesta and offered him a job as assistant GM. Over a four-season stretch (2000-03), Beane and DePodesta used a then-revolutionary emphasis on analytics to lead the A's to a 329-255 record. The approach didn't lead to a World Series title, but it did lead to one of the most influential books in recent history — "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" by Michael Lewis — and an accompanying movie starring Brad Pitt as Beane and Jonah Hill as DePodesta.

"I can't tell you how many people have come up to me in the last 10 years and said, 'You don't look anything like Jonah,'" DePodesta said. "And I've had to tell them, 'I think it's the other way around.'"

After leaving the A's, DePodesta took front office positions with the Padres, Dodgers and Mets before finally achieving his childhood dream of working in the NFL when he was hired as the Cleveland Browns' chief strategy officer in 2016. In that role, DePodesta is responsible for "assessing and implementing the best practices and strategies that will give the Browns the comprehensive resources needed to make optimal decisions for their players and team."

DePodesta spoke about his baseball background, his analytical approach and more on Thursday, April 20, as part of the Rochester Institute of Technology's McClure Lecture Series.

Here are eight other takeaways from his speech and the accompanying Q&A.

Ask naive questions.

When DePodesta joined the A's, he was leaving one of baseball's successful teams for one of its worst, a team that had posted six straight losing seasons, as well one with a small payroll, an aging stadium and declining attendance. To compete with the likes of the New York Yankees — or the Indians, for that matter — they had to think differently.

So, they reevaluated every aspect of their organization, borrowing a question from the management consultant Peter Drucker: "If we weren't already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?"

The A's discovered some bad processes not just in their organization, but the entire sport.

"Once we started asking this naive question, we started uncovering a lot of these things," he said. "We said, 'We are starting over and we are going to study everything. Unless we can prove a concept's relevance to today's game under today's circumstances, we're just not going to believe in it.' That's what really kicked off our period of study, the new metrics that came from those studies, the insights that we had. It started the foundation of what became 'Moneyball.'"

Old school and new school don't always have to fight.

Many of Oakland's baseball lifers chafed at the changes, creating a rivalry between the analytics crowd and the old-school crowd. But DePodesta believes there is room for both.

"It's funny because people ask me, 'Are you a purist?' and there are parts of the game where, absolutely, I'm a purist," he said. "I don't think it's necessarily one or the other. I think you can have these competing sensibilities."

Case in point: While baseball's offseason rule changes have sped up the game, they also threaten some of the sport's best moments, like those critical ninth inning situations that carry extra drama and tension because the sport doesn't have a clock.

"I don't think we're interested in speeding through those moments," he said. "On a normal Tuesday night in the fourth inning in the middle of July, I think we want to keep the game moving. But I think we want to savor certain moments. I'll be interested in seeing how baseball adapts to that, where they try to walk that fine line of progressing with the times and making the game better while trying to preserve as much of the greatness of the game as we can."

Focus on what you can offer, not what you can't.

DePodesta started as a minor league van driver for the Indians and his one real baseball job was charting pitches (pitch type, location, outcome) during the games. In his second year, he was promoted to advance scout, which involved traveling around the country to take notes on the Indians' next opponents. He quickly realized he didn't know as much as other advance scouts, so he asked himself the question, "What might I provide that is valuable to our players?"

He didn't have enough credibility to tell Orel Hershiser to throw more sliders down-and-away, but he could tell him, "This hitter is hitting 3 for 30 on sliders down and away. Do with that information as you please."

Once he started diving into more nuanced and detailed statistics — as opposed to batting average or on-base percentage — he realized he was sitting on a treasure trove of valuable information, not only for advanced scouting purposes but evaluating players in general.

"It was born out of necessity," he said. "I was in over my head in the job I was tasked to do and I sort of found this as a way of dealing with that. It wasn't some great insight of, 'Hey, using data will be a great answer.' It was really the only answer I had at the moment."

Learn to speak your listener's language.

The Browns have one of the NFL's most data-friendly front offices, but DePodesta said they spend as much time on the presentation of their insights as they do creating the insights themselves.

For instance, DePodesta is a math guy, but most of his players aren't. If he walked up to one of the Browns with a binder full of data and said, "Hey look, we got an R-squared of 0.87! This is amazing!" he would get a blank look in response. So, he translates that insight into something helpful to the player.

"Whenever you try to convey a new concept to somebody, it has to be in the language of the recipient, not in the language of the person doing the presenting," he said.

The "Moneyball" approach can — and does — work in a variety of fields.

When DePodesta and Beane first read the galleys for "Moneyball," Beane said, "I hope this reaches someone beyond baseball and they see it as more than just a baseball story."

That has happened "beyond our wildest dreams," DePodesta said.

"Over the last 20 years, we've seen the 'Moneyball' for politics, the 'Moneyball' for health care, the 'Moneyball' for retail, the ''Moneyball for farming — you name it," he said. "It's remarkable that almost everybody has found a way to relate to the story."

Thanks to the explosion of data, just about any field can benefit from a "Moneyball" approach, he said.

"The whole idea with us with data was not that it was going to somehow going to be some sort of crystal ball that was going to tell us the outcome of every future at-bat or every game or even every season," he said. "But what it could do was maybe help us get our arms around all that uncertainty we were dealing with on a day-to-day basis, and do a better job of managing that uncertainty and do a better job of predicting the range of potential outcomes."

Interviews aren't the best way to evaluate potential employees.

When the Browns look to draft a player, they take an in-depth approach with four basic components: in-person interviews, testing (both physical and psychological), game tape and references. They take the same approach when hiring coaches and employees, and do extensive work with the reference part.

While all four components are important, DePodesta said they've found their reference work is the greatest predictor of future success.

The least predictive? The interview.

"Oftentimes what happens is, the interview comes last," he said. "Because it's last, it figures most prominently in our minds and can really skew how we view the whole situation. We've done certain things both with our players and our hiring processes to try and mitigate that issue. But, we lean heavily on reference work and work samples."

Curiosity is crucial.

The sports industry is incredibly competitive, both for players and for employees, and DePodesta is often asked what organizations like the Browns look for in applicants.

One thing stands out.

"We want to find people who are incredibly curious intellectually," he said.

The Browns have hired people with all sorts of different backgrounds — DePodesta, for instance, comes from an economics and psychology background — and they know there are things about the sport, and the industry, that students won't be prepared for until they're in the building.

"We want people who have a wide breadth of study," he said. "Continuous learning is a big piece for us and we want that to be across disciplines. Some of our best insights have come when we're reading about other industries."

Beane and DePodesta, for instance, almost never read about baseball. Instead, they read about other industries with similar characteristics in hopes of finding insights that would give them a competitive advantage in baseball.

They found that in the pharmaceutical industry. Both industries are highly competitive, both spend a lot on research and development, both are trying to find breakout high-performers, and both have a high failure rate.

But there was one difference. While the A's talked about investing heavily in scouting and development, their budgets didn't back it up. The drug companies' did.

"We asked, 'Are we really putting as much investment behind those efforts as a typical pharmaceutical company as a percentage of revenue or percentage of expenses?'" he said. "When we looked at it, we weren't even close."

Dream big, but dream wide, too.

When DePodesta was a student at Harvard, he knew he wanted to work in the NFL — and he had certain high-profile jobs in mind. But he narrowed it even further, saying, "Oh, I don't want to work in that city" or "Or, I don't want to work for that team because they're not very good."

"That's absolutely crazy!" he said. "These opportunities are very few and far between."

Thankfully, DePodesta said, the opportunities to work in the sports industry have grown since the mid-1990s, whether that's on the business side, in the league office, as a sports agent, as a third-party vendor like Nike or Adidas, as a trainer, a team doctor or even in data analysis.

"You can say, 'I love sports, I want to work in sports, so in my mind that translates into being the general manager of a team,'" he said. "That's great. That's one path. But there are so many different ways of being involved in sports that might satisfy that passion you have. It's important to investigate all of those. I did not.

"I was incredibly lucky that I got a break and it ended up happening, but I wish someone back then had told me to broaden my horizons. I think there were a lot of other opportunities that would have presented themselves that I never ended up getting exposed to."