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Baseball & Truth

Watching the Oakland As crumble to the Red Sox last night made me pull off my bookshelf Michael Lewis' terrific book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. It's how the Oakland As manage to compete against the rich teams, even though they often fail in the post-season.

There's a nugget of wisdom there worth noting. Lewis quotes the famous baseball strategist Bill James on what James called "a law of competitive balance," a law with clear implications for those in business and management.

"There exists in the world a negative momentum," wrote James, "which acts constantly to reduce the differences between strong teams and weak teams, teams which are ahead and teams which are behind, or good players and poor players.

"The corollaries are: 1. Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength. 2. The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind. 3. Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upward."

Do you agree? Are underdogs advantaged in some odd way? Are winners ultimately disadvantaged?