Moneyball
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Baseball management relying on sabermetrics. uncountable
"Sure, the Florida Marlins and some others have a shot, but the “Moneyball” approach — using spreadsheets and unconventional thinking to fell baseball’s rich Goliaths — seems to have been co-opted by the big guys themselves."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of Moneyball. alt-of, uncountable
"[Ben] Waber portrays the work as “moneyball” for business, enabling any organization to manage its workers like a sports team based on measures that reveal how people move through the day, with whom they interact, their tone of voice, if they “lean in” to listen, their position in the social network across a variety of office situations, and much more, all of it to produce forty separate measures that are then integrated with a “business metric dashboard.”"
- 3 The application of advanced analytics to any domain in order to improve outcomes. broadly, uncountable
"Campaigns are spending a lot of money, but they are not playing Moneyball."
Example
More examples"Sure, the Florida Marlins and some others have a shot, but the “Moneyball” approach — using spreadsheets and unconventional thinking to fell baseball’s rich Goliaths — seems to have been co-opted by the big guys themselves."
Etymology
After the 2003 book by business journalist Michael Lewis; from money + ball.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.