When Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts attends home games at Wrigley Field, he spends part of the day hearing from fans who have endured more than a century without a World Series Championship.  "Moneyball" the book sold more than 1 million copies. "Moneyball" the movie opens Friday,starring Brad Pitt as the Oakland A's iconoclastic general manager Billy Beane. Matthew Futterman on Lunch Break discusses how the book changed the game.  He must endure inevitable questions about "Moneyball," Michael Lewis's 2003 best seller about baseball's statistical revolution. Fans used to ask owners when they're going to trade for a starting pitcher; now they beg for a computer whiz to swoop in and save the franchise.  "It comes up all the time," says Mr. Ricketts, whose family bought the Cubs two years ago. "The fans hope that the decisions made on the baseball side are made with the evidence at hand." He doesn't mind at all: he's pushing for more such analysis himself.  "Moneyball" the book sold more than one million copies. "Moneyball" the movie opens Friday, starring Brad Pitt as the Oakland A's iconoclastic general manager Billy Beane.  The film tells the story of how Mr. Beane ignored the intuitive powers of his crusty old scouts and instead evaluated talent using a statistical approach based largely on the theories of Bill James, the founder of what he called Sabermetrics. The resulting team, on a bargain-basement payroll, won 103 games in 2002.  What's the legacy of "Moneyball"? One thing it's not anymore: a raging culture war. Mr. Lewis deftly framed it that way when he wrote the book. Now, both sides acknowledge that statistical analysis has a place in baseball, but so does gut instinct, tradition, money, mystery—and plenty of dumb luck.  Yet the influence of the strategies explored in "Moneyball" did have a seismic impact on the game, even if the consequences were somewhat unintended and are still playing out  "This was all about using technology to analyze and measure things that used to be measured by guys with stopwatches or playing hunches," said Steve Greenberg, former deputy commissioner of Major League Baseball and now a sports investment banker, "There's still a place for that stuff, but technology has changed the game forever."  Here are some ways of looking at the legacy:  Early in the last decade, there was a fleeting moment when it looked like baseball might become a mental battle instead of a financial one. Wily numbers-crunchers could outwit the teams that were writing big checks for crowd-pleasing big swingers.  After all, Mr. Beane's A's were winning 100 games a year while spending a fraction of the New York Yankees' budget. Word had spread through baseball that Mr. Beane was doing something different.  What followed is a scenario that has been playing out in baseball for decades, according to Ken Burns, the filmmaker and producer of "Baseball," the game's definitive documentary. He compares Mr. Beane's innovations to Branch Rickey's creation of the modern farm system when he was running the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1920s. "He couldn't afford to buy Babe Ruth, but he thought he could grow one," Mr. Burns says.  Theo Epstein of the Red Sox, front  Of course, before too long, every team had a farm system. Likewise, in 2002 when the Boston Red Sox failed to woo Mr. Beane to the East Coast, it promoted to general manager Theo Epstein, who brought in Bill James and adopted Mr. Beane's approach, only with more money. Two years later they won the World Series. Yankees' general manger Brian Cashman, with what is now a $200 million payroll, steered his club in the same direction.  Today, the Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies have the game's highest payrolls and lead their respective leagues in wins. While some middle-level salaried teams are in the post-season, just one team among baseball's lowest payrolls—the Diamondbacks—is likely to make the playoffs.  "The notion that a small-market team could replicate what the A's did is silly," says Andrew Zimbalist, the noted sports economist. "Once every team knows about a market mechanism, it's gone. Any notion that you can have some sort of competitive balance because of Sabermetrics is very misleading," says Mr. Zimbalist.  Rightly or wrongly, the lesson sports executives drew from the publication of "Moneyball" was that opening the curtain speeds up the copycat process, and the potential for ridicule.  Today, in the post-"Moneyball" era, it's probably easier to discuss battle plans in Afghanistan with Pentagon officials than to get a member of the New England Patriots staff to talk honestly about the team's injuries or its defensive philosophies. A veil of secrecy has descended over sports unlike anything the industry has ever seen.  Bill James, shown here in 1981 at Royals Stadium.  All research is proprietary. General managers will barely mention what statistics they focus on, much less which companies they use to gather data, or how many people they employ to analyze it. A scout could tell a rival over a beer, "that kid really has some pop in his bat." But when numbers and formulas get into the picture, all of a sudden, lips clamp shut.  Yet small-market teams need not abandon hope: What Moneyball theory is really about is finding value in places where your competitors aren't looking and therefore aren't driving up prices. In the 1990s, that was players who were expert at getting on base and making pitchers throw a lot of pitches, which allowed a lineup to face middle relief, where baseball's worst pitchers reside.  More recently, as teams soured on spending millions on second and third-tier free agents, Mr. Beane has tried to find value there, signing veterans like Coco Crisp and Hideki Matsui for less than they had earned in previous deals. Likewise, he's tried drafting more high school players as other teams ran up prices on college prospects with more experience. Mr. Beane has little choice, as his annual payroll remains a fraction of that of what the game's biggest spenders.  Not coincidentally, Major League Baseball's so-called Moneyball Era, roughly the mid-late 1990s until the mid-late 2000s, coincided with its so-called Steroid Era.  Jason Giambi was a prototypical 'Moneyball' player, but his stats were affected by the steroid use he later admitted.  The uncomfortable fact is that when Sabermetricians run through the names computers indicated were the great players of their times, many of those same names have been connected to the game's steroid scandals, including Jason Giambi, perhaps the Oakland A's greatest "Moneyball" player (though he left the team just before the movie begins). Mr. Giambi testified in the Barry Bonds trial earlier this year that he had used steroids. Alex Rodriguez admitted steroid use in a 2009 TV interview. One-time Red Sox star Manny Ramirez, who never admitted steroid use, was suspended for failing a steroid test in 2009 and retired this year rather than facing the consequences of a second failed test. Barry Bonds, the Sabermetric quintessence (lots of walks, lots of homers), was found guilty of obstructing an investigation into his steroid use.  In other words, a lot of the theories and formulas used to decide the game's best players were based essentially on pumped-up numbers. With steroid use and power on the wane, pitching is ascendant, runs are precious, and Moneyball's win formulas don't work so well anymore.  This week's Sports Retort tackles the question of whether the reeling Red Sox could not just make the playoffs, but advance there. Plus NFL and college football picks and a fairly strained attempt to compare the podcast to "I Love Lucy."  Sal Galatioto, a sports investment banker, says some of these formulas remind him of the U.S. housing bubble, and certain disastrous leveraged buyout deals, which were facilitated when analysts used unreliable models and overvalued investments. "The computer analysis is only as good as the information you put into it," Mr. Galatioto said.  Bart Giamatti, the late baseball commissioner, medieval scholar and former president of Yale, used to say that the game of baseball was really the conversation surrounding it. If Mr. Giamatti were alive today, he'd likely find the conversation a little too inside baseball.  A discussion about the game can resemble one about the Grateful Dead's music in the early 1980s. It was no longer enough simply to like the song "Sugar Magnolia." Which version? From which bootleg? And how many bootlegs do you own? And how many shows have you been to?  In the age of "Moneyball," baseball debate can quickly devolve into whether one player's WAR (wins above replacement) says more about him than another player's VORP (value over a replacement player). Do you like WHIP (walks and hits divided by innings pitched) or FIP (fielding independent pitching)?  Brian Cashman of the Yankees with Derek Jeter  "The geeks have definitely been let off the leash," says Michael Lewis, the "Moneyball" author. Mention batting average, earned run average, fielding percentage, a pitcher's win total, or any other statistic that's dependent on other variables and risk banishment as hopelessly anachronistic. Never suggest a player should steal, or give away an out with a sacrifice. And by the way, Derek Jeter stinks. He's overrated because he doesn't get to enough balls at shortstop, and the math proves it.  "I'm O.K. until someone starts explaining to me why Bobby Abreu is better than Roberto Clemente," says the longtime broadcaster and MLB Network host Bob Costas, an early Bill James disciple. "Then I've had it."  Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent hates speaking out against statistical analysis because it makes him sound like a Luddite, which he swears he isn't, but he says numbers are often taken out of context.  "I remember sitting at Joe DiMaggio's funeral and listening to [former Yankee teammate and American League president] Dr. Bobby Brown explain how there were no statistics kept on how many times Joe had stretched a single into a double in the eighth inning or later and then come around to score the winning run, or made a spectacular catch or throw to save a game.  "He said he saw those things and rated Joe at the top because of it. The only numbers he cared about were how many pennants and championships the Yankees won when Joe was in center field. It was brilliant because Bobby was a man of science, a cardiologist who had played with Joe and he was arguing that you can only take the numbers so far."  Oakland's young pitching aces, like Barry Zito, pictured here, were largely ignored in the 'Moneyball' narrative.  Billy Beane hasn't taken his team to the playoffs in the past five years. "Moneyball" also is often debunked for virtually ignoring the fact that Oakland had three starting pitchers—Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito—who won 194 games among them from 2000-2003. Yet Mr. Beane and Mr. Lewis remain two highly sought-after guests on the corporate-management lecture circuit, and there's good reason for it.  The business world used to look to sports only for inspiration. Pat Riley, or Coach K or Rick Pitino would come in to fire up a sales force with talk of motivation, a winning attitude, never giving up.  "Moneyball" allowed the business world to see sports in terms of strategic tools, especially in environments where resources are scarce and innovation becomes a requirement.  "It's about how to price assets, and that's something that's germane whether you're running Chrysler or Goldman Sachs or the Oakland A's," says George Will, the political columnist and author of the baseball book "Men at Work."  Beyond that, "Moneyball" celebrated measurements at exactly the time when computers and simple programs were exponentially increasing the speed at which the educated working public could analyze data and hold everyone from second basemen to third-grade teachers accountable for their results.  John Challenger, principal of the job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, remembers reading "Moneyball" for the first time, then going out and buying copies for each of his top managers. In his view, this was the first book to coherently address the issue of finding the key measurements that will help you run your business, the kind of data that a company like General Electric sought tirelessly for decades.  "People thought it was crazy," Mr. Challenger said of GE's approach. "Moneyball" gave everybody a way to understand and think about it, and everybody finally got it."  Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com
A best-selling book, a much-anticipated movie, even a business-management mantra: How the Moneyball factor changed the game—and how it didn't.