When Opening Day arrives, it brings optimism, but there is also a familiar temptation: to focus on what’s happening now instead of what actually matters over time.

I find myself returning to the ideas of Michael Lewis, not just his iconic baseball book Moneyball, but also his recent appearance on the Acquired podcast. The common thread isn’t baseball. It’s perspective.

Moneyball wasn’t really about baseball statistics—it was about seeing differently. The Oakland A’s, constrained by budget, were forced to challenge conventional wisdom. They stopped paying for what was visible (batting averages, body type, “intangibles”) and instead paid for what actually drove outcomes but was underappreciated (on-base percentage). In short: they exploited inefficiency.

In his Acquired conversation, Lewis reflects on a similar dynamic across industries—how markets, people, and institutions repeatedly misprice what truly matters. The lesson isn’t just about being contrarian. It’s about being patient enough to let the truth play out.

That’s where “taking the longview” comes in.

In investing, as in baseball, the scoreboard updates constantly, but the real game unfolds over seasons (even generations!), not innings. Short-term noise is seductive and sometimes scary. It feels actionable. But it’s often just that: noise. The discipline is in identifying what actually compounds over time and then having the temperament to stick with it when it’s temporarily out of favor.

For our clients, that translates into something simple but difficult: staying invested in what works, even when it temporarily doesn’t feel like it. That’s what we’re doing every day. Helping our clients maintain the behavior that pays off in the long term.

The genius of Moneyball wasn’t the data. It was the willingness to endure looking wrong in the short term to be right over the long term. That’s really hard to do!

At Hill Investment Group, that’s the game we’re playing. Not predicting the next pitch, but building a process that wins over full seasons…full lifetimes.

In the end, the real advantage—whether in baseball or investing—isn’t speed. It’s clarity, patience, and the discipline to let time do the heavy lifting. Thank you for taking the long view with us.

If you’d like a new copy of Odds On (The Moneyball of investing) or want to gift it to a friend or family member, click here. We’re happy to share how it just might transform someone’s future and those that come after them.

What do you get when you combine an evidence-based process with visionary team spirit and brilliant leadership? A World Series Commissioner’s Trophy, for starters. The “rags to riches” tale of the Houston Astros 2017 World Series victory is now available for your reading pleasure, thanks to Sports Illustrated senior writer Ben Reiter.

We love the recent approach to managing the Astros because it mirrors our approach to investing in two major ways:

• First, it is backed by data. The Astros management seeks to fully understand the factors that drive wins, quantify them, and weight heavily toward them.
• Second, like with investing, achieving your long-term goals may sometimes require short-term sacrifices. If you have the right philosophy and the right process, you can trust that the odds will work in your favor long-term.

Something of a visionary himself, Reiter actually predicted the team’s 2017 victory on the cover of the magazine’s June 30, 2014 edition. Was that luck or forecasting talent? You be the judge, when you read Reiter’s entertaining account in “Astroball: The New Way to Win It All.”

Reminiscent of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball tale of the Oakland A’s, the Astros applied similar evidence-based strategies to improve their game. They leveraged what the Oakland A’s Billy Beane began and took it a step further, incorporating (with help from the “Nerd Cave”) scores for more unconventional qualities, such as personality and grit. These elements and more are touched on in this review: “[R]oster-creation, all by itself, did not bring home the championship. Building an exceptional team is one thing, but making it work as a team is another.”

We’ve said it before; we’ll say it again: We couldn’t be prouder of our exceptional home-town team. Go Astros!

Bonus read: For more of baseball’s rich historical lore, I also enjoyed this recent PBS documentary on legendary hitter Ted Williams, in all his quirky glory (narrated by St. Louis’s own Jon Hamm). This related New York Times piece tells the backstory of how some of the film’s best footage was almost lost for good.

Michael Lewis’ latest book, “The Undoing Project,” weaves together the biographies of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two Israeli psychologists whose work in the 1970s–1990s launched a new way of combining behavioral academics with practical applications. Their specialty was exploring the ways the human mind makes systematic errors when forced to judge uncertain situations.

At first, you may not think that sounds like gripping entertainment. But in typical Michael Lewis fashion, these pair of academics become a fascinating read.

I and my Hill Investment Group colleagues had the privilege of meeting Lewis and hearing him speak shortly after he published his 2003 book, “Moneyball.” In it, he showed how Major League Baseball teams were making poor decisions on valuing players based on human judgment. Defying convention, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane evaluated players using data rather than “expert” judgments to successfully compete against teams boasting much higher payrolls.

When Lewis wrote “Moneyball,” he wasn’t aware how powerful his book would become. He was simply intrigued by a real-life illustration of objective evidence beating the pants off of conventional so-called wisdom.

In some respects, “The Undoing Project,” is a prequel to “Moneyball.” Lewis admits, he didn’t realize it at the time how much of what he explored in “Moneyball” came directly from professors Tversky and Kahneman and their earlier work. Once he connected the dots, he decided to write a book about them too. Their story is about how they used their understanding of systematic errors in people’s judgment to improve that judgment, and thus improve their decision-making.

I believe one of their most important findings is this: Knowing you or others have biases (such as relying on overly small samples, anchoring on past assumptions, and mistaking hindsight as being predictive) isn’t sufficient to overcome them. Even when we know we’re being influenced, we often let it happen anyway!

Here’s one example from Lewis’ book:  In 2016, basketball player Jeremy Lin signed a $38 million contract with the Brooklyn Nets – clearly a coveted hire. But back in 2010, no NBA team would draft him. “He lit up our models,” one team manager said … but as a Chinese-American Harvard grad, Lin didn’t fit the stereotype. Even though they had the evidence (the models) in hand, they were unable to overcome their biases and recruit him when he could have been had for far less money.

Back to professors Kahneman and Tversky. In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for the work that continues to shape our lives today. Amos Tversky likely would have received the award as well but, sadly, he passed away in 1996, and Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously. In any case, their work has contributed to untold advances in medical diagnosis, military decisions, professional sports and – last but hardly least – financial economics.

Across all of these disciplines and more, the takeaway is that human bias is ever-present, which is why we must remain ever on guard against it. Hint: One of the best ways I know to combat your own biases is to recruit someone who is aware of how prevalent they are, to let you know when it’s happening to you.