IN SPORTS, just like the rest of life, the rich keep getting richer. Anyone who saw or read “Moneyball” knows that the deck is stacked against small-market Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. Their only hope of competing, Michael Lewis’s story goes, is to acquire brilliant, innovative general managers (GMs) like his protagonist Billy Beane, who have mastered the “art of winning an unfair game” by outmanoeuvring wealthier clubs.

The problem with this narrative is that there is nothing to stop the sport’s plutocrats from hiring the finest minds money can buy, just as they sign the best athletes. And after years of sticking with traditionalists in their front offices, big-market clubs are increasingly acquiring brand-name GMs to assemble their star-studded rosters. In 2011 Theo Epstein took over the Chicago Cubs, and Jeff Luhnow took the reins for the Houston Astros. Now, just one week after a devastating playoff loss that prematurely ended their season, the free-spending Los Angeles Dodgers announced on October 14th that they are poaching Andrew Friedman (pictured) from the Tampa Bay Rays. The Wall Street-trained Mr Friedman, who took over a decrepit Rays club as a 28-year-old wunderkind, has inherited Mr Beane’s title as the Smartest Man In Baseball™, and just like Mr Beane, he was profiled in a fawning book for his ability to do more with less. Despite finishing near the bottom in attendance and revenues every year, Mr Friedman’s teams took home one American League title, made four playoff appearances and won an impressive 55% of their regular-season games from 2008-14.

If you believe in the “Moneyball”-inspired Great GM Theory of Baseball, Mr Friedman’s move should foreshadow the apocalypse for competitive balance in the sport. Statistically-minded observers have long encouraged teams to invest in their front offices: earlier this year Benjamin Morris of FiveThirtyEight calculated that Mr Beane had been worth an astonishing $1.4 billion to the Oakland Athletics. Once the news broke of Mr Friedman’s move, Rob Neyer claimed that “it’s long been obvious that good general managers were massively underpaid” (emphasis in original), and Ken Rosenthal wrote that “whatever the price, Friedman will be a bargain.” If rich clubs are at last beginning to wield their financial advantage on their brain trusts as well as their players, this argument goes, their poorer rivals will be consigned to the league’s basement for all eternity.

There is plenty of reason for concern that the advent of free-spending, statistics-driven “Moneyball with money” teams in big markets will overwhelm the game’s modest redistributive economic policies, which have allowed 11 of its 30 franchises to make the World Series and 27 to reach the playoffs over the past decade. However, the tendency of quantitatively oriented commentators to ascribe the entirety of a team’s over- or under-performance (relative to its payroll) to the wizardry or lack thereof of its GM requires greater scrutiny.

One of the most important insights in the history of baseball statistics is the concept of replacement level. First articulated by Bill James, the father of modern baseball analysis, replacement level enables analysts to compare hitters who play different defensive positions, and part-time players to those with everyday jobs: you simply subtract from their production the performance one would expect from a “freely available” minimum-salary journeyman at the same position in the same playing time. The technique can lead to some surprising conclusions: for example, it tells us that slow-and-steady Bill Buckner, whose 2,715 lifetime base hits over 25 years are the 62nd-highest total in MLB history, was worth less than the blaze of glory that was Kal Daniels, who played the equivalent of just four full-time seasons before succumbing to injuries. Replacement level can also be extended to assess the relative worth of athletes to GMs. And contrary to Mr Neyer’s and Mr Rosenthal’s assertions, this approach would probably indicate that Mr Friedman, whose salary has not yet been announced, is likely to be over- rather than underpaid.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, it really did take a bold and original mind like Mr James’s to challenge baseball’s shibboleths. And in the 1990s a handful of pioneering GMs like Gene Michael and Mr Beane’s mentor Sandy Alderson deployed early quantitative discoveries with great success. In those days, elite GMs certainly did deserve similar compensation to the players they acquired.

But the publication of “Moneyball” in 2003 brought modern analytic techniques to the mainstream and let the cat out of the bag. Over the past decade, a whole generation of fans has grown up reading the sabermetric gospel. During the mid-2000s a host of snarky, nerdier-than-thou websites sprouted up to mock the flat-earthers who decried the new metrics from newspaper sports columns, broadcast booths and GM’s offices. Today, Fox Sports offers entirely statistics-friendly broadcast teams, and of current GMs only Rubén Amaro Jr could fairly be accused of remaining in the analytic Stone Age. As a result, informed decisionmaking in baseball is now essentially a commodity. If given the proper support staff and training, any writer for Baseball Prospectus or Fangraphs with the appropriate organisational and people-management skills could probably do a competent job.

None of this means that renowned GMs are emperors lacking clothes. Far more goes into running an MLB franchise and its myriad minor-league affiliates than the fantasy-baseball-relevant fields of evaluating draft picks, free-agent signings and trades. Moreover, Mr Beane and Mr Friedman have impressively managed to stay a few steps ahead of their rivals: they were among the first GMs to spot market inefficiencies in areas like defensive shifts, pitch framing, platooning and injury prevention. But those ideas were probably not the product of a late-night eureka moment from a lone-wolf genius. They almost certainly originated in the Rays’ and Athletics’ well-staffed analytics departments, and filtered through a layer of sage assistant GMs before reaching Mr Beane’s or Mr Friedman’s desk. Modern MLB organisations are far too big for one executive to determine their fate. The true contribution of a great GM today is to set up a system capable of producing such insights, and then to have the courage to follow through when it yields unorthodox recommendations.

Mr Morris’s work showing that the Athletics have won 180 more regular-season games under Mr Beane than the club’s payroll would indicate is sound. However, to borrow Mr James’s vivid analogy of “the baseball player as an iceberg”—meaning that the vast majority of their production falls below the “water line” of replacement level and thus has no economic value—the credit for those extra victories does not belong to Mr Beane alone. Most of the principles that he deployed to attain that success had already been in the public domain for years. The only reason the Athletics overperformed is because other teams waited an inexcusably long time before incorporating them.

Moreover, many of the assistants Mr Beane trained became capable of running a team in a similar style after a few years under his tutelage. Paul DePodesta, the basis for Jonah Hill’s character in “Moneyball”, was hired by the Dodgers as GM in 2004. He lasted just two years in the post, but his big free agent signings all look wise in hindsight. More recently, Mr Beane has entrusted much of the Athletics’ heavy lifting to Farhan Zaidi, his MIT-educated deputy with a PhD in economics. Until these “replacement-level” disciples are given an extended opportunity to prove themselves as GMs, there is no way to know whether they can actually match Mr Beane’s or Mr Friedman’s remarkable performances. But they could certainly offer a club enlightened stewardship, equal or superior to all but a handful of GMs. And they would probably be available for a fraction of what the Dodgers are expected to pay Mr Friedman—possibly less than $1m a year, or 30% of the average MLB player’s salary.

Hiring the talented Mr Friedman is hardly the worst or most wasteful decision in recent Dodgers history. The gap between what he is paid and what he will contribute pales in comparison with what the club is squandering on Andre Ethier or Brandon League. And Mr Friedman’s sterling reputation may help Los Angeles to attract elite researchers and scouts, who are the real sources of competitive advantage, from other clubs.

But far from the $100m a year or so that Mr Morris suggests that Mr Beane deserves, no member of a front office is worth as much as even a half-decent MLB player. The reason GMs make less money than players do isn’t because owners are blind to the contributions of an elite executive. It’s because there are far more people capable of running an MLB team at a high level than there are people capable of playing for one, and less scarcity leads to less value. The only front-office decision that really matters is the owner’s choice to embrace modern management techniques. Once a club chooses to take the plunge into the 21st century, there will be no shortage of brainiacs ready, willing and able to implement that strategy.