“Moneyball” was a 2011 movie based on a 2003 book about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and their general manager, Billy Beane.  In 2002, the Oakland Athletics was one of the most cash-strapped of all major league baseball teams.  With a very small budget for player salaries, the team was losing all their best players to other teams that could pay them much higher wages.

Realizing that he had to find a new way to compete with those rich teams, Billy reached out to Paul DePodesta, a former Cleveland Indians employee with an economics degree from Harvard.  Together, they pored over decades of data on individual players to find the best recruiting strategy.  They concluded that many players were actually overlooked or undervalued by baseball scouts.

Despite objections from recruiting agents, Billy and Paul put together a championship team of players rejected by other teams for various reasons: age, appearance, personality...  As it turned out, that was not only an affordable solution but a smart move.  The Oakland Athletics team went on to win 20 consecutive games!

Dear Agathians:

Billy and Paul were able to turn their challenge into opportunity, their failure into success, because they were willing to look “under the radar.”  While other people were looking elsewhere for something else, these two men recognized that the players they needed to win might be right around the corner, like treasures hidden in plain sight.  This is a good lesson for us to learn, as we navigate through the stormy waters of our time.

After the pandemic shut down church activities, many people turned to the internet for their daily spiritual bread.  But the internet is a double-edged sword.  There are many wonderful resources out there, but there are also plenty of fake, malicious, and even dangerous, information.  How easy it is for unsuspecting parishioners to be led astray!

 In their spiritual hunger, some gullible parishioners have been viewing and sharing all sorts of material across all kinds of social platform.  They even sent them to me and our parish’s Facebook account.  Some of these contents are really questionable, especially when they criticize or contradict each other and the Church.  Recently, I saw a video of a priest talking about how to detect a fake priest.  Now, I wonder whether that man was a fake priest himself.

It might not be a bad idea to do what Billy and Paul did with the Oakland Athletics.  Instead of searching all over the internet, if we look closely enough, we might find hidden treasures right where we are, beginning with this bulletin.

— Fr. Vincentius Do, Pastor