There’s a great scene in both the book and movie Moneyball where the Jonah Hill character explains how to think about data in terms of baseball. Hill’s character, Peter Brand, explains:

“Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.”

It sounds weird to say to all the development executives reading this, but you aren’t actually paying to make TV shows either. You’re paying for future hours of viewing. Those hours then get “monetized”— to use probably the lamest business jargon there is after “disruption” and “synergy” — either by subscriptions or advertising.

One of the sneaky big streaming stories in America in June was that Netflix just lost its “Jason Giambi” (the player central to the plot in Moneyball who left the Oakland A’s for the New York Yankees).

The show?