The MVP Machine: How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players

by Ben Lindbergh

This process is rooted in the thinking of Aristotle, who called it reasoning by first principles. It was an idea instilled in Boddy as a child by his father, who worked for a time as an electrician for British Petroleum and at NASA’s Glenn Research Center when Boddy was growing up. Entrepreneur Elon Musk is also a proponent. During a TED Talk interview in 2016, Musk explained how his process of innovation begins by boiling “things down to their fundamental truths and reason[ing] up from there.”1 This method, Musk argued, is far superior to reasoning by analogy, “which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations.” When Musk began researching how to build a rocket, he told Wired,2 he put aside conventional methods and approached the problem with a fresh perspective. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles.… What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2 percent of the typical price.” SpaceX was born.