If you talk to David Zaslav, as I do on occasion, there’s a good chance he’ll eventually bring up the penultimate scene in Moneyball, the film adaptation of my friend Michael Lewis’s classic book, where Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) spends time at Fenway Park with my other friend John Henry (played by Arliss Howard), the Red Sox’s then-new principal owner. In the scene, Henry wants to hire Beane as the Red Sox’s general manager because he believes his radical reliance on data-based decision-making, rather than baseball’s old dogmas and gut instincts, are what his team needs to deliver a championship to Boston for the first time since 1918, and to finally purge the Curse of the Bambino. And yet, the fictional Henry concedes that he knows it won’t be easy: Beane’s philosophy would upend baseball traditions and people’s livelihoods. “It’s threatening their jobs,” Henry says. “It’s threatening the way that they do things…”