Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game | Michael Lewis

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game | Michael Lewis | Great Writing & Entertaining

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Moneyball: The Art...

	Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis W. W. Norton & Company, 2004 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 382 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

great book explaining what baseball GMs should do

For a former baseball player Billy Beane is a rare bird as a baseball GM. He used real baseball statistics, the kind the sabermetricians use to make great trade and bring a strong team back to Oakland. He had a great advantage over other GMs because he took advantage of their ignorance and tendencies to rely on the somewhat biased eyes of basebll scouts. What Michael Lewis did with this book was to show the world of baseball how Billy Beane did it and now I am sure that other GMs like Brian Cashman at New York and Theo Epstein in Boston are catching on. I don't know how much Steve Phillips put into action when he was the Mets GM. His lack of great success there indicates that he [robably didn't follow it enough. But now as an ESPN commentator he definitely mentions it. This book si so good that the term moneyball now means the strategy that Billy Beane used. So the title of this book became a baseball term! This book is a must for managers, general managers and owners of professional baseball teams. It is also great for the fans and the fantasy baseball enthusiasts.

Along with Mike Schell's books and the ones like "Curve Ball" written by Albert and Bennett this is one of the most thoughtful and scientific books on the game of baseball, how to win at it and how to build a successful team. The other books I mentioned were written by professional statisticians. It is the great success of the statistical science of sports, sabermetrics that we are now witnessing a scientific and statistical approach to baseball and other sports that had been lacking for many years. What Beane proved with regard to money was that a small market team like Oakland without the big money of a Steinbrenner could build a great team through smart trades and drafts based on looking at the right statistics on the players, the statistics that determine value in terms of run production for offense and run prevention for pitchers and defense.

The amazon reviews of this book are almost unanymous in their praise of Lewis' book. Read it and enjoy it. If I haven't convinced you, read some of the other fine reviews here.

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Great Writing & Entertaining

My father-in-law gave me Moneyball for Chirstmas. I took it to White Sox spring training in Tucson, Arizona in March 2008. What a great way to spend a week. Solid baseball, great baseball reading and no snow.

Others have gone into great detail, so I will make my review short. I have a new found respect for the A's, Billy Beane & Paul DePodesta. They have taken baseball to a new level and built some great teams. The White Sox now have Beane favorite Nick Swisher, but in return Beane extracted solid pitching prospects from the Sox organization.

If you love baseball read this book. You won't regret it.

Finally, as I have suspected for a long time, ESPN analyst & baseball hall of famer Joe Morgan is truly nothing but a gas bag. Good player, but a worthless analyst.

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Engaging, Informative and a Great Read

Think you know baseball? Think again. This book follows the 2002 season of the Oakland A's, the team with the second lowest payroll in baseball, but one which managed to win more games than any other team in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Moneyball is a fascinating study in how baseball's Old Order, its Established Way of Doing Things, clashed with a new, more rational, data-driven method of making decisions. It's full of the colorful personalities and gripping roller coaster you'll find in any great baseball book. But Moneyball takes you deeper. It takes you "into the numbers" to show how advanced statistics, game theory, and the laws of probability are harnessed by really smart people to make better baseball decisions.

You don't have to be a long-suffering small market fan (like me) to enjoy this book. It's a universal story of how change happens in a change-resistant institution. A great read not only for baseball fans, but for those who are interested in the dynamics of change in many different kinds of organizations.

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Never judge a book by its subject

First, Moneyball was not written by Billy Beane, as many people who have not yet read it (myself included) often describe it in a convenient but incorrect form of shorthand.

Second, Moneyball isn't about Billy Beane, although he is a prominent character who certainly deserves a full-length biography or could write his own fascinating memoir.

Third, Moneyball isn't about Bill James and sabremetrics, although the new genre of statistics-based baseball writing and thinking created single-handedly (almost; Lewis cites a few other sources) in the last 30 years is covered here.

Moneyball is about "The art of winning an unfair game", as its subtitle (not on the cover of this paperback edition, interestingly enough) succinctly describes it. It is about a small-payroll baseball team that wants to compete, and about how failed major-leaguer Billy Beane was perfectly-placed and given free rein by the Oakland A's owner to figure out a better way to evaluate and valuate baseball players both current and prospective.

This is where James' statistics came into play, as Beane and his Harvard educated assistant Paul Depodesta developed and then applied this rational approach to player selection, overcoming years of baseball "intuition" and scouting, to turn the Oakland As into the most efficient winning organization in MLB over the last seven years. For a 4 year period the A's won more games than any other team except the Yankees, at a "cost per win" typically a quarter to a third of the irrational-spending Yankees.

Moneyball is justly famous (and infamous) inside the social club that is MLB. Lewis theorizes that this reaction by the social club (as well as those of a number of players) is driven by a fear of public humiliation. If members of the Club stick together, and continue to manage the organization by the "book", they can't be publicly blamed and humiliated for failure; they just move to a new branch of the Club and keep on repeating the failures of the past.

Despite resistance from within the club, the market for rational thinking is growing. The Toronto Blue jays were the second team to understand and want to apply the tactics, hiring away the A's third in line (when Beane and Depodesta wouldn't leave Oakland) to begin winning efficiently (it takes one year to get cheap, it takes two years to get better, according to this GM, and the trend line of Toronto's recent seasons confirms this. Look for Toronto to compete for a playoff spot in the AL east in 2008). The grandchild of the experiment is the Boston Red Sox, who had a verbal agreement from Beane to take their GM job but were left to hire Theo Epstein (a young Ivy-Leaguer with no baseball background) instead when Beane backed out of the contract that would have increased his salary many times over.

And in an action that inspires hope for the future, the Pittsburgh Pirates new GM just made a move described by Beane as "Selling the Closer", based on the theory that the save is an overvalued statistics that does not accurately predict the success of a relief pitcher. In this model, a team either sells its closer for an inflated price, or lets the closer go as a free agent, garnering two compensatory draft picks. With the money or picks, the team selects a young undervalued pitcher based on statistics that do predict success (keeping runners off base and limiting pitches per at-bat) to turn into the next "Sell the Closer" candidate, PLUS an other prospect who together add more value to the team (statistically-significant contributions to winning baseball games) than the closer just sold. Lets hope the Pirates trade was made with rational forethought and not dumb luck.

In fact, one side benefit of the Moneyball theory is that it provides rational components for evaluating the contributions of pitchers and hitters (not so much fielding, as Lewis explains) to winning baseball games in such a way that their relative worth can be compared and evaluated against each other. No wonder the Club is so upset; this is light years ahead of the old "book".

While baseball is the nominal subject of this book, it really isn't a "baseball" book. It is more a book about applied rational thinking and statistics, and has been justly and highly praised by critics, as by this one, who rates Moneyball as a classic (just like Les Miserables which he just read and reviewed). Never judge a book by its subject.

Les Miserables (Penguin Classics)

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Satisfying baseball read with a touch of transcendence

Mr. Lewis observes that the persistence of Sacred Cows and inaccurate thinking in a market as lucrative as MLB has sobering implications. The reader is encouraged to reflect on the likely discrepancy between his own perceived and actual value in the workplace.
Billy Beane's story of redemption adds to the evidence that Baseball is indeed the manliest and most heartbreaking of games. A good read, especially for a fan.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, page 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

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