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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Posters
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Rating:  -
I found this book fascinating. I had read Michael Lewis' earlier book "Liar's Poker", about his dealings on Wall Street. What struck me most was how he brought his free-market capitalism frame of reference to the world of Major League Baseball and found that for a small group avant-garde managers, the same basic rules apply. Buy low, sell high, don't listen to market hype, and never get emotional. This book might be disturbing to people who have a lifetime love of the pure game, but Major League Baseball is also a business and has to be acknowledged as such.
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I love sports. I love business, finance, and statistics. I've never been a baseball fan. This book was very well written to appeal to a very broad audience with a wide variety of backgrounds on the topic. The principle observations are delivered through expert story telling around very compelling central figures.
Without flowery language or paragraph after paragraph of adjectives - Lewis recounts experiences and conversations with such clarity that you can almost see, smell, and hear the scenes unfolding.
I won't look at baseball or the exploitation of market inefficiencies the same after having read this book. I'd recommend this book to anyone with intellectual curiosity.
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So I'm a big fan of fantasy baseball. And for those that are as well, you know that playing the fantasy game changes the way you look at everything. Moneyball has the same effect. It just revolutionizes your outlook on the game of baseball. The "important" stats like RBIs and runs are replaced with really important ones, like OBP and pitches per at bat. No name guys like Scott Hatteberg become cogs that make teams great.
Michael Lewis crafts a book that is engaging on several levels -- to the baseball fan, the economist, and the statistician.
Ever wonder why we give more credit statistically to a guy that bloops a single just out of a poor fielder's reach vs. the guy that smashes a homerun, but is robbed by an amazing leaping catch? This book answers those sorts of questions. And it does so through the amazingly in depth looks at the mind of Billy Beane, the genius that built the A's, renowned for their ability to find talent that other teams miss.
I would highly recommend this book to any fan of baseball on any level. It's a truly great book, and one that will leave you feeling a bit like you stumbled upon a little known secret. You'll suddenly rush and start analyzing the latest pickups of your favorite team. You'll feel compelled to run out and follow the career of guys you'd never heard of before reading the book (and hint...they don't get on SportsCenter that often...). No regrets after reading this, and I promise it will be staying on my shelf for a long time.
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Baseball is a game that nerds can really enjoy, largely because of the availability of abundant and meaningful statistics. Back in the 1970s the basic numbers could be obtained through books that were published every year, but a small group of super-geeks began looking more deeply into the mathematics of the game and developing their own metrics for rating players. These guys were mostly self-taught statisticians and motivated entirely by an obsessive passion for the game. I'm talking about people like Bill James, who a few decades ago was a security guard who began publishing really interesting and well-written analyses of baseball statistics in his famous Bill James Baseball Abstracts.
Of course baseball is also fun to watch, even for those who don't enjoy crunching numbers in their spare time. That's why it's a multibillion dollar business, and that's where the influence of the Jamesians gets really interesting. The thing is that for the sport's first 100 or so years the process of locating and recruiting talented players was based entirely on the gut instinct of the scouts employed by each team. These guys were mostly ex-players who made decisions based on notions that had nothing to do with (and often conflicted completely with) the available evidence. (The fact that the world is run almost entirely by people who think this way makes this book all the more insightful.)
Moneyball highlights the success of General Manager Billy Beane, who was able to run a very successful team for many years on a low budget by adapting the statistical approach. Interestingly, Beane was a player who was highly touted by the old-school scouts who employed the conventional criteria (which apparently amounted to something like imagining how the player would look on a baseball card). Beane's struggled throughout the 1990s to bring baseball into the 20th century, and he has had a substantial impact on the game, although any fan who watches the sport in 2008 will tell you that old habits die hard.
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My 15 yr. old son is currently reading it. He can't put it down and he is not an avid reader. He is a baseball nut who not only follows the sport but plays it in high school and hopefully college in a few years. Everyone who catches a glimpse of him reading Moneyball raves about the book themselves. It's an A+ in this mom's book.
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