Moneyball

I found this book extremely interesting, especially since I didn't read it until eight years after it came out, meaning I knew how all the draft picks and other players mentioned in the book panned out (a topic on which a good deal has now been written). Only my rule of always reading the book before seeing the movie prompted me pick it up now, a decision I don't regret.

The book had some interesting tidbits I wasn't aware of, such as where the term sabremetrics came from ("The name derives from SABR, the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research") and the origin story for Rotisserie Baseball ("1980 a group of friends, led by Sports Illustrated writer Dan Okrent, met at La Rotisserie Française, a restaurant in Manhattan, and created what became known, to the confusion of a nation, as Rotisserie Baseball"). It also had some great quotes on the mindset of Billy Beane ("He'd flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul's laptop") and the team he managed ("The Oakland A's are baseball's answer to the Island of Misfit Toys").

The book probably could have been a bit shorter -- I could have done with a bit less on Beane's backstory as a failed player and a lot less of Chad Bradford's life story -- but overall Moneyball was a great read that should be mandatory for any serious baseball fan.

“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”

n  n

This book came out in 2003, and the movie version came out in 2011; yet, it is amazing to me that despite the success shown by the Oakland As under the guidance of Billy Beane, baseball, for the most part, is still focusing on the wrong things. Just recently the manager of the New York Mets, Terry Collins, who commands one of the best teams in the world, said in an interview after the World Series:

“I’m not sure how much an old-school guy can add to the game today,’’ Collins told USA Today. “It’s become a young man’s game, especially with all of the technology stuff you’ve got to be involved in. I’m not very good at it. I don’t enjoy it like other people do. I’m not going to sit there today and look at all of these (expletive) numbers and try to predict this guy is going to be a great player. OPS this. OPS that. GPS. LCSs. DSDs. You know who has good numbers? Good (expletive) players.”

n  n
Terry Collins said: “Shit Happens” at a press conference. Billy Beane must have rolled his eyes.

The MLB network show Hot Stove was incensed that Collins would make such a statement in this day and age, especially since they could track several “gut” decisions he made during the World Series that probably cost them a chance to win it. The most glaring error was when he decided to pull the pitcher, Matt Harvey, in the 9th inning of game five only to change his mind and send him back out there after Harvey complained. Collins looked into the player’s eyes and saw what he wanted to see. It was the third time through the order. Harvey had pitched brilliantly, but statistically, that bad word that Collins doesn’t like. When you look at the Royals, they get to pitchers late. The Royals got to Harvey and knocked him out of the game, which left a mess for Jeurys Familia to come into the game to try and save.

Royals Win!
n  n
Eric Hosmer going off the Billy Beane script for success, but man, was it dramatic. I about had a heartattack.

The Royals deviate from Billy Beane ball at many junctures. One being the most dramatic play of the series when Eric Hosmer steals home. Beane does not believe in stealing bases, too risky, and if you steal a base on a Billy Beane team, you better make sure you are safe. The Royals also occasionally bunt to move a runner, which doesn’t fit the Beane philosophy. He believes in managing outs and never giving up an out to advance a runner. The Royals have speedy wheels and frequently turn bunts into base hits, which would probably keep them from finding themselves subjugated to a Billy Beane lecture. You can go off script, but just be right.

The Royals are a homegrown team. Most of the players have come from the farm club system, although they are a bit too athletic and good looking for a Billy Beane ball club. One of the things that Beane talks about is getting away from players who could sell jeans. He should know; he was one of those players that looked like a Greek God in a uniform. He was drafted in 1980 along with another phenom that even those people who don’t follow baseball probably recognize his name...Darryl Strawberry. Beane was an interesting enough prospect that, for a while, the Mets were even considering taking him in the draft first instead of Strawberry. Both were amazing specimens of what we want athletes to look like. The Mets ended up taking Beane, too, but with the 23rd pick. Beane had all the physical gifts to be successful, but sports is not just about the body; it is about the mind. Billy had a lot of expectations for himself, and those expectations became insecurities that eventually evolved into a gifted player being unable to play the game.

n  n
Billy Beane on the verge of a stardom that somehow eluded him. He is exactly the player who Billy now tries to avoid.

He asked for a job in the As front office, and that began an odyssey in search of those players who were ”ballplayers”, not pretty head cases, not players that hit home runs and created RBIs, but players that could control the strike zone. As he tore apart the As organization, he got rid of the scouts who were still insisting on signing Apolloesque ballplayers and sold off overpriced talent. Ownership wasn’t giving him much money to work with anyway, so instead of buying expensive talent, he had to sell expensive talent and replace it with a motley group of players whom no one else wanted, but who had the one important element he wanted most, OPS (on base plus slugging), i.e. these guys knew how to get on base.

These players had a menagerie of interesting things wrong with them that had other clubs looking to get rid of them, which made them perfect for Billy Beane. One pitcher had club feet. They were below average fielders. They were overweight. They threw sidearm pitches. They were older players on their way out. They were players too green for any other team to consider playing them.

You can’t win with players like this!

Well, maybe you can. Exhibit A: The standings at the end of the season in the American League West in 2002.

Wins Losses Games Behind Payroll
Oakland 103 59 ---- $41,942,665
Anaheim 99 63 4 $62,757,041
Seattle 93 69 10 $86,084,710
Texas 72 90 31 $106,915,180

Now the interesting thing is notice the payroll compared to the wins. The more money a team spent the fewer games they won. If I had been the Texas Rangers owner, I’d be looking at these results and think to myself, What am I paying for?

Baseball is in love with RBIs and Home Runs. They think those are the things about baseball that put butts in seats. As the Royals made their way through the playoffs in the American league in 2015, they encountered two teams that depended on the home run to win ball games. The Royals hit 95 home runs in 2014, which placed them dead last at 30th among major league baseball teams. In 2015, they improved to 139 home runs, but were still 24th in the league. Their opponent in the playoffs in 2015, the Toronto Blue Jays, were 1st in all of major league baseball with 232 home runs. Their other opponent, the Houston Astros, hit 230 home runs and were second in the league for home runs.

n  n
Jose Bautista hit several dramatic home runs in the playoffs, including the famous bat flip home run, but despite those fence clearing bombs, they were unable to advance in the playoffs.

Jacking up home runs might equal playoffs, but it doesn’t seem to equal winning world championships.

Even the Mets hit 177 home runs for 9th in the league. They did win the pennant, but still fell short of winning a world championship. To my eye, they are a more complete offensive ballclub than Houston or Toronto and will be contenders again this year, but not because they hit a lot of home runs.

So why is major league baseball so reluctant to embrace the philosophy of Moneyball? ”Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions.” For instance, preferring high school players in the draft over college players, even though statistically college players do better. College athletes have played against stiffer competition. They have honed their skills. They have more reliable stats to give a general manager a better clue to how they will perform at the next level.

I admire the Mets. They are a terrific team. I still have a lot of nostalgia for Gary Carter and the Miracle Mets of 1986, and if the Royals hadn’t been playing against them last year, I would have been rooting for them in the World Series. I have to say that Terry Collins’ comments about basically comparing statistics to voodoo was disappointing to me. I don’t mean to pick on Collins, but his comments came after he made several decisions in the face of a pile of data to the contrary that probably cost his team at least a better chance to win the World Series. He is not alone. Baseball is still filled with owners, GMs, and managers who believe that home runs and RBIs are the most important statistics and the best way to win championships.

The Royals, after all, are an anomaly, right?

It was the same things teams were saying about the As in the early 2000s.

I think of all those ballplayers who really know how to play the game, who are stuck in the minor leagues because they hit too many singles or walked too many times, and didn’t launch enough missiles over the back fence.

I loved this book because I’m a fan of baseball, but the book had a much bigger impact on me. I started thinking about and applying Billy Beane principles to my own business. We are a company mired in traditions and traditional thinking and long overdue for an overhaul in philosophy to meet new challenges. Like all companies, we need to become more efficient, more lean, more targeted to what wins ball games rather than what creates a big splash. I’m buying copies of this book for the rest of the management staff, and we are going to talk about singles and doubles and managing our outs. Maybe we, too, can get our Royal on.

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What a terrific book! I expected the book to more or less correspond to the movie (which I also enjoyed), but there's a lot of depth to the story that really wasn't covered in the movie version (understandably).

I particularly enjoyed the in-depth stories of the various players that the Oakland A's recruited that literally no one else wanted. Their backstories were fascinating. They were told they would never make it in baseball for one reason or other, and they probably never would have if it wasn't for the A's relentless pursuit of a way to win within their budgetary constraints.

I am a baseball fan, and I do think it helps to have some knowledge of the game to truly appreciate this book. It probably would be dull for those who don't understand the basics of the game. But Lewis does his usual extraordinary job of making the story widely accessible even though it talks about business and mathematics.

One of my favorite (but also most disheartening) parts of the book was the afterward. Apparently, after Moneyball was published, the baseball insiders tore Billy Beane to pieces, accusing him of all sorts of things. He went against baseball orthodoxy, and then had the gall to allow the story of his team's achievements to be published in a book. The afterward basically rips apart the vultures. Good for Michael Lewis for defending Beane, his book, and those who cooperated with bringing us this fascinating story. He certainly has the last laugh because literally every baseball team uses analytics today and those insiders who jeered Beane should be embarrassed and ashamed.

Definitely a don't miss read for baseball fans. In fact, this book makes me wonder what other great baseball writing I may be missing.

Any audio book narrated by Scott Brick is worth the time to hear. Interesting to re-read this now given how the concepts that were cutting edge at the time are now used by all major league teams no matter the size of the payroll. Gave it four stars then, and still do now.

I have only recently started seriously watching baseball and I was confused as to why this book kept topping the recommendations lists; as far as I could tell, it was about finances in baseball, and that sounded boring. This is, in fact, the least boring baseball book I have ever read. Surprise!

What this book is actually about is why and how baseball statistics matter, and I swear it will make you care about sabermetrics by the end of it. The conventional wisdom is that teams with more money to spend will beat teams with less money, because the teams with more money can simply snap up all the best players because they can afford to give them the most money. Moneyball is the story of the 2002 Oakland A's, who attempted -- and mostly succeeded -- at proving this wrong. The idea is that all the teams with money (say, the Yankees) are focusing on the wrong stats, and there are stats they are not paying attention to (mostly On-Base Percentage) that will lead to good players, whom other teams (say, the A's) can snag cheaply because no one else wants them. And everyone likes a plucky underdog story.

I have to say that this was a great read from the perspective of a relatively new fan, because I haven't spent my entire life just accepting the way things are done in baseball, and I've been sitting here for a month thinking about how weird it is that errors even exist, because it seems deeply weird to record a thing that you think someone should have been able to do on the field but didn't. So it's really gratifying to get to a section of the book that's like, yeah, you know what, errors DON'T make any sense, and I'm like, ha, I knew it! See! I wasn't thinking something dumb after all!

Similarly, I was gratified that there was an entire chapter about the portion of their success that the A's owed to their pitcher Chad Bradford. I say this because I have been watching a whole lot of the Giants this season and I am really, really enjoying watching Tyler Rogers, their submarine pitcher. Sure, he may not have a 100 mph fastball but how much does raw speed matter when no one can hit what he pitches? Surely the point is that no one hits the ball! If anyone hits anything off him at all, it's almost always a ground ball. His ERA is extremely low! This is so amazing to me that it seems like cheating. Why, I have been wondering, doesn't every team have a pitcher like this? Well, it turns out the A's thought of this in 2002 and got Chad Bradford, the submarine pitcher whom apparently no one else believed in because he didn't have a 100 mph fastball either. I still wasn't thinking something dumb!

Anyway, yeah, so this book definitely made a lot of sense to me, because it seems like sometimes the answer to "why do they always do [x] in baseball?" is "they don't actually have to do it that way, because the A's did something else and it worked!" and that was, you know, delightful.

The style of this book is extremely well-written; it's probably the most readable of all the baseball books I have tackled so far. The explanations of baseball statistics are easy to follow, the author has a gift for drawing out characters even in this work of non-fiction, and there are so many lines that are actually funny. If you like baseball at all, you will enjoy reading this. You might even like it if you don't like baseball!

Also, it was really weird reading this book last week while watching the A's beat the stuffing out of the Yankees.

Engrossing enough that I read the whole thing in one go while absolutely hanging yesterday morning. It could've been impossible to make baseball stats interesting but the book mostly focuses on the blokes using them, who have far more interesting stories. From a content standpoint the book takes the complete wrong conclusion from the information it lays out, and stats have ruined all sports since this originally came out, but that's not actually the writer's fault. I'll write about it more fully some other time. I really liked the afterword where bro, presumably a couple years after the initial publication, just roasts everyone in the baseball community that disagrees with him. Go off, sis

3.5 stars. Since I don't know baseball and this book is filled with baseball jargon, I could not enjoy more. For a baseball fan, this book will be an absolute treat.

I was intrigued by the idea of statistics applied to player's performance scores in evaluating the hire worthiness of the player.

I know next to nothing about baseball, and less than that about statistics, but this book about applying new statistical thinking in baseball to the selection of a winning team (the Oakland A's) was absolutely riveting reading for me. Michael Lewis is just that good.