This just didn't wow me like I thought it would. I guess I just like the play on the field better than the behind-the-scenes action.

I grew up going to my brothers' little league games, although I was usually running around with my friends and getting treats at the concession stand. So, I have fond memories of baseball being a family affair. That being said, I'm not a big baseball buff..I'm more of a college football buff - kind of a fanatic if I'm being honest. However, I really enjoyed this book.

Being a math girl, I loved all the talk about stats and especially the chapter about Bill James and his mathematical equations using players' statistics. I loved how Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta ran with it and put together teams...everything logical and methodical, and defying all conventional baseball wisdom. I found it shocking that the traditional baseball scout when Billy Beane was trying to figure out how to get the most bang for his buck with the Oakland As was more concerned with how a player looked physically than how his stats stacked up. For example, they would snap judge a player as being "too fat", "too skinny", "too slow", having "the good face" or a "great baseball body". If they were judged, for example, as not having "the good face", then they would be passed over. Seems very short-sighted and illogical in my opinion.

As much as I was fascinated by the chapters about the draft and the careful examination of stats with accompanying calculations, I loved the chapters that followed about individual players and their time with the team. Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford were inspirational. Humble great guys. The juxtaposition between the mental game and the physical game was interesting as well. Sometimes sad to read especially in Billy Beane's and Chad Bradford's cases.

Another great story to read was the game in which Jason Giambi leaves the As to go to the Yankees. Billy and Paul scramble to get a replacement and end up with Jason's younger brother Jeremy. Fun to read about the first time Jason comes back to play the As as a Yankee and against his own brother.

To sum it up, I learned a lot and enjoyed the journey.

Billy Beane raises his right hand up- “There are rich teams, there are poor teams, there is 50 feet of crap and then there is US.” reaches the table level.

Thirty pages into book I knew this book is going to be completely different from movie version only time to decide if it’s engaging or uncompelling. So I thought I would find a way to supply my patience fuel for another thirty pages or so, then I shall confidently decide on quitting or no because after all, this was not the story I fell in love with after watching the movie.

Few parts are soothingly inspiring, otherwise I daresay I struggled with those first 50 odd pages, which move back and forth between Billy Bean’s childhood & his disastrous Baseball career, in short, time what he did with before joining as general manager of Oakland A’s, which movie version never cared to mention. I’m not complaining either. Adding to this, somewhere in the midway, author takes a great leap into the life & writing career of revolutionary Bill James, only to fill pages about baseball statistics (on base percentage, slugging percentage), saber metrics etc., even before we get to main story. But, having said that, it’s not completely irrelevant either, only less of a joy ride.

Next 150pages is where book’s real intentions lie at. Sometimes, I bet you can sense author’s brutal honesty in depiction and his gutsy approach in narration. Having given an insight into Billy’s & his assistant Paul’s back stories in first 50 pages he sincerely tries to find answers in the rest, to a very sincere question which has been puzzling whole of the baseball community for years How in the world one of the poorest teams in Baseball, Oakland A’s, win so many games?, but beauty of the book is he doesn't try to answer this in pure baseball lingo but with human emotion, connecting all the dots between Billy Beane, Paul, scouts, managers, players and everyone else involved in this ball game, very interestingly.

As for writing I agree it’s sometimes overwhelming with author trying to fill pages and pages with statistics’ jargon only to prove how important it is to understand the orthodox methods and again to prove them wrong. And sometimes, it also feels like, in order to establish a small relation between a random player and Billy author starts off into a way too long back say from player’s childhood days, his influences, or his playing style etc., which seems out of the track a bit. May be a regular baseball fan finds it interesting/exciting. besides that rest of all is in perfect place and surprisingly, there's nothing much to complain about too.

As for differences from movie version, movie focuses only on these two stubborn guys Billy Beane and his assistant Paul who risked everything to enjoy their experimentation to reinvent a whole new system by questioning the existing one, and carve out a perfect team out of $40 million which is just one third of what rich teams spend on an average wherein book, it also throws light on players’ necessary transformation some big names roll here, psychology of his colleagues & players involved in or against Oakland A’s winnings and many more off the record categorized incidents. One thing I liked about book in particular was Oakland A’s winning or their rewriting history was not as dramatic as they made me believe in the movie.

Finally, if you are a sports fanatic, or a serious baseball follower or someone who has an appetite for underdog stories (like me) this is a perfect book for you. I installed the game in my phone since I spent too much time playing baseball in my TV video game as a kid. Other than this I have no other premium knowledge on baseball or whatsoever, but I still enjoyed rather inspired by this book.

Easily 4/5

Smart people who think outside the box are so much fun to read about.

I read this book really fast, and it was enjoyable to read the whole way through. I've never read a Michael Lewis book before, but I might consider reading more now. He has a simple, clean style that is really efficient at getting his story across, and he has an instinct for the best way to use his material. And he has some great underlying material here.

As he notes in the Afterword (which is really great, so if you're going to read this book, make sure you track down a newer copy that has it included), he didn't set out to write a book about the Oakland A's with GM Billy Beane at its center, that's just where the research took him. That's where the answer to his initial question was centered, which was all about how the monetary inequalities between baseball teams affected economic efficiency. How could a team like the Oakland A's, with a budget of only approximately $10M to spend on players salaries, hope to compete against say, the New York Yankees, who were shelling out closer to $130M? And yet they were!

What follows is a book that can basically be summed up, as the author puts it, "when reason collides with baseball". It boggles my mind how stubborn and shortsighted humans can be. This book only reinforces my view that people who are capable of adaptation and change, of admitting they are wrong instead of blindly adhering to something just because "that's the way it's always been", are extremely valuable in every aspect of life, not just running baseball teams.

Highly recommend this one.

[4.5 stars]

Read Harder Challenge: A business book.

Almost makes me want to watch baseball again.

“[I]n professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it. When I first stumbled into the Oakland front office, they were coming off a season in which they had spent $34 million and won an astonishing 102 games; the year before that, 2000, they’d spent $26 million and won 91 games, and their division. A leading independent authority on baseball finance, a Manhattan lawyer named Doug Pappas, pointed out a quantifiable distinction between Oakland and the rest of baseball. The least you could spend on a twenty-five man team was $5 million, plus another $2 million more for players on the [injured] list and the remainder of the forty-man roster. The huge role of luck in any baseball game, and the relatively small difference in ability between most major leaguers and the rookies who might work for the minimum wage, meant that the fewest games a minimum-wage baseball team would win during a 162-game season is something like 49. The Pappas measure of financial efficiency was: how many dollars over the minimum $7 million does each team pay for each win over its forty-ninth? How many marginal dollars does a team spend for each marginal win…?”
-tMichael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game


“It breaks your heart,” A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote of baseball in a piece called The Green Fields of the Mind. “It is designed to break your heart.”

And so it does, year after year.

Baseball is – as often noted – a game predicated on failure. The best hitters only succeed in roughly three out of ten at bats. The best pitchers might take a career-defining loss due to one bad pitch out of a hundred.

A 162-game season presents a tremendous sample size, which should iron out aberrations. Yet year after year, everything comes down to a single bad bounce or mistimed swing or hanging curve or blown call. You can spend an entire summer of lazy days drinking beer and cheering for your 100-win team, only to watch them sputter and die in a five-game series in October.

It hardly seems fair, sometimes.

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball is about a man who tried to crack the code, and unlock the secret of winning an “unfair” game.

***

The man in question is Billy Beane, the general manager of the small market Oakland Athletics. In 2002, the A’s lost three free agents from a tremendously successful team. To replicate that success – on the cheap – Beane had to find and exploit a market inefficiency.

Beane’s approach was to utilize undervalued players with a knack for getting on base. He believed that this metric – more than batting average or home runs – more closely correlated to wins than any other metric.

The baseball world largely doubted Beane’s sanity. Yet the 2002 Athletics ended up winning one more game than their star-heavy 2001 model.

Beane’s revolution didn’t result in a championship, but it helped change the game of baseball, a sport that is historically resistant to transformation. It’s a testament to the impact of Lewis’s book that the title has become shorthand for the entire sabermetric movement that has altered the way players are watched, judged, and paid.

***

Like all of Michael Lewis’s books, Moneyball is addictively readable.

I read this during a time when getting my two-year-old to sleep had become an epic battle of wills. Whenever I tried to leave the room, she’d hop up in her crib and unleash a sound akin to the war cry of the orcs on the Pelennor Fields. Even when she nodded off, she’d randomly wake up screaming as though her Daniel Tiger doll had caught fire. So, I’d sit with her and read with a headlamp, until unconsciousness arrived.

Moneyball proved to be perfect for this task. It is fast paced, perceptive, and filled with memorable character sketches. Lewis has an uncanny knack for making his readers feel smart. He can take complex subjects and boil them down with such ease that you start to feel like you can learn anything. Indeed, one of the knocks against Lewis is that he’s an over-simplifier, and there’s some truth to that. But that’s better than an over-confuser.

***

Simplifier or not, Lewis is a gifted storyteller. He’s good at finding the idiosyncratic characters that can shoulder a story. Beane – a former top-prospect who flamed out – proves to be a good choice. It is easy to see how his failures as a player made him eager to find a better rubric for evaluating talent. In Lewis’s hands, Beane is a passionate convert with a bucketful of neuroses, such as an inability to watch the A’s play live.

***

Moneyball is partly Beane’s biography. But he didn’t create the sabermetric movement. In this area, he stood on the shoulders of giants math nerds. The godfather of advanced statistics is Bill James, founder of the self-published statistical compilation Baseball Abstract. Lewis rightfully devotes an entire chapter to James and his acolytes, many of whom were hired by various Major League teams. They devised a new model; Beane implemented it.

***

Moneyball was originally published in 2003, and has since been made into a motion picture. It’s interesting to read it now, in light of all that has transpired. When the book first came out, it angered a lot of people in Major League Baseball. There are, it seems, a lot of “old school” guys who didn’t like the way Beane operated. Famed manager Dusty Baker, for example, once complained about walks because they “clog up the bases.”

This kind of wrongheaded institutionalized dogma makes it difficult for fresh views to gain traction. The popularity of Moneyball helped bring the stat geeks into the mainstream. Today, advanced statistics are the norm, and even casual baseball articles make reference to wins above replacement (WAR), weighted on-base average (wOBA), and fielding-independent pitching (FIP). Technological innovations have taken this even further since 2003, gauging exit velocities, launch angles, barrel rates, and route efficiencies for outfielders.

Everything now has a number attached to it.

***

Beane’s Athetics weren’t the only team using advanced stats. Beane just staked a lot more on it. He also had a great promoter in Michael Lewis. Looking back, though, some of Beane’s tactics were pretty rudimentary.

One of Moneyball’s centerpieces, for instance, is Scott Hatteberg’s transition from catcher to first base. Hatteberg was an on-base machine, so Beane put him on first without any experience. Today, with advanced defensive metrics, such a move would be even more suspect than it was at the time. Though Hatteberg fielded just fine, Beane’s deprecation of defense now seems rather shortsighted for a value-oriented GM. Likewise, his bullpen evaluations make him look like a dinosaur in the age of ace middle relievers and closers.

Many of the players mentioned in the book as Beane favorites never quite panned out, including catcher Jeremy Brown, who plays a large role. This isn’t to say that Beane was wrong in the premises, only that the game of baseball will always remain unfair.

***

The term “moneyball” has outrun its original meaning. Teams like the Red Sox and Cubs and Dodgers are known for using sabermetrics and also happen to have all the money in the world.

This has required small market teams to improvise. When I read this, the Kansas City Royals had just come off a two-year stretch in which they twice went to the World Series, winning once. Their manager, Ned Yost, was disparaged mightily for going with his gut, and believing in the hot-hand fallacy. Yet he also valued defense, refused to bunt or steal, and pioneered the six-inning game by stocking his bullpen with flamethrowers.

Innovation, it seems, comes in many forms.

***

Beane and the A’s have not won a World Series since the publication of Moneyball. Over the last couple years, they’ve gone so far downhill they’re going to end up in Las Vegas. As Beane himself admits, his tactics are great for the regular season, but can’t help in the crapshoot of the playoffs. That is the nature of baseball and life. You think you have all the time in the world to get things done, and then suddenly you don’t.

“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again,” A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote. “When you need it most, it stops.”

Having the misfortune of being a Kansas City Royals fan, I thought I’d had any interest in baseball beaten out of me by season after season of humiliation. Plus, the endless debate about the unfairness of large market vs. small market baseball had made my eyes glaze over years ago so I didn’t pay much attention to the Moneyball story until the movie came out last year and caught my interest enough to finally check this out.

Despite being a small market team and outspent by tens of millions of dollars by clubs like the Yankees, the Oakland A’s managed to be extremely competitive from 1999 through 2006. They did this when their general manager Billy Beane embraced a new type of baseball statistics called sabermetrics that had been championed by a stat head from Kansas named Bill James.

James had pored over box scores and started seriously questioning the traditional ways of measuring the performance of players with his initially self-published digests that eventually became must reads for hardcore baseball nerdlingers. As the digital age made mountains of baseball stats available on-line, fans with a mathematical frame of mind (And there are a lot of them.) started coming up with ways of looking at the data that called the old ways of evaluating players into question.

Beane had plenty of reason to distrust the old way of scouting since he had once been identified as a can’t-miss prospect who ended up quitting as a player to take a job in the front office after his career flamed out. By coming up with new ways to grade performance and ignoring things that other teams deemed flaws like being overweight or having a peculiar throwing motion, the A’s went after low dollar high-impact players who made them one of the winningest teams with the lowest payroll in baseball.

The sport has always had a weird intersection of nerd and jock, and this story illustrates that dynamic very well as Beane and his staff decided to trust the numbers rather than conventional wisdom. The conflict between the two worlds is a fascinating story, and the brash Beane makes a great focal point.

It’s a great book not just for sports fans, but for anyone who likes stories about people trying to shake up an established way of doing things. And if you’re a math geek or have a thing for hard nosed business deals, there’s a lot to like here. By framing the story in terms of the people involved, Lewis keeps it relatable in human terms and not just a dry recitation of on base percentages.

The movie is also extremely well done and entertaining (Hence the Oscar nomination for Best Picture.),but the Aaron Sorkin screenplay vastly simplifies the story and Hollywoodizes it to an extreme degree. Still, it’s a great flick for anyone who has a soft spot for stories about underdogs.

Like I've already stated before, I absolutely love Lewis's work. I have a few more of his warming up in the bullpen. Taking what could easily be a dry subject and telling the tales about the people behind it is what Lewis does best. I'm going to watch the Moneyball movie tonight and attending an Everett Aquasox game (the second one this year!) tomorrow. I'll be watching.

This is a book that's not quite what it seems, or not wholly, anyway. It's mostly about Billy Beane, manager of the Oakland A's, and his unique method of recruiting players. Where most baseball teams rely on scouts and "wisdom" like "This guy is good looking," Beane uses some hard data by way of stats, and looks at them in a way most other baseball professionals can't seem to bring themselves to.

While it's an interesting look inside baseball, that's not all it's about. What I really found fascinating was that it was a revolution in knowledge. It's a story about a few people daring to buck the system by saying, "Hey, this doesn't make sense," and then prove themselves right. I love the idea of someone taking a cold hard look at something and realizing that the "traditions" don't have any logical basis.

So, recommended to baseball fans, people interested in statistics, and those who are intrigued by the idea of finding new ways to look at things and keeping an open mind.

Low-key makes me want to become a baseball nut

despite my best efforts, i really, really liked this. she money on my ball until i win an unfair game

Moneyball is an amazing multi-genre book that is changing the way that millions of people think about sports as well as other topics. The statistics used to evaluate baseball players were not an accurate portrayal of player value. When Bill James blew that wide open with his Baseball Abstract, most of baseball didn't notice. Those who did shrugged.

Once Oakland A's manager Billy Beane started winning against all odds by using sabermetrics as the basis for player selection, people finally started paying attention. Even then, it took a long time for baseball to come around.

People tend to think about things and do things the way that they have always been done. It is rare that people reevaluate the fundamental basis of anything and start over. This creates discrepancies between market value (the perceived value) and intrinsic value (the actual value). This is the basis of value investing, which has made Warren Buffett one of the richest people in the world. It is also what allowed Billy Beane's $40 million payroll to compete with $100+ million payrolls in Major League Baseball.

Michael Lewis, in his always brilliant style of writing, shares the story of Billy Beane, his players and staff, and some other personalities like Bill James. He gets into the psychology of baseball as well as the game statistics to show what exactly makes a successful career in the sport. He examines techniques like studying derivatives instead of big events. This book makes the reader better equipped to reexamine which metrics are more important, and how much more important one is than the other.