This is a good book, but not as good as I thought it was going to be. Sometimes I find technical writing to be a bit repetitive and this definitely leans more toward technical non-fiction than biography (I was hoping for more of a human interest story here)—because even though Billy Beane takes up a large chunk of the story, it isn’t really a story about Billy Bean per se.

Moneyball was published in 2003, only a year after John Henry bought the Boston Red Sox. Before that time, very few people in baseball had ever heard the term sabermetrics, never mind tried to implement it into a strategy for drafting and trading players—very few people, that is, besides Billy Beane. What’s fascinating about Beane is how much he had to struggle against the tide in order to apply the statistical approach of sabermetrics to his managing of the Oakland Athletics. Of course, given the payroll of the A’s in the early 2000s one might argue that he had no choice. But still, he was the first general manager in baseball to attempt it, so his story is unique.

But why the struggle? Any baseball fan could tell you how important it is to get on base, that patience at the plate is in fact doubly rewarding as it wears down opposing pitching and draws walks. And walks are huge! They extend an inning by avoiding an out, and they put a man on base which statistically leads to a greater probability of runs scored. The reverse is also true: base stealing attempts and sacrifice bunts are no-no’s in the world of sabermetrics precisely because they have the effect of potentially shortening an inning, leading to a lower probability of runs scored. It is simply not worth the calculated risk to try to advance a base runner. So why were these concepts so difficult for baseball operations managers (besides Beane) to understand? This is essentially what the author investigates here, and the easy answer lies somewhere in the fact that baseball managers are curmudgeons who are used to doing things a certain way and don’t want any smart alec college boy with his pocket protector changin’ the way things ‘er done.

Also, Joe Morgan is a buffoon.

I think this is basically old news, but I was still pleased to have my suspicions confirmed. So the story here is definitely interesting, but like I said, the argument in favor of a more objective approach to baseball decision-making is something that I already subscribe to (Yeah, Science!), so the argument itself does become rather repetitive.

Being a baseball fan, though, there are a few things I did enjoy, specifically Billy Beane trying to steal Kevin Youkilis out from under the noses of the Red Sox brass. At first, even though I obviously knew how things would turn out, I was almost rooting for Beane (who, by the way, was John Henry’s initial choice for managing his new organization), but I quickly checked myself and did a Jersey Shore–style fist pump when Theo Epstein refuses to let himself be outsmarted by that West Coast punk!

n  
n  n  
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And now that I’ve read this book, I think I’ll see the movie.

After learning about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s of the early 2000’s, I got even more sad about them leaving Oakland and moving to Vegas. If you want to learn about how advanced statistics started (and how unwilling old baseball curmudgeons were to adapt), this book is for you.

This book is so awesome...so awesome!!! I may be partially biased because I've always been an A's fan, and I've also always been really cheap (a piker, my family affectionately calls me), and this book basically glorifies both of those things. And it doesn't even try to glorify them, it just tells it like it is, which makes both having small amounts of money and being the Oakland A's seem totally rad...dude. I got this from the library but I think I'm going to have to use some of my store credit at my local use bookstore to get a copy, because really, it was that good. I was skeptical at first when everyone said it was so great, and the very beginning didn't really, I don't know, reach out to me in a super compelling way, but somewhere the book completely won me over. Color me awed of what a genius Billy Beane is!

I fucking hate watching sports.
Hate it.
Then how is it that this book, about applying pertinent statistical analyis to creating baseball teams and playing basesball, so captivated me? It's a testament to a) the skill of the author, Michael Lewis, but also b) the unequivocal appeal of the underlying story: how hard it is to change the status quo (and how one can succeed despite that) and the man Lewis profiles, Billy Beane.
A fantastic narrative for fans of spectator sports or folks like me who'd rather clean a toilet bowl with his tongue than watch a ball game.

One of the most overrated books in recent history. The sabermetrics were fine. Billy Beane's ego wasn't, though it did add some entertainment value. How's that 2002 draft working out? 29 other teams were so stupid for not drafting Jeremy Brown. Whatever.

I read Moneyball at a time when I wasn't reading too much besides preschool kids books and reread it for the baseball book club I am a part of on good reads. Michael Lewis follows the story of general manager Billy Bean and his 2002 Oakland As, a low budget baseball team that managed to win their division going away. What is remarkable is that Bean built his team focusing on sabermetrics, not home runs and RBIs. He knew he did not have money to compete with the Yankees of the world and assembled a team of Harvard brainiacs to read stats in order to then assemble the best low cost baseball team his money could buy.

An amazing thing happened: the As team of damaged players won 20 games in a row on their way to a division title. The east coast establishment took notice and offered Bean a job at season's end. He declined and these years later his heart is still with the As determined to win in their crumbling ballpark with a lower budget team than before.

Postscript: teams are focusing on sabermetrics and big budget teams like the Yankees are floundering. The last World Series champion, the Royals. The best two up and coming teams with stocked farm systems who have entire teams of Harvard brainiacs at their disposal running stats: the Cubs and Astros. Even the Yankees are building their team around up and coming players. Sabermetrics is here to stay even if it isn't as fun to watch as a home run.

I have tried to read Lewis' other books but did not got get into them because they are about money, not baseball. Maybe I will try again because Lewis writes in a manner that makes his subject accessible to all readers. Highly recommended to all.

3.5 - I wish I knew more about baseball

In nearly everyone's mind, for any topic which they care about at all, there is a mental model. Not, generally, a probabilistic population of models, but rather, one model: The Way This Thing Is. It may be how the economy works, it may be how politics works, it may be how romance works (or fails to). Whatever it is that a person needs to have an opinion on, because it impacts their life and they must deal with it (which means they must have a strategy for dealing with it), people have a mental model of how that thing works that they use to decide what to do.

It is always, in every case and for every person, at best, incomplete. As the saying goes, "all models are false; some models are useful."

Small wonder, then, that from time to time people come across evidence that their model is wrong. Even in fields such as war which have been analyzed from time immemorial, by people whose life depended on it, new things are discovered. For most of us, whose professions are considerably newer than that of the warrior, not only do changes upend our profession, but the old models of how things worked may not ever have been that good in the first place. It takes time for a profession to discover what works and what does not; my own current profession of software development has certainly not sorted this out yet. But when this happens, when a new mental model of How This Works comes along, there are at least a generation of people who have deep investment in the old mental model, who will be deeply resistant to any attempt to change the consensus on How This Works. This is because it would render their years (or decades) of accumulated knowledge suddenly less valuable. In many fields, this resistance is enough to prevent any change to the orthodoxy, whereas in others, there is some objective method of determining whose mental model is most correct.

In no field, not science and not warfare and certainly not economics, is this testing more rigorous than in professional sports. Every other expert in the field may disagree with you, and yet your strategy and theirs, when matched against each other in full public view, may declare yours the winner.

This book, is the story of how one paradigm was overthrown, and a new one came to replace it. If you enjoy watching the sport of baseball, it will likely add an extra layer of interest to the story for you, but I am guessing that it is by no means necessary, because this is not at its most fundamental level a story about baseball, per se. It is the story of how an intellectual orthodoxy can resist change for years (decades), and then can be shaken and overthrown by events.

Billy Beane was, we are led to believe, able to see through the common orthodoxy about what makes a great baseball player, because he was not one, and yet everyone he met in his life for years thought that he would be. While possessed of great physical talent, and obviously a keen intellect (he had been accepted to Stanford University before choosing to play baseball instead), he was unable to perform well at the professional level. Not merely in spite of this failure, but perhaps because of it, he went on to become one of the most consequential managers in the history of baseball. His fundamental insight, the foundation for all of the rest, was that Looks Are Deceiving. He turned to a succession of ever-more-nerdy sources of statistical analysis to tell him what really mattered in a player. In many ways, he was looking for players who were the antithesis of his younger self. If they were a bit chubby, or slow, or old (by the standards of professional baseball), or otherwise failed to live up to the Olympian ideal of American baseball, but they nonetheless could get the job done, then Billy Beane wanted them on his team. If they got the job done, but not in the usual way (e.g. getting a walk rather than a hit, which nonetheless got you to first base), he wanted them on his team.

The principal motivation for this unorthodoxy, was that he was manager for a team, the Oakland A's, which had far less money than its competitors. Unlike many other professional sports leagues, professional baseball teams each were free to spend as much as they wanted on player salaries. This meant that, for example, the New York Yankees could spend several times the money that the Oakland A's could, on getting the best players. It was as if they were competing in a pole vault in which different players were able to use poles of different lengths, depending on how much pole length they could afford. Because he was never going to be able to outbid the richer teams for the players which those rich teams wanted, Billy Beane was forced to find ways to get players which the rich teams didn't want, that were nonetheless just as good at winning games. This meant, that he had to have a better mental model than they did, for what it is that makes a player good.

I don't watch much baseball anymore, but as a youth I did watch many St. Louis Cardinals games with my dad, and enjoyed it. The game has a pace slow enough to encourage discussion, debate, and even prediction. Do you think he's going to try to steal a base? Do you think he's going to pitch him inside? Do you think they'll do a hit-and-run? There is enough time for those watching the game to guess what is happening, or what should happen, and enough of a pause afterwards to discuss it before the next play begins. You don't just have time to say "Yay!" or "Oh no!"; you also have time to say "Why didn't he...?" It's not as if it is a purely intellectual exercise, but more than many sports it is tailored well for intellectual analysis. For over a century now, people have been recording what happened, analyzing it, and debating it. In this sense, baseball was uniquely prepared for someone such as Billy Beane to disrupt it, by mining the data of all that history instead of relying on whether a scout liked the young fellow's physique ("we're not selling blue jeans here," he liked to say).

But in a larger sense, Moneyball is a great symbol of what has happened to our entire world, with one exception: here, it is the little guy, without huge piles of money, who has the data. Because if it had been, say, the New York Yankees who had first tried to use the power of data and analysis to crush all resistance, they could have been the Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Or, to look at it another way, this is a world where those companies were kept forever small and hungry, knocking down the walls around privilege instead of erecting new ones around their own fortresses. It can also be seen as a story of what happened when science overthrew religion in the heart of Europe, or what happened when medical knowledge started to come from double-blind trials instead of the wisdom of the ancients. There are a lot of different ways to see the quixotic quest of a small-market team in a poor city, trying to compete with the teams of larger, wealthier cities.

And it can also, of course, be read as a story about baseball. Either way, it is a great read.

If you are the type of person who loves to analyze the shit out of statistics, are inclined towards sports, and American, chances are you love some baseball. My brother and I would read baseball almanacs, which, if you are unfamiliar, are giant books of baseball statistics. We would quiz each other on obscure data like, "In 1981, of the top 10 base stealers, who had the highest batting average?" My brother would usually win. He had much more driving passion for the game than me. It's this obsessive love for baseball and baseball data Michael Lewis writes about in Moneyball.

Moneyball tells the story of how passionate fans dragged professional baseball into the modern era of data analytics. I loved the stories here about how fans questioned some of the most basic baseball statistics, proved the old statistics were almost meaningless by feeding their data and proofs through a crowd-sourced peer-review process, and presented new statistics which were simply better and useful. One fan on a baseball forum questioned conventional wisdom about pitching and defense, showed his data, said, "Prove me wrong", and changed the way people thought about pitchers forever. One can never underestimate the collective autism of the internet.

Intensely fascinating and entertaining, but if you don't know baseball, probably not so much. And if you know baseball, you probably easily knew the answer to my question above - Kirk Gibson.

Have been following Pacific Coast baseball for nearly 70 years. Have never been to a major league. Uncles took me to some games at Vaughn Street. Remember tall stacks of emptied beer containers. The San Francisco team had an awesome player. One game sat in roped area of outfield. Would not want fans on ground behind me and a rope to trip over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughn_...

From Pacific Coast League to Moneyball to the Mariners. Lewis insights/perceptions enhanced my knowledge and understanding ... like reading economics as he presents it. Has a big sweet spot.
***

Intrigued that people in Portland are again pushing for MLB membership/stadium construction ... Hard to comprehend the amount of money involved in professional sports ... and the management decisions. But would be fun to see Beavers playing in the Bronx.
***
Haven't been as enthused by ML's financials.

“As he runs, he sheds years at the rate of about one every twenty feet. By the time he touches home plate, he’s less man than boy.

And, not five minutes later, Billy Beane was able to look me in the eye and say that it was just another win.”

Awesome read. It really made me appreciate the movie and the individual players that much more.

Another book I wish I had read when it first came out. I saw the movie and liked it a lot, and as a life-long baseball fan is should have snatched this up. Since I've read a couple of baseball books since Christmas, I finally decided to look this up.

What a fantastic journey through the minor leagues and up to the highest levels of the Oakland A's organization. Fantastic insights about the game, the "old school" mindset that existed across baseball, and how one man changed at that. Of course I could not help picturing Brad Pitt as Billy Beane (I wonder what Beane thought about that casting), but it only enhanced my enjoyment in this book. Every baseball fan should read this now, especially with spring training starting.