Really enjoyed this, partly because reading a baseball book in October when your team is in the playoffs gives you a great high and partly because I was surprisingly and honestly fascinated by the science of sabermetrics. Science and math have never been my strong points, but like Jurassic Park or The Martian, I was nevertheless intrigued. Coupled with the handful of recognizable players scattered through the book, I had a good time with this one. I also remember seeing the film a few years ago; gotta watch it again. It's not nearly as accurate to the book as it should be, but that's an adaptation for you.

October 2016 Baseball Book Club group read

In truth, I did this backwards. I saw the movie “Moneyball” 19 years after the book was first published. I’ve always had a penchant for numbers, especially curious about the ways others sometimes twisted those stats to mean something more than the stats actually meant. It was inevitable that sooner rather than later I would read author Michael Lewis’s book.

Like most people, I’d grown up listening to the accepted, the tried-and-true methods of how to play the game of baseball. Most of the time I agreed with the accepted wisdom, although questions sometimes wriggled their ways through my brain. Does this right-handed pitcher have a horrible record versus left-hand batters, and thus must be removed from the game? Why is a batter who consistently gets on base bunting into a sure out just to move a runner to the next base? Unfortunately, the overwhelming knowledge of baseball was too big and heavy for me to entertain more than just a few fleeting thoughts.

That is, until reading “Moneyball.” The author was allowed into the Oakland A’s clubhouse where he was able to ask questions of those who were using different (and to scouts and those on other teams, strange and sacrilegious) methods to gather ballplayers and to play the game of baseball. Facts are facts, and Mr. Lewis demonstrates why this going-against-the-grain philosophy of managing baseball teams in the big leagues works. Anything but dry, this illuminative study of the Oakland A’s and General Manager Billy Beane is a must read for statisticians, fans, and anyone who has similar questions to the ones I listed above. Five stars.

A couple cons:

The writing’s a little heavy-handed in places, which might just be a hazard of writing about baseball. Ex: “The batter’s box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.”

Plus, as a poet, I always feel guilty reading books like this when I could/should be reading Proust or Shakespeare…

But:

Overall, I really enjoyed Moneyball, and I’m glad I read it. Even though it’s focused on the emergence of new baseball-thinking, Moneyball seems much more comprehensive, and much more narrative than I expected. Essentially, Lewis tells the story of a new way of thinking about baseball. Bill James, this smartypants non-athletic geek, challenges the traditional way of thinking about baseball, subverting “the foolishness of many conventional baseball strategies.” With the most pitiful bank account in the AL West, Oakland A’s listen to James, apply his theories, and improve exponentially.

“Conventional baseball strategies” includes such nonsense as: discouraging plate discipline, encouraging recklessness, and pooh-poohing walks ( I’m still shocked to know that drawing walks used to be, and sometimes still is, considered a failed at-bat). Anyway, James, The A’s, and now the Red Sox, operate—thrive—by challenging conventional thinking and looking for ways to locate and manipulate inefficiencies in the baseball market. They rely on stuff like logic and math to evaluate performance, rather than the good-ole’ traditional scouting system (drafting/evaluation based on non-quantifiable qualities like hunches, scout observation, the player’s “presence”). Although there’s still some problems about what this actually means and how to implement or manipulate stats, it’s clear to me that math and logic beats out chutzpah.

Things about Moneyball I particularly enjoyed, and think you will too:

--Anytime Lewis discusses the language of baseball. (BTW, for an awesome book about baseball language and signs, read Dickson’s The Hidden Language of Baseball).

--Issues of the value of and tensions between emotional and intellectual intelligence, or lack thereof, in baseball—Lewis tell of scouts ranking a player with “personal problems,” such as psychological issues and jail records on the same plane as a player who’s “too smart”(!). Then he writes: “Physical gifts required to play pro ball were…less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head without total confidence.” (I like thinking about this when I watch games now.)

--Even though Billy Beane’s sort of the *star* of the story, I found Bill James’s, Chad Bradford’s and Scott Hatteberg’s stories especially, surprisingly, endearing.

--Challenges to unchecked tradition, which basically run through the whole book. This includes questioning insider baseball journalists, talking heads, Bud Selig, Joe Morgan & co. What can I say?—-Selig & Morgan might not actually care about Lewis’s jabs at them...but reading them does kinda fill me with glee.

"I was writing a book about the collision of reason and baseball." - Michael Lewis

Moneyball has become the modern-day shorthand term for a perceived over-reliance on statistical data by a given baseball manager, front office, or franchise. Critics point out that, since Billy Beane took over as General Manager and implemented many cutting-edge valuation models based on sabermetric data, the Oakland As have failed to win a World Series Championship. That criticism is accurate. It also misses the point. Moneyball is the story of one of the poorest teams in baseball, cursed with a stingy owner and an antiquated stadium, that nevertheless manages to be shockingly competitive during the tenure of its oft-, and wrongly-, maligned General Manager despite consistently fielding one of the lowest payrolls in the league. How do they do it? (Ironic spoiler alert) They find and acquire players whose production is inefficiently undervalued by the marketplace. Author Lewis turns his eye from the financial markets (Liar's Poker, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine) to baseball, and with wit and clarity, peers inside the age-old mystery of why baseball does the things it does. A working knowledge of the basic rules of the sport is probably a good idea but even casual readers and not just die-hard baseball fans will be both educated and entertained.

In honor of the MLB postseason, I am resurrecting a book review that I wrote back in 2009 on another website.

I hardly know where to begin in attempting a review of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. It isn’t that I don’t think that the book is well written, because it is. It isn’t that I disagree with the conclusions that are reached in the book, because, for the most part, I don’t. What bothers me, as a recovering baseball fanatic, is that I don’t enjoy the game that utilizes the approaches that are proposed in this book.

Moneyball describes how the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, has been able to use sabermetrics (statistical analysis originated by Bill James and others) to more intelligently draft players and win games.

According to the proponents of this new approach:

1) offense is more important than pitching; 2) defense hardly matters at all; 3) the most important baseball statistic is on-base percentage, followed by slugging percentage; 4) stealing bases should not be attempted because it is not worth the risk; 5) the same goes for the hit-and-run; 6) never sacrifice because it is not worth giving up the out; 7) scouts are unnecessary; and 8) line-ups and game strategy are dictated to the manager by the general manager and his statistical analysts, making managers almost as unnecessary as scouts.

Beane and his statistical guru, and not the scouts, decide who should be drafted. According to Lewis, the most important statistic to Beane and his statistician in determining what position players to draft is the ability of players to draw walks. They look for players (only college players for they never draft high school players) who have exhibited the ability to work deep in the count and to draw walks.

I can’t speak for others, but I don’t watch baseball games in order to watch hitters work deep into the count, draw a walk, camp out on the bases until somebody gets an extra-base hit (or two) to drive them home. The strategy utilized by Beane and his proponents may produce a more efficient style of baseball, about that I am in no position to quibble. It may be the only way that a small market team like the Oakland A’s can compete with the deep pockets of the New York Yankees and other large market teams (the ‘unfair game’ mentioned in the book’s subtitle).

However, to repeat, I find the emphasis on this approach to result in a game that is much less fun to watch.

Money Ball is about men, and male relationships, risk and responsibility, success and failure, power and service, decision making under pressure, and betting large.

Yogi Berra Said: You don't have to swing hard to hit a home run. If you got the timing, it'll go.

Some equivalent happed for Lewis when he wrote Money Ball.

Something lined up just right, and it went!

5/5 ⚾️

This was a fun book I had on a list for a long time. The author has challenged America's Pastime with the modern world. This is the fourth book I have read from Mr. Lewis. He is a master at finding, explaining and making interesting the way technology and mathematics wrenches us into this current, new world. He has an "Afterword" in the edition I read which was laugh inducing and quite fun.

I don't watch much sports. Oh some Olympics, some X games. But of the sports I don't watch, I can think of few I dislike as much as baseball. Booooring.

I used to be a Yankees fan, a long time ago... mostly that meant reading books on the 1927 Yankees - Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and later Yankees Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle. But I got over that a long time ago.

So when I saw this book is basically an analytical book on baseball. Well it was the 3rd Michael Lewis book I've read now. Outrageously knee-slapping tears in the eyes hilarious. And on top of that a reminder that the world is meant to be analyzed, turned into numbers and beat. And you can choose to do it or take the easier path and not do it - but it's doable. 5 of 5.

Barbarous Statistics

I don't follow baseball, but I can't escape statistics. Whether making hiring decisions, investment calls, or building experimental design, statistics haunt every day.

In Moneyball, Lewis has found an all-star protagonist and crowd-pleasing backdrop to spin a yarn worth listening to. Lewis' lesson is not that one should use statistics over gut instinct. Instead it is that statistics are only as useful as the totality of their methodology. A mistake in any level that started by translating the real world into quantized data, then aggregated it to actionable insights, invalidates the entire process.

As the story progresses, baseball scouts become the villains: like a Greek chorus, it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. But as Lewis reveals in later chapters, these scouts are indeed using statistics, just useless ones developed by a cricket player generations ago. So even with the veneer of pure math, such numbers are corrupted to the core by opinions from the past. Garbage in, garbage out. Experiments become wisdom, wisdom becomes dogma, dogma becomes an opportunity to profit.

I don't follow baseball, so the implications on the sport didn't resonate. But as one subject summarized: If gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of 30,000 and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? And if we weren't getting in our own way on the pursuit of baseball truth, we would be fooled by randomness anyways: In a 5 game series, the worst team will beat the best about 15% of the time. [...] Baseball science may still give the team an edge, but that edge is overwhelmed by chance. The baseball season is structured to mock reason. Because science doesn't work in the games that matter most, the people that play them are given one more reason to revert to barbarism.

So for just about all of us, just about all of the time, statistics are just barbarism.

6th book of 2022

I liked the first half better than the second but man, no one tells a story like Michael Lewis. I totally see why this became so successful - and the movie is great, too!

Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive!

I was reading about baseball statistics--and I was enthralled. You must understand; I am literally unable to watch baseball. While I can appreciate its significance and legacy (acquired through cultural osmosis, not any interest in the game itself), actually watching a match bores me to tears. So when I say I love this book and you should read it, I want you to get my full meaning.

Listened to this as an audiobook . . . fun, interesting, enlightening. I've been a Braves fan for a very long time & it was nice to hear confirmation that skill (front office and player) matters in winning the most games but luck plays the biggest role in the post-season.

Very interesting, too, about how important personality and outlook is for the players' success and particularly for the success of the team that they are playing for.

Quite the story about Billy Beane, the super talented young player who was not suited or even that interested in playing the game itself but who was super successful as the general manager in putting together winning teams on very low budgets.