n  “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

Honestly, the only reason I got interested in baseball is thanks to one of my favorite animes: Diamond no Ace.

And now here I am. I’ve read this book after watching the movie Moneyball itself and both deserve 5 stars from me. I enjoyed the novel an awful lot, especially knowing that these are all real events. When I read about Hatteberg’s homerun in the 20th game I could actually find it on youtube and watch exactly how it happened. When I read about Chad Bradford’s unique way of pitching I also could also watch a video of his plays.

Even if this would all be a fiction it would have been jawdropping, but knowing that it all happened truly makes it more fascinating.

Baseball is – unfortunately – not a popular sport here in Hungary, although for me it has more miraculous moments than football ever had. And Oakland A proved that not everything in baseball is about money.

“Goliath, meet David.”

Billy Beane has reformed a sport even when everyone ridiculed him for it; in the end he was the one laughing.

“He had reason to feel some distaste for baseball’s mystical nature. He would soon be handed a weapon to destroy it.”

I’m not exactly a fan of any sport but now I feel like I can understand the baseball fans’ enthusiasm. Because, how can you not be romantic about baseball?

“Assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games, and watching them become stars, was one of the pleasures of running a poor baseball team.”

Moneyball is a book that shook the world of professional baseball, but not necessarily in the way it should have. Let me explain...

Moneyball is framed around the story of Billy Beane, a hot prospect who never panned out in the majors, who became general manager of the Oakland A's in 1997. Since that time, the A's, while consistently having one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, have been one of the best teams in the game. How is this possible? The book details how Beane and a few trusted associates began looking at the game in a different way. Instead of trusting scouting intuition and traditional baseball thinking, the A's began focusing on particular assets of players that were being undervalued by other teams. In this way, they were able to build winning teams using players that were overlooked or discarded by wealthier or less skilled organizations.

While straightforward statistical analysis is interesting enough to me (see my review of Baseball Between The Numbers), where Moneyball shines is it's more detailed investigations into the development of statistical analysis in baseball, and some of the individual players who made up the A's successful 2002 squad. It is these investigations that give the Beane storyline depth and character, and add credence to the statistical analysis strategies the A's employed.

I also appreciated the way Lewis outlines the response FROM the baseball community to the release of Moneyball, which is included in the later paperback edition. This even more firmly establishes the view that most baseball organizations are wasteful and subjective in their approach to analyzing the game they spend hundreds of millions to play. However, Moneyball also explains how teams such as the Toronto Blue Jays and, more impressively due to their two World Series wins in 3 years, Boston Red Sox have hired statistically-minded and data-crunching GM's to run their organizations - showing that the future will perhaps indeed have on base and slugging percantage be our primary focus rather than batting average and RBIs.

Not if Joe Morgan has anything to do with it, though.

Boy did I read Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game at the right time: January.

(The off-season.)

Over the last two years, I've made a real effort to learn about sports. Hockey? Not a problem. The NBA? A gossipy league, but I think it's more popular because of it. The NFL? Short but sweet. No matter how hard I try -- I'll score the game, I'll eat the peanuts, but I draw the line at chew -- I just cannot develop an interest in baseball. I recently talked to a former ESPN writer, and he told me that football's popularity is often attributed to its TV friendly format. I can see what he means. When I watch a football game, there's a lot of action, the replays are good, and there are only a few games so it's hard to become bored with the season. Baseball strikes me as a radio friendly game, particularly the many sounds we think of when we think of baseball. Unfortunately, radio went out of style decades ago. So even after watching an entire season of baseball games, the first association that comes to mind when I think of baseball is this line from The Simpsons: "And now there's a beach ball on the field. And the ball boys are discussing which one of them is going to go get."

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis mostly ignores the game of baseball. Instead, he looks into why the Oakland Athletics, a team with the second smallest payroll in the league, was for a brief while able to compete with the New York Yankees. It turns out that Billy Beane, the A's general manager, decided to found his strategy on decisions that tend to lead to wins. Runs lead to wins; outs do not. For example, stealing second and sacrifice bunts tend to lead to outs. So don't do those things. Relying on Bill James' analysis, Beane ignores defense and invests in hitters that get on base because a high on-base percentage tends to correlate with a lot of wins. Because Beane has an idea of how to measure players that can lead to wins, he can find players that are undervalued.

The best parts of Moneyball may be when Lewis explains the archaic thinking that is guiding the Major Leagues' managers. For example, a relief pitcher's value increases as he accumulates saves. But how often does the relief pitcher "save" the game? Rarely. Consequently, Beane realizes that he can buy cheap pitchers, plays them until they accumulate a lot of saves, and then sell them at a profit. It's not that the other teams don't have access to the same statistics as Beane. It's just that they don't seem to care. Lewis explains that there are outsiders and insiders, and the insiders want nothing to do with the horn-rimmed glasses wearing, ivy league educated, statistic gathering nerds that point out that teams can win more games paying less if they pay attention to these few undervalued skills that have been tied to wins.

What makes Moneyball work is that its central figure, Billy Beane, is actually an insider. He had the "good face," and he looked good in a baseball uniform. He should have been big. He had a ticket to a free education at Stanford, but he traded that in to become a Met. Beane ended up leaving the game to become an advance scout. Beane seems to have a vendetta against the traditional, "go with your gut" decision making that guides the league and, arguably, ruined his life. Watching him outwit other managers because he is willing to consider non-traditional approaches to the game is real joy, and Lewis does a fantastic job in these sequences.

There are moments that don't work so well. For example, Lewis is happy to praise Beane, which is fine. However, after writing an entire book about how every aspect of baseball can be broken down into statistical likelihoods, he then explains Oakland's failure to make it out of the first round of the playoffs is that the playoffs are a "crapshoot." We could argue that an NFL playoff game is a crapshoot, but baseball teams are eliminated in a series. Although there's little data to gain from a single series, there are many playoff series to study. Lewis and Beane want to embrace moneyball, even though it fails in the playoffs. Why they should accept Beane's claim that "my shit doesn't work in the playoffs?"

Lewis also gives little attention to what happens when other teams do begin to realize the importance of on-base percentage. I've read on Marginal Revolution that the size of a team's payroll is a bigger predictor of success now than it was ten years ago. That may have been inevitable, but it's not irrelevant.

Still, I have to admit that for over 300 pages, Lewis had my interest. I once read that the best non-fiction books transcend their subject, and I think Lewis has produced that caliber of non-fiction here.

It was almost as though baseball itself was interesting. But that may just have been because there it's been a long time since I watched a baseball game. After all, it is January.

Michael Lewis and greatness finally intersect. They have orbited around each other for years before this book arrived.

The story is narrow in scope, discussing a baseball team. Or more narrowly, discussing the general manager (i.e., the person responsible for hiring and firing players and coaches) who doesn't have enough money to hire top-ranked talent. Zooming in even further, how this manager realized he could never win using the traditional tools of the trade, so he cobbled together a new toolset and changed the game forever.

The more narrowly the book is defined, the more universal the message, oddly enough. Hashing together a new toolset, for example, is exactly what Isaac Newton did back in the late 1600's when he invented Calculus to help him explain why falling apples and orbiting planets were actually two manifestations of the same force.

Innovators are rarely appreciated by the people they work with, and Billy Beane (the topic of this book) was no exception. Lewis, an author given to hagiography, here produces a much more complex portrait of an inspiring figure, and in so doing has written the best book about competition I've ever read.

(The movie was great, too -- quite a pleasant surprise. I have actually used the film as a teaching tool at work.)

July 2023

I can't help myself, I've read this a few times already, But I thoroughly enjoy it every time. The movie is good, but there's more in the book. I didn't realize I was such stats geek until more people became aware of the shift.






Gift from JTG. Loved it. Read it twice. Billy Beane is still underrated. Movie was good but couldn't quite fit in everything, and I think Jonah Hill's character was actually a composite. And I was very interested to see the A's make it to the playoffs this season. But as Billy says, "my shit doesn't work in the playoffs." True--too short of a time span. Anyway, I've been intrigued since I believe my home team could REALLY use a few of these principles and not fast enough. It seems every time we drop big $ it's a disaster, and we don't have that kind of budget to begin with. The point about recruiting from college graduates has proven true in our ranks although I don't know if management has connected those dots or not. Ugh, they really need a woman like me helping me with this stuff. The old ways are just that. Old, crusty, and wasteful. And can we please learn from past seasons? Ok, read the book if you like baseball, especially if you don't like the Yankees! Does a WS Red Sox always have to go there? And yes, I'll read it again before Opening Day which is sacred in my town and try to soothe my wounds over the amazing catcher they let get away (he's getting some good money at least; but it broke my heart, he was the definition of team player along with talent behind the plate that I think mgt just took for granted. They might be surprised next year when they see more white in the back space.). And "getting on base" and not wasting outs IS the strategy you have to use. No sac bunts or flys. You get ON base. But not by walking the most in the league when we paid you to be the bat. Hit the damn ball. It's your job. And stop our whiney fans. We are so lucky to have a team--one with four winning seasons. But no, you have to win the WS. Well, it is true that the playoffs do involve a lot of luck. A little gratitude goes a long way. And hanging a good manager out is so not classy, I can't get over it.

For the most part, the is a fun book to read about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. The first half of the book was very enjoyable. Toward the end, though, it became a bit repetitive. It's not that the author repeats himself--he does not. It's just that the stories about hiring and trading for good baseball players started to sound all the same after a while.

Billy Beane was the general manager during the late 1980's, early 1990's. His team was one of the poorest in the league, so he found it necessary to do things differently than other teams. He could not afford to pay top dollar for new recruits. So, when it came to recruiting and hiring new players, he decided not to strictly follow the advice of his died-in-the-wool scouts. He often ignored their advice, and listened to the advice of his assistant, Paul Depodesta. Paul was an economist, and used sabermetric principles in making up his recommendations. That is to say, he combined data with statistical approaches, and uncovered many correlations and relationships that gave Billy Beane a better idea of the relative values of players.

Whereas many general managers listened to their scouts' advice, they would often judge a player not by their playing ability, but by a set of factors; speed, hitting, fielding--and even by their body type, appearance and mannerisms. But, to Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta, one really counts is the data-based evidenced that a player could get himself on base, which is highly correlated with the number of runs scored. And, since the team was starved for cash, Billy Beane often resorted to wily negotiations with the general managers of other teams. He could not express his interest in another team's player too openly, because that would tip off others about the high value he placed on that player. So, this book is not only about the use of statistics in putting together a superior baseball team, it is also about the art of negotiation, and the wily craftiness involved in getting good deals.

The book describes some very interesting characters. And, it is also about the psychology behind coaching players, and hyping up their self-confidence.

I didn't read this book; I listened to the audiobook. It is narrated by Scott Brick. While I have listened to many thrillers narrated with great drama by Brick, this book is not a thriller. Brick's tendency to over-dramatize seems a bit over-the-top for a book of this sort. He should have toned it down some

The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto; instead, it was used to divine the logic hidden inside a baseball game, and create whole new ways of second guessing the manager.
Moneyball by Michael Lewis (Page 81)

The premise of n  Moneyballn is stated in the introduction. At the beginning of the 2002 baseball season the New York Yankees, the richest team in baseball, had a payroll of $126 million, while the poorest, the Oakland A’s, had a payroll of about $40 Million. At the end of the season Oakland would finish in first place in their division with the same number of wins as the Yankees. So how did this happen?

As the salaries of ballplayers became so expensive a need to better evaluate players became more important. n  Moneyballn is the story of the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, and how he assembled a successful team. For several years Beane’s Oakland team working with the lowest payroll had won more games than any team except the Atlanta Braves. The story shows how it does not matter how much money you spend but how well you spend it. Oakland had a willingness to rethink how baseball is played. It began a scientific investigation of the sport.

Baseball is a sport ripe with statistics. One of the earliest people to utilize these numbers in a innovative way was Bill James. As a hobby he worked with box scores to search for answers to unusual questions. For instance, do some baserunners reach more bases because they capitalize on a fielders throwing accuracy? He began publishing abstracts on baseball statistics, which he named sabermetrics. These works found interested readers who then expanded the study. One of these people was Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate who became the assistant manager to Billy Beane. Together they were able to find undervalued players.

This book was fascinating both about baseball and the statistics. The story of the Oakland A’s is one of a team that set a major league record with 20 consecutive wins. It also has many interesting statistical analyses that Oakland used in evaluating players and the game of baseball. There are lessons here for an aspiring baseball player on how to become a better hitter. In addition, there are some interesting aspects in how the game is played and managed.

I was left with the question of what long-term impact these had on the game and how players are evaluated. The “Old Men” of baseball still believed in manufacturing runs; doing things like sacrifice bunts and stealing bases. Billy Beane saw these as squandering outs. The baseball world refused to acknowledge the possibility that the Oakland A’s might be on to something.

However, the Oakland A’s numbers were getting notice by more business-savvy baseball owners. The new owner of the Toronto Blue Jays made it clear that the team had to become self-sustaining, and he hired a protege of Beane and Podesta. The new owner of the Boston Red Sox, after a failed attempt to hire either Billy Beane or Paul Podesta away from Oakland, hired Bill James as a Senior Consultant. The Boston Red Sox would go on to win their first World Series in 86 years. However, when in 2024, 22 years later, the Los Angeles Dodgers would offer a $700 million contract to Shohei Ohtani, perhaps the lessons of Billy Beane have been lost.

As a writer, Michael Lewis has that amazing ability to write about one thing but actually be writing about something else entirely. Sometimes it’s meanings within meanings, and it often requires a deeper read between the lines.

“Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” is, ostensibly, about the economics of baseball, how baseball can be looked at as a financial microcosm of the real world: the wealth inequalities between major league teams and how rich teams tend to win many more games than poor teams and why that is.

Insofar as any book ever written about baseball is never actually about baseball, one can still enjoy “Moneyball” as a basic underdog story, and it has the distinction of being that rare literary beast of an underdog story: a true one.

But it’s even more than a metaphorical look at the unfairness of how our economic system works. Going deeper, it’s actually about our 21st-century disinterest in and---more worrisome---inexplicable discouragement of innovative “out-of-the-box” thinking, perhaps because true “out-of-the-box” thinking has the perception of being counterintuitive and diametrically opposed to everything we’ve been taught.

In 2002, Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, decided to do something so radical as to have the appearance of utter insanity. Rather than listen to his talent scouts---seasoned veterans of the sport and guys who could recognize real talent---in regards to picking players for the upcoming season roster, Beane chose to listen to his assistant Paul DePodesta, an economics graduate from Harvard with a laptop always at the ready.

Beane’s theory was this: picking players based on an outdated and somewhat mystifying and undefined je ne sais quoi of inherent talent was too subjective to be reliable, and, not only that, it simply didn’t work. How did he know this? Beane was living proof that it didn’t work.

By all rights, according to the talent scouts, Beane should have been one of the sport’s all-time best players ever. He hit all the markers: running, catching, hitting, throwing, looks. In 1980, fresh out of high school, he was signed by the New York Mets. Everyone knew, absolutely, that Beane was going to go places. Everyone, of course, except Beane.

The truth was, Beane’s heart wasn’t in it. If any of the myriad of scouts had asked him what he really wanted to do---go to college, for one---his life may have been drastically different. Unfortunately, Beane’s baseball career was a series of trades to teams who didn’t know what to do with a decent player who didn’t really want to be there.

As General Manager, Beane decided in 2002 that doing it the old-fashioned way just wasn’t cutting it. There had to be a better way.

Enter DePodesta. Like Beane, DePodesta loved baseball but saw that the sport was growing stagnant and major changes needed to be made, even changes that might initially seem destructive but would, in the long term, be better overall for the sport.

One of the changes was the way baseball statistics were being used. Basing their new philosophy on the writings of historian and statistician (and baseball lover) Bill James, Beane and DePodesta looked at the stats of the players in a way that most people didn’t. Most of the stats that scouts looked at were irrelevant, and scouts often overlooked more important stats. In a nutshell, Beane and DePodesta were looking for a player to do one thing: ensure a win.

The team that Beane/DePodesta picked looked, on the face of it, like a nightmare of rookies, has-beens, and never-wases. At one point, someone referred to the 2002 Oakland A’s roster as “the island of misfit toys”, and to most people it was an appropriate moniker. As the season opened, the Oakland A’s lost every single game they played for the first two weeks.

Then, something interesting started happening. They started winning games. It bumped their standing up from dead last in the league to, well, second to last. But it was something.

Then, something even more interesting started to happen. They started winning more games, until, at one point, they had a 19 game winning streak that didn’t appear to let up.

Sadly, the A’s lost in the postseason against the Minnesota Twins, and while their success to that point was something incredible, many of Beane’s naysayers pointed to the postseason loss as an “I told you so” moment, negating everything Beane was trying to do. Clearly, he was a failure, and his ideas were hokum.

Except, he wasn’t, and they weren’t.

Since 2002, more teams have begun adopting the same philosophy and methods that Beane used for his team, to great success. Indeed, the Boston Red Sox (a team that offered Beane a $12.5 million salary to be general manager, an offer that he turned down) won the 2004 World Series utilizing the same metrics and philosophies pioneered by Beane. Clearly, many people in baseball were changing their minds about Beane’s ideas: they weren’t hokum.

While Lewis’s book may seem like it might be a dry look at numbers that won’t interest anyone other than people who are die-hard baseball fans, it is anything but dry. Besides being beautifully written, Lewis never forgets the human element---the “romantic” side---of baseball in his characterizations of an ensemble cast of fascinating, flawed, and idiosyncratic people.

He also knows what makes for an exciting baseball underdog story, ending the book with the climactic tension-filled now-famous early-September game against the Kansas City Royals, where the A’s, starting off with an 11-0 lead, slowly began to lose the lead until the final inning, a score of 11-11. This was the game that would have either broken their 19-game winning streak or continued on to a 20-game streak. It was a nail-biter of a game, and Lewis captures it brilliantly on the page.

Beneath all the baseball and the economic theory, though, Lewis is telling another story about the American people, one that isn’t very pretty.

According to Lewis, people like Beane---idea people, outliers with highly innovative new ways of doing things---must fight their way past almost-unstoppable barriers of ignorance, anti-intellectalism, and traditionalism. Sometimes people like Beane never get heard. For every Beane, Steve Jobs, or Bernie Sanders, there are countless millions who may have had revolutionary ways of changing health care, education, the economy, the environment, etc. who simply gave up trying.

There is the secret tragedy that hides behind the upbeat and optimistic pages of “Moneyball”. It is a tragedy, I think, that Lewis hopes to avert in the future by telling Beane’s amazing story.

Well, its kind of about baseball. Its more really about Billy Beane and how terrific a GM he is and, as an extra bonus, he is so much like the swell guys on Wall Street who have it all figured out.

Well kinda.

You see, the Oakland Athletics were/are a "poor" ballclub. They do not have the cash of teams like the Yankees or Red Sox so they can not afford much in the way of scouting and even if they do scout they do not have the money to sign the best players (actually I mean the players the rich team want, so forget the word "best")... free agents or anyone else. So they had to come up with something different.

They did. They said they would use "stats" and look at things other teams did not look at... like On Base Percentage... and sign those guys. This did two things. First, it cut the expense of scouting (you do not need to pay so many real people to go see real players), but then they could not afford much of this anyway. Second, they could hire someone to pour over numbers on a PC and "Voila!" they got scouting! And its cheaper!!

OK, it worked. Kinda. That is until the rich ballclubs hired stat guys with PCs too. The Red Sox hired the best stat guys around. Guys who are famous in the stat world. Guys the Oakland team could not afford. The rich teams said "If it works for Oakland, we will really throw a ton of money at it and it will work EVEN BETTER for us!!" (It really didn't but that's another story.)

See, baseball is a business that works like this: If you have good success with something, then everyone else copies it and your good success isn't good any more on account of now everyone is doing it and the rich clubs do it better than you do on account of they have all the money. They still sign the "best" players because like anyone the "best" players want as much money as possible for being the "best" players. (This is not a new thing either... goes back to 1901 at least).

Every so often a poor or losing club will come up with a new idea because they want to win and the old ideas are not working or just cost too much. Owning minor league teams, signing players from the Dominican Republic or some other country, guys who hit tons of homers, guys who stole lots of bases, guys who get lots of walks... these were all new ideas at one time and once a team has good success, it becomes a "Revolutionary Idea!! That Changes The Game!!" because everyone else follows and does it too, figuring that is the quickest road to good success. Then those new ideas just become the way everyone does it and the poor or losing clubs need to come up with another new, revolutionary idea that changes the game.

Now, to the book. Its OK, but I think the author does not know much about ballclubs and rather too much about Wall Street. Beane's idea worked for a time but was not all that revolutionary or fantabulous to begin with. The stat stuff has been around for a long time for basic scouting and player contract negotiations.... like since at least 1908, probably even before that but I can not remember right now. That Beane concentrated on OBP (On Base Percentage) ain't a particularly new idea either (may I introduce you to John McGraw and Connie Mack). Using PC's and stats has been around in ballclubs since the 80's.

I do not really grasp what this author thought was so great. Its just a guy running a poor ballclub that needs to come up with a new idea. For Bill Veeck it was a midget, the Yankees got Babe Ruth, Whitey Herzog got speedy guys... there's always a new idea. Some work, some work for a while and some don't work at all.

An OK read, but no news here. Maybe his Wall Street books are better. This one was not so good.

Obviously an amazing story and I’m glad it was documented, but the timeline felt a bit convoluted.

This is one of those rare instances when the movie was a lot better than the book.
There's so much math and statistics that seem to go on and on for several chapters that tend to bore the reader to death if they're not a big fan of baseball or a mathematical genius.
But the author does an adequate job of making his point and is engaging.

Reading Moneyball was like seeing Peter Thiel's book, "Zero to One," in action. In Thiel's book, he poses the question, "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" In other words, what do believe that's contrary to conventional wisdom and so contrary that nobody takes you seriously. Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics believed that high-budget MLB teams like the LA Dodgers or the Boston Red Sox are running their organizations wrongly. Why waste money on high-dollar players when what really matters is having a roster that gives you the best statistics? This fascinating book chronicles the story of Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, who changed the game of baseball. If you like sports, fast-paced storytelling, and a narrative that re-thinks the status quo, you'll love this book!