The major taxing of this book is not the baseball terms, but there are so many people appeared in the book, and the similarities in names are not helping. For example, the main protagonist is Billy Beane, and there is another important character whose name is Billy James. That's my only concern when reading this book. Some people maybe not comfortable with the writing style in this book, jumping from one subject to another without smooth main story.

I am not a professional baseball fan although I enjoy reading some Japanese high school baseball manga. Pardon my approach, I read this book as if I read a fantasy novel where I don't know the setting or magic system of the story. And there is magic in this story, called sabermetrics.

But as in any good fantasy story, the magic system is one aspect, but a good fantasy story still needs a good plot. The plot is: how the second lowest payroll team could become the team with the highest number of win in American League West in 2002. If the answer is simple "by using sabermetrics", there won't be necessary to write such a thick book. No worry, Billy Beane still had a lot of to do although he was supported by sabermetrics mages behind him.

I admit the author could delivery the story in interesting way, sometimes I forget this is a non fiction book. When I check other sources for cross reference, some things don't developed as in fairy tales that I imagine after reading this book.

The only reasons I didn’t give this book 5 stars is that it was a little slow in the second quarter and that I’m not at all a baseball fan, with the exception of one season of trying to learn all the Red Sox players only to see them all leave the team the following season- catching me completely by surprise and making me vow never to give away my love like that again. Necessary run-on sentence.

I love data and statistics though and from that perspective, this book is such a joy. If only more people took an interest in what statistics can and cannot tell us, the world would be a more logical and effective place.

Lewis is a brilliant writer, and I give credit where credit is due: He sketches a memorable portrait of Billy Beane, maestro of the Oakland A's, and of his ideas and approach. My three main problems with the book are that it leaves people with the impression that more had changed than it really had; looking for guys others had missed who had a knack for drawing walks and getting on base was a long-standing passion of, for example, Sandy Alderson, Beane's mentor, here given short-shrift; two, it exalts the art of winning regular-season games on a shoestring without ever confronting the painful reality that winning it all, a World Series, was not necessarily any more likely using this method; and three, it resorts to flat-out self-caricature in pushing the idea that in baseball the field manager (whether Joe Torre or Tony La Russa or Art Howe) does not matter at all, since the GM is the auteur of the show, and was just plain mean in casting Howe as an absolute dunce.

Oh, boy. I am disappointed and I guess I have only myself to blame

It's not that this is a bad book - it's hauled as one of the best sport business books for a good reason and I see why so many people enjoyed it. It's just not the book I thought it would be. I thought this book would be more about sport stats rather than a book on why sports stats matter - if this distinction even makes any sense.

The annoying thing is, even though this book wasn't the book I thought it would be, the initial idea was still super intriguing - but it also didn't deliver on that. It's the ultimate sport story of David and Goliath where Goliath is the club of trusted baseball man(TM) and David is the nerd who wants to beat the jock in his own game by exploiting market inefficiencies and, oh Lord, maths, of all things. It should have been the most exhilarating thing for a sport nerd like I am.

But instead of focusing on a dramatic fight, the book felt more like a collection of anecdotes that are all loosely connected and jump around in time without seemingly any meaningful reason. (I don't usually have a problem with time jumps but I felt that in this instance, they messed up the dramatic arch of the book.) And yeah, in the last 20 pages, all stories kind of came together but, even when they did, I still didn't really see the point why all of them had to be included. (To fill 300 pages, probably.)

All in all, the book explored an interesting story and made me want to learn more about baseball - and really, what else do we expect from non-fiction books? Regardless, I still felt a little disappointed that the potential of this book was not reached (at least not in my eyes.)

If you're a baseball fan, this is a must read. It's entertaining, well written, and optimistic. In 2017, the Los Angeles Dodgers had baseball's highest team payroll at $265 million while the Milwaukee Brewers had baseball's lowest team payroll at $83 million. In 2002, the spending gap was just as pronounced. This is a story about the Oakland A's, whose 2002 team salary was the lowest in baseball and their use of statistics or sabermetrics to compete in a game where the richest teams can simply outbid them for the most accomplished players available. More precisely, the story is about Billy Beane the A's general manager and face of the sabermetric movement in professional baseball.

Has phenomenal insight on the inner workings of the front office of baseball. Additionally it offers an incredible perspective into the complex world of baseball stats. I feel like I understand baseball waaaaaaaaaaaaay better because of reading this book.


A must read for any baseball fan, and a great read for any sport fan!

An interesting read in 2022, 20 years after the 2002 Oakland Athletics season this book was based on. A lot of the baseball players mentioned were key figures in my teenaged baseball fandom, now retired and mostly recessed from the public eye. Lewis is a captivating storyteller whose books I'll definitely be taking a deeper dive into after this one.

Not a book I expected to like, but I did. Thanks to an ex-boyfriend baseball is one of the few sports of the world I actually sort of understand and mildly enjoy watching. Football comes with the territory of being Mexican, but any other sport and it is like 'no, thank you' for me.

I was hoping to get something different out of it thou. Basically, I agree with Riku's review here. But all things considered, I think it helps that I'm not in love with the game or anything like it. Because I can get behind the propositions put forward here which is basically to take the poetry out of the game. The unexpected is sidelined. The beauty of witnessing raw talent is unimportant. What matters is the statistical probability of winning bases and the slugging percentage. And with that, you have a game. Drafting should be based on numbers and not scout feels. It's not a bad take. And hey, it kind of works. Math doesn't lie. But is it taking the beauty out of the game? I don't know.

Anyway, I'll be watching the movie too xD

I've always found baseball fascinating, but have rarely admitted it publicly. That's because the revelation always seemed to be followed by someone trying to engage me in a conversation about the game. And that conversation would always, always end up revolving around statistics I neither cared about nor cared to learn.

Not because Math Is Haaaaaard, but because I always had a niggling suspicion that baseball-nerd numbers really weren't that important. Lewis proved me half right; some of the numbers formerly used to make judgments about the quality of a player or team *weren't* that important -- but there were other, lesser known numbers that *could* tell you something.

And it was Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane who used the "new" numbers to build a 2002 team that managed to rack up wins without a Yankees-style payroll.

Moneyball is a captivating look at just how Beane did it.

So why a 4 -- really, a 3.5 -- instead of 5?

For all his smarts and talents as a writer, my God, is Lewis ever a repeat-o-monster. He drums in a point over and over like no other. This was a more serious problem in The New New Thing, which fell into murky unreadability every time Lewis reminded us how smart! and rich! Jim Clark was (you know, every other page or so).

I get it, Lewis: Billy Beane's a maverick, and you're crazy impressed with him. But that level of overkill put just the slightest damper on what was otherwise enjoyable and instructive.

Simultaneously among the top 10 sports books and the top 10 economics books. Without Lewis's typical Princetonian smugness.

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.

Any book that can help you see something conventional in a totally new light is worth the read. Michael Lewis brings his own fascination with financial themes to this book. Baseball will never be the same. We follow the General Manager of the Oakland A's, Billy Beane, as he makes use of statistics in a new way to keep a small-market, low-budget team competitive. Since it was written, some mentioned in it, like Theo Epstein, have parlayed this technique into World Series Championships for the likes of the Boston Red Sox. I suppose that if you were not a baseball fan, it would be more of an exercise to finish the book. But, no problem for me.