I don't particularly care for sports, but I certainly love statistical analysis!

Moneyball is the story about how science beats gut feelings and culture and how often, common sense isn't. Nowadays Sabermetrics--the practice of using statistical analysis to determine the relative value of a player and strategize on how to win games--is standard practice and basically everyone uses it, but twenty years ago that wasn't true. Baseball management was a club, and certainly things Were Known. Managers who had played the game had The Knowledge, and those who hadn't, didn't. A good scout could identify a good player and sign them on. Player salary had some relation to how good they were.

Billy Beane, general manager for the Oakland As, was determined to change this due to the most powerful motivator of all--money. The Oakland As didn't have much money, so Beane couldn't afford to pay the salaries of the most valuable players. In order to win, he'd have to either find more money, or change what made a player valuable. It turned out that the latter was a lot easier.

As I said, I don't really care about sports--I don't think I've ever even been to a baseball game--but I have a huge interest in how conventional wisdom is often actively wrong. Reading the account of Bill James's decade-long attempt to convince someone, anyone, that they were going about baseball analysis wrong through his newsletters was both interesting and depressing, in the same way that Thinking, Fast and Slow shows that even psychology grad students aren't immune to cognitive distortions. When Beane started his quest, buying players that the rest of the baseball world considered pointless or unskilled and then winning games with them, baseball made excuses. Any loss was seized on as an example of why his approach was wrong, and any success was written off as luck--though admittedly, one interesting sabermetrical point is that luck is much more important than most people think. But gradually, as the Oakland A's posted a great records of wins at a fraction of the cost of other teams, including breaking the record for longest consecutive winning streak, other teams took notice and the world of chewing-tobacco-filled rooms with veteran scouts was supplanted by men with computers and tables of statistics.

In some ways, this is the terror of modern life, that computers will come in and displace the human element because they are simply better and humans don't even know what to measure. In other ways, it's an example of the triumph of reason over superstition. One part I really liked was the revelation that pitchers have no control over results once the batter hit the ball. Conventional wisdom dictated that better pitchers could have some influence over where the batter hit, but statistically, this is not the case. It seems obvious in hindsight, since the pitcher has no influence over the fielders, but it took statistics to overcome conventional wisdom.

People who love baseball would probably give this five stars. My eyes tended to glaze over at any tale of a player's life or technique and I wanted to get back to the science, but this is still a fascinating book. If my book club had to read a sports book, I'm glad it was this one.

If you want to do better, measure!

The name of Michael Lewis's hit nonfiction book Moneyball is, in my opinion, a little misleading -- it leads you to think that the book is about money, and about ball games (specially baseball, as the cover photo makes clear). It is, in fact, about both of those things. But fundamentally, I think, it's about a much broader question, "How do you do better at something?" The particular something at the center of this book is "Build a winning Major League Baseball team on a limited budget."

The answer to the general question is, "Find a way to measure it, to measure everything about it, and work hard to understand your numbers and make them better." Now, if you're a North American, you more likely than not hold numbers in contempt, and you extend that contempt to people who care about numbers. If you are such a person, one who holds numbers in contempt, this book is about you. It's about you, and you're not going to like what it has to say. Here is what Lewis thinks of you

Anyone who wanders into Major League Baseball can’t help but notice the stark contrast between the field of play and the uneasy space just off it, where the executives and the scouts make their livings. The game itself is a ruthless competition. Unless you’re very good, you don’t survive in it. But in the space just off the field of play there really is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated.

If you are willfully, intentionally and proudly innumerate, and if you don't like being described by the sentence "There really is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated," you're going to find Moneyball a tough read.

As the publisher's blurb says, the hero of the book is Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A's, a team that wins games despite having one of the lowest budgets in all of Major League Baseball. Billy Beane is not the only hero in the book, however. One of the earliest to appear is Bill James, who collected and analyzed baseball statistics long before Billy Beane began to rely on them. James was by no means the first person to collect baseball stats, but he was, perhaps, the first person to approach them the way a scientist approaches data, and to find ways to use them to answer important questions about the game.

Lewis is, I think, uniquely good at telling stories about numbers that are as exciting as novels -- indeed, more exciting than many novels. He does this in part by the obvious trick of telling personal stories (thus Billy Beane and Bill James, as well as several of the players). But Lewis's characteristic strength, I think, is to show you the real stakes of the number games. The numbers matter because proper attention to them determines who is happy or sad, or even who lives or dies. In the movie based on Lewis's The Big Short, there is an extraordinary scene in which one investor tells two others that for every 1% increase in unemployment, 40,000 people die, and that they are betting for this to happen. In Moneyball the stakes are lower -- baseball is, after all, only a game, but they are still high for the folks in the game.

Michael Lewis - image from Forbes

This is one of the best baseball books I have ever read, and that is saying something. Lewis’ focus is on Billy Bean, the GM of the Oakland Athletics. Because Oakland is a small-market team, Bean must use his brain to tease out the players who can help his team, at a reasonable cost. This makes him a sort of anti-Steinbrenner. Lewis goes into some detail on how Bean manages to field competitive teams almost every year under dire fiscal constraints. Must-read for any true baseball fan, and a source of hope for fans of small-market teams. The film version was a top-notch interpretation of the book, a lovely surprise.

Some other books that deal in baseball analytics in whole or part
-----The Inside Game by Keith Law
-----Smart Baseball by Keith Law
-----The Arm by Jeff Passan

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4/13/18 - NY Times - How Do Athletes’ Brains Control Their Movements? - by Zach Schonbrun - Fascinating article. Maybe the next level in the expanding realm of the sort of baseball analysis someone like Billy Bean might employ to get an edge over wealthier franchises

It would seem to have almost nothing to do with their biceps muscles or fast-twitch fibers or even their vision, which, for most baseball players is largely the same. It would seem to have much more to do with the neural signals that impel our every movement. “It’s like saying people who can speak French very well have a very dexterous tongue,” John Krakauer, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “It would be the wrong place to assign the credit.”

To most people, this book is about stats, how some stats are inadequate, and moreover, how important stats are ignored. But that's not why I like this book. The real story for me is how people with fewer means succeed. It is more than an undercurrent in the book, and it is sadly ignored by most readers. The Oakland A's took baseball's detritus--fat guys, skinny guys, short guys--and composed championship-caliber teams with them. Moneyball to me isn't about the stats, it's about making the best of what you have.

Rather than evaluating players on their weight, height, and pedigree, some readers want to clothe them instead in their OPS+, DIPS, and VORP. Yes I agree, that's closer to whatever the ideal valuations are, and it's fascinating. But the coolness of these new numbers overlooks the true content of the book.

The real story is about baseball's castoffs. They're ignored by scouts and teams, sent to the outlands and forgotten. These small town boys were taught how to pitch by their preachers, signed contracts after losing the ability to grip a ball, or nearly went undrafted because everyone else said they were too fat and slow. We see these nobodies get a chance, and those stories cover a significant portion of the content. I know the stats and they inspire my intellect. But reading about these men in Moneyball, it tugs at the very crux of my hopes as a common man.