Moneyball

Home. You are here: Books / Moneyball

Moneyball

Editorial Review

The Oakland Athletics have a secret: a winning baseball team is made, not bought.

I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it--before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?
With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities--his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission--but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers--numbers!--collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.
What these geek numbers show--no, prove--is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.
Billy paid attention to those numbers --with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to--and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.
In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win...how can we not cheer for David?

Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.

Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe

Features:

• Audiobook
• Unabridged

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
• Excellent insight into the real game
  I must confess - I'm not a huge fan of baseball. Indeed I purchased this book for my father. However, once I began skimming the book - I became hooked. I read it cover to cover in only a couple days. This book showed 21st century statistical methodology as it is brought kicking and screaming into the game of baseball. I find it amazing to believe that any major league operation would not have changed its system of evaluating talent after this book became published, and yet given the entrenchment of old... more info
• Author of Pain Killer Marketing Loves This Book!
  Pain Killer Marketing: How to Turn Customer Pain into Market Gain
  This baseball book does a great job of asking and answering the question: What are the hidden benefits and values that others do not see? The book explains why decisions should be based upon predictive metrics, not emotion. This is the same message from our book about business. Great stories and enough explanation to relate the lessons from each story to a business situation. A great read!
• A Brilliant Achievement
  Aristotle once argued that there are three main purposes to art and writing: to teach, to delight, and to inspire. Rare is the book that accomplishes all three but Michael Lewis's "Moneyball" does exactly that: it is all at once a readable economics textbook, a classic good guys versus bad guys page-turner, and an edifying epic.
  "Moneyball" is the story of three obsessive-compulsives -- Bill James, Billy Beane, and Paul DePodesta -- who re-imagined baseball from a game of stars and heroics into one of... more info
• Leadership Classic
  Lewis's MONEYBALL is impossible to put down because it is speaks as much to leadership as it does to baseball. The key premise is that instead of worrying about what you do not have, do all you can with the resources you do have.
  Worthy of its praise and glowing reviews. A great read.

Similar Products:

• The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Price:
  $11.16
• Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, Price:
  $9.69
• Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, Price:
  $10.20
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Price:
  $10.88
• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, Price:
  $10.17