Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

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 numbers and discipline. An unemployed self-declared baseball critic Bill James understood that baseball statistics weren't just numbers and trivia: they were fundamentally a myth and a morality that sought to explain the game. Consider the statistic "error" which sought to eliminate luck from the game, and is a moral statement on who is at fault. This statistic, like most statistics in baseball, Bill James argued, was pig-headed, wrong, and irrelevant: it neither discounted luck from the game nor properly accounted for why a team won nor helped predict if they would win. So what does? Here Bill James turned from critic to metaphysic: what really is baseball? It's a game where each team must score as many runs as possible without getting three outs. In other words, while great fielding is beautiful to watch, baseball is fundamentally an offensive game, and Bill James discovered that "on-base percentage" (the times a hitter gets on base divided by the times a hitter goes to bat) and "slugging percentage" (the number of runs a team generates each inning divided by the number of batters a team sends to the plate each inning) were the best indicators of a team's future performance. Of course it didn't matter if Bill James was right or wrong because he was irrelevant. Baseball was a club that was dominated by those who played the game. Players became coaches and general managers and sports commentators, and they all thought alike and treated baseball as a sacred temple only they could access. Since the mid-eighties fantasy baseball players had taken James and made him into a self-publishing phenomenon, and amateur baseball theorists who counted among them expensively-educated and expensively-paid statisticians were constantly proving and refining James' theories -- but who listened to geeks anyway? The revolution needed to come from within, and it did. Billy Beane should have been a baseball Hall of Famer -- with his build and athletic prowess he could have been the baseball Hall of Famer. That's what baseball scouts kept on telling him, and while Billy Beane did make the major league his heart really wasn't into baseball, and he was only a little above mediocre. At age 28 -- usually the prime of a baseball player's career -- he did the unthinkable, quit playing, and asked for a scouting job in the Athletic A's organization. And while Billy Beane was a member of baseball's sacred fraternity he had first-hand experience that they could at times be all wrong, and when he became the Oakland A's general manager he began systemically to prove that they were in fact all wrong. As general manager Billy Beane hired a Harvard number-cruncher Paul DePodesta to implement and refine Bill James' theories. DePodesta made the critical insight that "on-base percentage" was three times as important as "slugging percentage," and used this new knowledge to draft college baseball's most undervalued players. What Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta found was what Bill James had long argued: that the market for baseball players was incredibly inefficient. Players who could get on base and wear out an opposing pitcher -- a team's most important contributors -- were underpriced, and the players who could hit jaw-dropping home-runs after striking out many times and make terrific catches that nevertheless did not alter the inexorable logic of the game were overpriced. By exploiting this market inefficiency Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta created one of baseball's most winning teams on one of baseball's smallest budgets. And Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta saved some of baseball's best players from obscurity. Take, for example, Chad Bradford, one of baseball's most consistent closers. But why did no teams want him? He threw underhanded. Baseball teams couldn't dispute the facts -- Chad Bradford was a winner -- but in the end they decided aesthetics were more important than facts. Then there's Scott Hatteberg, one of baseball's smartest players, and definitely the most patient and disciplined: for him baseball was a mental game, and as the game's most consistent hitter he wore down opposing pitchers by raising the ball count, gleaming valuable information in the process. What was his problem? He wasn't man enough -- not aggressive and reckless enough in the batter's box. In other words he didn't strike out enough -- and it was again Billy Beane who saw the absurdity of mainstream baseball's reasoning and snapped up Scott Hatteberg as soon as he could. In many ways "Moneyball" is even more "Fountainhead" than Ann Rayn's best-selling classic. Like Howard Roark Billy Beane is not a person you'd like to meet. Nevertheless, motivated by his insatiable need to win, he is fighting against the forces of stupidity and unreason, and in so doing making a world a better place. And it is a credit to Michael Lewis's patience and discipline as a writer to just let this great story tell itself. "Moneyball" is a brilliant achievement.

Field of Stats Although the steroid scandal may have eventually accomplished the same thing, "Moneyball" destroys any persistent romance surrounding professional baseball. It's an antidote to all those paeans glorifying the love of the game: "The Natural," "Field of Dreams," even the raunchy lens of "Bull Durham." Players don't rise and fall due to the nobility of their character, the sheer beauty of their swing, the sage advice of a wizened baseball scout, or even their batting average, per se. What Moneyball does is show how the Oakland A's, and a few emulators, dismissed all this lore and culture in favor of multiple regressions and other advanced statistical tools. It's a fascinating book that could have been a dry one--full of detailed statistics and equations--except that Lewis cleverly balances the mathematical perspective with the same character studies that have graced sports biographies for years. The book centers around former big league prospect Billy Beane, a man with great athletic ability who didn't make it in the bigs, partly because of his perfectionism and resulting temper. Years later, Beane is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a team with stingy owners who'd rather save some bucks than buy a pennant (see "Yankees, The"). Faced with a shoestring budget, and enamored with the new baseball analysis cultivated by Bill James in his "Baseball Digest" system, Beane and his advisors invest in players as if they're brokers on Wall Street. James and other highly-educated baseball fanatics (often from Harvard, often lawyers or scientists with a mathematical bent) discover that the old wisdom wasn't all that smart: Their analyses yield cold, objective facts, and suddenly, as in the old "Firesign Theater" skit, "Everything You Know Is Wrong." It's not batting average and RBIs that are most important, it's on-base and slugging percentage that predict the one thing, the only outcome that matters--who wins. Throw out fielding statistics--these are too dependent on luck and the kind of pitches served up. Furthermore, invest in bargains: Overlooked players who get to first through walks rather than singles (the phrase, "a walk is good as a hit," was never so true as it is here), guys who aren't great all-around players but who fill complete missing elements in your roster (sort of like diversifying your portfolio, Beane and others take their cue from a market mechanism known as "derivatives"), and those who otherwise don't fit into other GMs' and scouts atheoretical notion of what makes a great player. The results are convincing. With one of the least expensive teams in baseball, the A's repeatedly make the playoffs. Beane acquires college players and castoffs from other teams like a man who collects trashy art, and XXX shows how his "I must be insane to offer you these bargains" style of purchasing ball players pays off, mostly through chapters devoted to one particular exemplar of Beane's philosophy. There are a few problems with the book, as there are a few problems with the stats-driven approach to building your team. The most egregious of these is Lewis' concentration on the successes predicted by statistics. For a book driven by science, Lewis ignores the other 3 cells of the implicit 2x2 table of success/failure by "uses Beane method"/"doesn't use method." The most significant is the failure/Beane method cell; Lewis just doesn't write about those players who didn't pan out as mathematically predicted. The only examination of failure is Beane's rather clinical excuse for never advancing very far in the playoffs--in a short series (I.e., when N is small), luck (i.e., the statistical error) tends to become more powerful and empirical "truths" suffer as a result. The fans suffer too, but their enjoyment of the game is always secondary to winning. Therefore, Athletics almost never steal bases (the percentages dictate no), and managerial and player judgment is minimized in favor of the all mighty victory. You have to admit it works, but when Beane shrugs off the post-season failure question almost with a "that's not my job," you have to wonder whether "Moneyball" is enough. Maybe it's just the best oine can do on a budget. (On the other hand, XXX Lewis to mention--even in his most recently written epilogue--that Beane's right hand man Paul DePodesta was fired after 2 seasons with the well-financed Dodgers.(A 71-91, 4th place finish in 2005 didn't help DePodesta.) Along with this bias towards success stories, XXX reveals a few bad writing habits. He'll sometimes describe something with sentences repeatedly beginning with the word "that." As in: "That the book doesn't look enough at failures. That the book was a best seller. That the book was reportedly misunderstood by many when published." Lewis also lapses into a high-falutin' prose style, somewhat emulating "King James"--Bill James of the pioneering Baseball Digest school of analysis. Still, "Moneyball" deserves its reputation and its sales. Beane's number-crunching, myth-busting approach isn't always pretty, but it makes sense and meets the bottom line of both winning and preserving capital. An excellent and accessible book that has it both ways, an argument for using "cold" higher math in sports, and a spirited study of the ballplayers who add value to the original purchase, and the GMs who know what it takes to buy low and sell high.

One of the best sports books ever written. Especially for Baseball lovers. Even if you are not a baseball lover, its not really hard to comprehend Just search over all the Baseball terms on the Internet and life would be easy.

Very detailed information. Not anything you would find in the movie. As a matter of fact, i watched the movie before reading this. Than i read this book. Than i rewatched the movie, and it was like watching a complete different film. Great book. It’s what consumers want when reading biographies: detailed scenarios behind negotiations, conversations and various episodes that helped create a winner. The opposite of what autobiographies do.

Ein sehr gutes Buch über die Entwicklung und Bewertung von Spielern, gepackt in eine spannende Geschichte über den General Manager der Oakland Athletics. Es zeigt einen tiefen Einblick in die Art und Weise wie Spieler gescoutet wurden und teilweise echt über- oder unterschätzt wurde. Warum kann ein Spieler der nicht gut schlägt, nicht gut fielded, nicht gut rennt und nur 500k/Jahr verdient so gut und erfolgreich sein, wie jmd. der alles macht und 15mio. im Jahr verdient? Wie kann ein Team von 25 Spielern, die 40mio Kosten so gut sein wie ein Team das 150mio kostet? Das ist eine Frage der auch Michael Lewis nachgegangen ist und hat bei Billy Bean sagenhafte Entdeckungen gemacht. Es hat nur den Mut eines GM gebraucht, der Analysen aus den frühen 80ern verwertet hat, die von allen anderen nur belächelt wurde. Die Geschichte ist sehr spannend geschrieben aber etwas Vorwissen bezüglich Baseball ist unerlässlich, sonst verliert man sich im Dickicht des Baseballjargons ohne etwas zu verstehen.

I enjoyed the movie, i loved the Book. I don't watch baseball but the Book Can make you love it.

It was a great book for its age talking about the Oakland Athletics running their team on a shoestring budget and trying to do things differently to stay ahead of the big spenders. The A’s were successful using new dangled analytics for a while and became a contender out of nowhere. That is until everybody caught on and started doing it too. Interesting read the focuses on a few key players and shows how over time, if you are doing something different that is netting you some good results, before you know it everybody is going to be doing it.