Product Description

"One of the best baseball—and management—books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).

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?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1428 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

From Publishers Weekly
Lewis (Liar's Poker; The New New Thing) examines how in 2002 the Oakland Athletics achieved a spectacular winning record while having the smallest player payroll of any major league baseball team. Given the heavily publicized salaries of players for teams like the Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees, baseball insiders and fans assume that the biggest talents deserve and get the biggest salaries. However, argues Lewis, little-known numbers and statistics matter more. Lewis discusses Bill James and his annual stats newsletter, Baseball Abstract, along with other mathematical analysis of the game. Surprisingly, though, most managers have not paid attention to this research, except for Billy Beane, general manager of the A's and a former player; according to Lewis, "[B]y the beginning of the 2002 season, the Oakland A's, by winning so much with so little, had become something of an embarrassment to Bud Selig and, by extension, Major League Baseball." The team's success is actually a shrewd combination of luck, careful player choices and Beane's first-rate negotiating skills. Beane knows which players are likely to be traded by other teams, and he manages to involve himself even when the trade is unconnected to the A's. " `Trawling' is what he called this activity," writes Lewis. "His constant chatter was a way of keeping tabs on the body of information critical to his trading success." Lewis chronicles Beane's life, focusing on his uncanny ability to find and sign the right players. His descriptive writing allows Beane and the others in the lively cast of baseball characters to come alive.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
The Oakland Athletics have reached the post-season playoffs three years in a row, even though they spend just one dollar for every three that the New York Yankees spend. Their secret, as Lewis's lively account demonstrates, is not on the field but in the front office, in the shape of the general manager, Billy Beane. Unable to afford the star hires of his big-spending rivals, Beane disdains the received wisdom about what makes a player valuable, and has a passion for neglected statistics that reveal how runs are really scored. Beane's ideas are beginning to attract disciples, most notably at the Boston Red Sox, who nearly lured him away from Oakland over the winter. At the last moment, Beane's loyalty got the better of him; besides, moving to a team with a much larger payroll would have diminished the challenge.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

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 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.

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.