Moneyball: The Artwork of Profitable an Unfair Sport
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Moneyball reveals a quest for one thing as elusive because the Holy Grail, one thing that cash apparently cannot purchase: the key of success in baseball. The logical locations to look can be the large places of work of Main League groups and the dugouts. However the actual jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over time by a wierd brotherhood of beginner baseball lovers: software program engineers, statisticians, Wall Avenue analysts, legal professionals, and physics professors.
In a story filled with fabulous characters and sensible excursions into the surprising, Lewis exhibits us how and why the brand new baseball data works. He additionally units up a sly and hilarious morality story: Massive Cash, like Goliath, is all the time speculated to win…. How can we not cheer for David?
Prospects say
Prospects discover the ebook well-written and straightforward to learn, appreciating its depth and statistical evaluation. Furthermore, they describe it as deeply participating and compelling, with a dramatic storyline that will get readers concerned. Moreover, the ebook gives an excellent take a look at the sport, making it a must-read for baseball followers, even those that aren’t baseball lovers. Prospects reward its worth for cash, highlighting cost-efficient administration of baseball groups, and respect the character improvement, with one evaluation noting the creator’s glorious portrayal of personalities concerned.
Ron S –
Fun learning about baseball in under 290 pages
EZ to read but with a lot of jargon and numbers. FUNNY! Very informative, well written. You don’t need to be a fan to enjoy this book. When you finish you’ll have a brand new understanding and perspective of the game and MB even a desire to go to a game or at least watch one on TV
Jiang Xueqin –
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.
Hamilton Beck –
What are the lessons?
As someone who scans the headlines but does not otherwise follow baseball, I was hoping to learn lessons from this book that could be applied to sports in general, or at least football and soccer. Let me say first off that while there may be such lessons (though fewer for leagues with a salary cap, like the NFL), one thing I quickly discovered is that there sure are a lot of baseball players I never heard of.So, what are the sports lessons? On the one hand, Moneyball is about statistics, the key insight being the importance of “inefficiencies in the system.” To a large degree this means determining which stats are the key to winning and – here’s a point that does not get emphasized enough – putting a dollar value on them. The implication is that a player’s total value can be calculated by figuring out the dollar amount you can assign to each of his individual skills. Then see which players on your team are overvalued, sell them and replace them with unknowns who are undervalued by the market but can perform just as well at lower cost. Billy Beane phrases it this way (he’s talking about replacing a player): “The important thing is not to recreate the individual. The important thing is to recreate the aggregate.” Because in Beane’s eyes that’s all a player is: an aggregation of skills. When in the course of time these younger players start to demand big bucks, they too are let go. It’s all about winning on a shoestring. Which makes sense if you’re managing a low-budget outfit like the Oakland A’s.What’s the downside? Evaluating players by stats alone may be efficient, but it’s also ruthless. It exposes management’s eternal mantra that “we’re all a family” as mostly claptrap. It leaves little room for rewarding loyalty. Whether we’re talking about baseball, football, soccer or basketball – the point is that these are all team sports, obviously. And that means there are certain intangibles such as team spirit and leadership which cannot be quantified. Think of the franchise players on your favorite team – would you trade them virtually at the drop of a hat if you could find a couple of no-names who, according to a spreadsheet, had the potential to produce just as well? Well, you would if you really believed, like Beane does, that there’s nothing you can’t put a dollar figure on. Followed to its logical conclusion, you might end up having less a cohesive team than a bunch of misfit toys. It’s no accident that Moneyball lacks a chapter on team chemistry.On the other hand, this book is not just about baseball stats – a subject which would not automatically appeal to a wider audience. You’ve got to have some human interest. Where does Michael Lewis find it? Aside from Beane and some members of his staff, he discovers it in the stories of those who benefit from the system: the unsung players, diamonds in the rough who don’t look like marquee players or even think of themselves as being very good. Players nobody else wants, who are taken on board and turned into winners. The chief joy of Moneyball comes from reading about these underdogs.But if they are the winners, who are the losers in this system? I missed the stories about those who, either through talent or hard work or both, have risen to the top and can command high salaries, only to find themselves traded for no other reason than “inefficiency in the system.” We’re not necessarily talking about players who have stopped producing either. Where are Lewis’s tales about the shock of being a star one week and finding yourself on the trading block the next? No heart-warming human interest there – to Lewis (and Beane), those guys are like overpriced stocks, to be unloaded before their value starts to decline. No matter how much these players have contributed to the team, or how much we fans have come to like them, no matter if they are still performing at a high level, evidently once they get that oversized paycheck, it’s time to start thinking of how best to cut them loose. The movie is actually much better about this aspect than the book. It goes a long way towards humanizing Beane, who appears somewhat callous in the book, by showing that he acknowledges this fact and tries to rationalize it – “They’re professionals,” Brad Pitt says, “they can handle it.”Many reviewers praise Moneyball for the business lessons it contains. Of course there are useful tips such as – “don’t accept something just because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” and “it pays to think outside the box,” and “dare to be different” – all commendable. At the same time, it should be kept in mind that the advice given in Moneyball pertains best to organizations like the Oakland A’s: undercapitalized firms that are forced to compete with the big boys. The book shows you how to punch above your weight for a while – but is not a formula for on-going success. As Beane himself puts it, “When you have no money you can’t afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones.” He didn’t manage his team this way because he liked to, but because, given his budget constraints, he had little choice. I worry that the chief lesson CEO’s will take away is: In the name of rationality, it’s okay to treat your employees as though they were members of your fantasy team. The movie makes it explicit that this is one reason Beane does not like to watch his team play – if he did, he might form an emotional attachment to some players he’s inevitably going to trade away. The other reason being: superstition – his presence might jinx the team.Keep in mind, too, that this book was written long before the Great Recession, when CEO’s were not as obsessed with cutting costs as they are today – and for most companies, labor is the top expense. It’s perhaps not entirely coincidental that one of Moneyball’s gurus, Paul DePodesta, has joined the board of Sears, according to Bloomberg Businessweek (July 11, 2013 – the whole article, by Mina Kimes, is well worth reading.). Eddie Lampert, Sears’ chairman and an Ayn Rand acolyte, “wanted to use nontraditional metrics to gain an edge, like DePodesta did for the Oakland Athletics in Moneyball and is trying to repeat in his current job with the New York Mets. Only so far, Lampert’s experiment resembles a different book: The Hunger Games.” How so? The company is now “ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.” Talk about learning the wrong lessons.But that’s not the fault of Michael Lewis. I give the book four stars for being thought-provoking.By the way, Moneyball is soon going to appear in Russian translation. I don’t envy the person tasked with writing explanations of technical terms for an audience that for the most part has probably never seen so much as a single inning of baseball. It’s been years since the sports channels have broadcast an MLB game with commentary in Russian. The movie was released here under the title, “The Man Who Changed Everything.”Finally, here’s a stat that’s pretty amazing for a book that first came out about a decade ago – almost 30% of the reviews on this site were written in the past twelve months!
Karan Vashisht –
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.
N. A. Osborne –
This story of how a group of nerds tried to play baseball in a different way is reasonably well known now and many of their method have had an impact on the games’ evolution. The book of the story is simply outstanding and superbly written. It really gives an insight to how stuck, in thinking, sports can become and how resistant, those inside a sport, can be to change. In a world of sport dominated by big spending teams the method of finding value in undervalued players give as extraordinary insight into a game dominated by stats, often ill used by teams. Great stuff!
Miguel L. –
Recibí mi producto en tiempo récord y de acuerdo con lo anunciado! Muy satisfecho
Client d’Amazon –
I enjoyed the movie, i loved the Book.I don’t watch baseball but the Book Can make you love it.
N. Tiwari –
I like this book and I like Lewis’ writing style.That said, if you aren’t a baseball fan – and I am not – then there will be parts that will drag. But that isn’t really a fault of the book or the writer in the least bit. I can’t see this book being marketed as anything other than a book about baseball, for baseball fans. It literally is exactly what it sells itself as.That said, if you can sit through the bits that drag to the parts that could serve some value for non-baseball fans (like me) then I think you are in for a rewarding experience. The book just barely touches 300 pages so it’s not particularly long either.