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Michael Lewis

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Paperback – March 17, 2004

by Michael Lewis (Author)

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"This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame." ―Forbes

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-budget Oakland A's, visionary general manager Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge―insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.

Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

March 17, 2004
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
ISBN-10

0393324818
ISBN-13

978-0393324815
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Editorial Reviews

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

Review

"The best book of the year, [Moneyball] already feels like the most influential book on sports ever written. If you're a baseball fan, Moneyball is a must."
― People

"Lewis has hit another one out of the park…You need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis's] thoughts about it."
― Janet Maslin, New York Times

"Moneyball is the best business book Lewis has written. It may be the best business book anyone has written."
― Mark Gerson, Weekly Standard

"By playing Boswell to Beane's Samuel Johnson, Lewis has given us one of the most enjoyable baseball books in years."
― Lawrence S. Ritter, New York Times Book Review

"It’s a sports story that’s actually a business story that’s also a story about preconceptions. Plus, Michael Lewis’s writing is so clear, readable, and highly entertaining."
― Charles Yu, Literary Hub

"Ebullient, invigorating…Provides plenty of action, both numerical and athletic, on the field and in the draft-day war room."
― Lev Grossman, Time

"A journalistic tour de force."
― Richard J. Tofel, Wall Street Journal

"Michael Lewis's beautiful obsession with the idea of value has once again yielded gold…Moneyball explains baseball's startling new insight; that for all our dreams of blasts to the bleachers, the sport's hidden glory lies in not getting out."
― Garry Trudeau

"I understood about one in four words of Moneyball, and it's still the best and most engrossing sports book I've read in years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode."
― Nick Hornby, The Believer

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (March 17, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393324818
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393324815
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,757 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Sports Industry
- #5 in Baseball (Books)
- #85 in Business Management (Books)

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The Huntington Book Depository

Michael Lewis at his best

Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2020

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It's hard to sit down and write something about a book that already has 1700+ reviews. But I bought this book when it first came out and have reread it several times since then, so feel I owe it to the book to say how well done it is. The baseball component of the book has been reviewed to death - it's certainly a great story about the Oakland A's, their unusual approach to statistics under general manager Billy Beane, and how that garnered them successes in the win/loss department despite a low payroll. Lewis does an engaging job as always of laying out an unusual cast of characters, their backstories, and their rag tag group against the world narrative sprinkled with a bunch of recognizable baseball players along for the ride.

But when you pair this book with Lewis' other writings, particularly those related to the financial sector, you start to see a familiar pattern or a deeper meaning which I didn't appreciate until recently - the data (whether financial, or baseball-related in this case) is out there in the world for everyone to see, but oftentimes it takes a unique individual or radical perspective to see that data differently and try to work some efficiencies from it that everyone else in the industry has overlooked. So it has taught me through my life to 1) even if you're not a math guy, you need to appreciate and try to understand the statistics in your life/industry, and 2) oftentimes there's a creative way to approach the data that will unlock some benefits. It's just a matter of thinking about where those efficiencies lie.

So read it as a great baseball story, or a book on statistics, or just as a great read on its own. But certainly worth your money and time to pick up a copy and give it a read. Highly recommend!

12 people found this helpful

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N. Tuzov

Is worth reading even if you couldn't care less for baseball

Reviewed in the United States on October 29, 2014

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I decided to read this book after I got a nagging feeling that I am the only statistician in the US who hasn't read it. This review is aimed at those who are interested in quantitative performance evaluation or quantitative modeling in general.

First, I'd like to thank Lewis for a book that is worth reading even for someone who has never learned the rules of the game and never will. Even if I had had a glimmer of interest in baseball per se before I read the book, it would have been extinguished for good anyway (read on to learn why).

According to Lewis, for about a hundred years American baseball existed as a peculiar social club composed of GMs, scouts, baseball writers and commentators, and players who would often become one of the former. The first reason why The Club was special was that it was rarely run as a business. Consider Walter Haas, a former owner of Oakland Athletics. Haas was a great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss and coincidentally served as CEO of Levi Strauss & Co for almost 20 years. He was not shy of giving it back to the American society or at least to the most indispensable part of it, professional baseball players. As a result, in 1991 Oakland A's enjoyed the highest payroll in baseball while losing money for the owner. Unfortunately, that commendable manifestation of social responsibility was halted in 1995 when the new owners switched to a pro-business stance and slashed the payroll drastically.

The new goal for the GM became to keep the team in the major league, while minimizing the ratio of payroll to the number of wins. The quest for how to run the most cost-effective team resulted in a number of fascinating discoveries. First, consider the process of drafting young players from high schools and colleges. The old scouts were used to some glaringly subjective player selection criteria, such as how cool the player's body looks ("selling jeans") or how concordant his facial features are with a great future in baseball ("The Good Face"). The "internal compass of an old baseball guy", directed them to look at the player and "imagine what he might become". They believed that they could judge and predict the player's performance simply by watching him. To be fair, the old school scouting worked fine but only assuming that the team's pockets were very deep. Indeed, that was often the case thanks to Walter Haas and other individuals who possessed similar amounts of wealth and social responsibility.

Of course, different stats (foot speed, batting average, etc) were also considered, but none of the old guard had the desire, ability or means to assess how predictable such metrics are given the current information about the player. For instance, do young power hitters tend to develop precision over time or not? Are the stats of a high school player informative enough or does it make sense to ignore them and focus on the college players who have a longer history? Are there metrics that confuse skill and luck and contain no useful information even about the past performance, let alone the future?

Further, suppose the future values of a measurable characteristic (e.g. foot speed, fastball velocity) can be predicted well, and we are fairly certain that luck and skill are not mixed up. So far so good, but exactly how much does that particular skill contribute to the ultimate objective, winning a game at the lowest cost? Say, if the future foot speed of the player is guaranteed to be as good as it has been, how much the team should be willing to pay for the player? If the answer is known, the GM can then perform some arbitrage by selling players whose characteristics are overpriced and buying those whose characteristics are underpriced.

It may appear strange that those questions were not raised and addressed until after Billy Beane became the GM of Oakland Athletics in 1997. Apart from the philanthropic attitude of the team owners, there were other reasons why. Before the late 1970s, quantitative analysis of baseball data was both hard for the lack of computers and impractical because the players' salaries were not that high. Most importantly, the eventual adoption of quantitative performance evaluation methods revealed that the baseball data are extremely noisy. To extract some useful insights, one has to generalize from a large body of stats that no living scout or other baseball insider can keep in his head. Likewise, to see whether a given quantitative approach does (not) work, it's not enough to follow the career of a single player or observe the outcome of a single game.

That nourished the perception that quantitative metrics are more or less useless and recoursing to one's "internal compass" works better when it's time to draft players and then decide how (not) to use them during the game. An example of such attitude is the scouts' belief that "if you see it once, it's there", which is a ringing endorsement of making a decision based on the sample size of one. Given how much the outcome of anything that happens on the field depends on luck, that's a kiss of death for good scouting, or at least for a cost-effective version of it.

Undoubtedly, baseball teams vary in skill, but, according to the book, the contribution of skill to the outcome of an average game is about four times less than the contribution of luck. In particular, the number of games in playoffs is so small that luck doesn't cancel out: in a series of five games, the worst team in the major league has a 15% chance to beat the best team. Because a team that loses in the playoffs cannot get the coveted World Series title it creates another psychological incentive for having little faith in the quantitative approach. To me it also means that if all of the noise were to disappear (and that's what "sabermetrics" is trying to achieve), the game would become far less fun to watch and talk about. There is not much thrill in observing how a slightly biased coin is flipped. Isn't that another reason why both the insiders and fans preferred to stick to the old ways instead of embracing the "performance scouting" and other insights offered by sabermetrics? If that's the case then The Club turns out to be far more rational and efficient than Lewis portrayed.

Next, I'd like to explore the most important point made by Lewis: bad as they may have been, the baseball statistics were probably far more accurate than anything used to measure the performance of people in many other lines of work, so ...? What immediately comes to my mind are the "scouting" (hiring) practices of Microsoft and Google that included the so-called brainteaser interviews that were administered for 10 to 20 years (see Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? and How Would You Move Mount Fuji? ). To me it has always been clear that being good at brainteasers does not predict one's future job performance unless the job amounts to solving brainteasers. Both companies banned the practice in the end, even though some copycats are still lurking around. The point, however, is why it lasted for as long as it did. Apparently, the engineers at Microsoft and Google are no fools. They figured out that the brainteasers fail at achieving their purported objective many years ago. Why continue to use them, then? Moneyball provides a plausible explanation. Companies are not only about doing business but sometimes about being a certain social club. The club entry requirements can be as arbitrary as anything. If they appear, to put it mildly, irrational, that is to be expected every now and then. Therefore, the real question is not "Are you smart enough to work at Google?" but "Are you a good fit for the Google social club?". Regardless of what the answer is, it has nothing to do with one's intelligence or the absence thereof.

Now back to baseball. If you have some quantitative background I could highly recommend "Stein's Paradox in Statistics", a paper published by Prof. Efron in 1977 (incidentally, that was the year Bill James published his first Baseball Abstract). The rather ancient article is quite in line with what I learned from Moneyball: the amount of noise in the baseball stats is substantial and the players are a lot more similar to each other than it appears to the public and even the insiders. It looks like my background in Statistics, combined with what I learned from the book, made it impossible to enjoy the game the way millions of fans do. Nevertheless, I managed to derive a lot of value from Moneyball and I wish you the same.

43 people found this helpful

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Colleen K.

Full of great nuggets of information hiding in a over-exaggerated yet still interesting story

Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2018

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Very interesting book that flies by. It is so easy to read that you can almost pardon's Michael Lewis' penchant for perpetuating the hyperbole of others and contributing exaggeration of his own. You can easily see how the added flair and drama makes the book more interesting for a mass audience. You can also excuse the fact that the book doesn't actually point out the answer to the original question. Why were the Oakland A's able to win so many games on a small budget? It turns out that was a little bit of skill but mostly luck. They got lucky with their pre-moneyball pitchers Zito, Mulder and Hudson.

Despite the fact that Lewis doesn't highlight this anti-climactic conclusion on his own, the book still has enough information for the reader to get there. It is ironic that this parallels the reason Bill James' departed from Baseball Abstract and that is mentioned in the book. There is too much focus on the details that don't matter. The high level narrative and explanation are more important. Budget matters. You can get a slight advantage by exploiting inefficiencies but this takes a long time to prove out due to limited data points the out-sized impact luck has. There are lots of little nuggets of information like that hiding in this book that make it worth reading.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

sgh100

this is a great book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 29, 2020

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This book was recommended to me by a friend, probably 4-5 years ago, and, despite not being a fan of baseball, I thought the book was excellent. I've heard a few people say that you really have to understand baseball before you can enjoy the sport (rather than the occasion of drinking weak beer in a stadium with friends), and I do think that's probably true. Having read this book I do have a new appreciation for the sport but the best thing about it is the story and the characters, all of which are, unbelievably, "real".

I'd never heard of Billy Beane, but he sounds like a very interesting guy, a smart guy and a great leader. I particularly like the story of someone who is willing to challenge the conventional wisdom, and he very much did that. The other thing that is really interesting is that he, himself, was given a shot at the big leagues based on the "hokum" of what a ball player should look like, and in defiance of what his stats were saying when he was signed as a player. Despite the pain which it maybe caused him, he purposefully turned his back on picking stars based on the "hokum" approach and went looking for players who did not "look like" him, i.e. weren't natural born athletes, didn't look good in uniform, didn't get the scouts excited, etc, etc. It's a rare quality to go looking for people who don't look like you.

The main thing to love though is the story about how "baseball insider wisdom" (on everything from picking players in the draft to the strategy of winning games to negotiating trades with other teams) was challenged by those outside baseball, but no one from within baseball, except for Beane and the Oakland As, was ever willing to put it to the test. Beane took this body of knowledge, further developed it, and then implemented it, and to great effect. His team, despite its small budget, was very successful over a long enough period of time to prove the point. It's almost impossible to imagine all the pro teams in any other sport, worldwide, ignoring so much data on how things could be done better, and for so long.

Now, I'm going to watch the movie.

3 people found this helpful

Peter L. Hurst

Behavioual economics case study

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 4, 2012

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Moneyball is ostensibly a book about Baseball, superfIcially a book about the Oakland A's (equivalent of Bolton Wanderers under Sam Allardyce) and their General Manager (equivalent of a 'Director of football') Billy Beane in the late 90's/early Noughties and how a club with scarce financial resources consistently out-performed its more wealthy rivals and it is! But it is so much more than that, this book has more layers than an onion.

On one level this is a book about Baseball and a maverick who subverted the consensus view on how the game should be played and understood but on a deeper level this is a case study of an idea. It is behavioural economics as applied to sport.

The book demonstrates how Billy Beane used the insights of a Baseball statistician named Bill James (a cipher for Nobel winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, author of 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'?) and the practical mathematical genius of Paul Podesta (a Harvard graduate with no Baseball experience) to outsmart his competitors.

'Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to Baseball...... Paul wanted to look at stats because the stats offered offered him new ways of understanding.....That was James's most general point: the naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games.'

On one level level this is an old-fashioned David vs Goliath story but on a deeper level it is a book about two competing views of human nature. The view being triumphed in this book is that of 'behavioural economics.' In short, that human beings are inherently irrational. Trusting one's gut, or intuition, is inherently flawed and is subject to systematic biases/limitations/flaws/illusions which can only be rooted out by a sophisticated analysis of relevant statistical data.

The author Michael Lewis is really an economics writer and what he has managed to do is something that many writers (including Daniel Kahneman, whose writings in my opinion tend to be turgid in the extreme) seem unable to do, and that is:- make seemingly complex ideas come alive by embedding them in real-life situations with real people. Moneyball is a great sports book but it is also popular social science writing at its finest too.

17 people found this helpful

Kuma

A home run

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2011

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Michael Lewis is better known for his books giving an insider's view into the world of high finance and economics so knocking out a book on baseball may seem somewhat incongruous. However, a few pages in and the parallels between the two subjects seem suspiciously close - like Liar's Poker and The Big Short and their investors trying to make a killing on the markets by staying ahead of the game using information and careful blagging, Moneyball tracks cash-strapped baseball team the Oakland Athletics and their unconventional manager Billy Beane as they successfully compete against the wealthy teams by careful analysis of players' statistics and doing the complete opposite of what is generally expected. Picking up a rag-tag line-up of players that don't look the part for knockdown salaries - fat kids, kids that throw funny, kids that are scared to hit the ball, older players thought past their prime - they give the multi-million dollar players more than a run for their money, continually defying the odds season after season to finish near the top. This is a book packed both with wit and fascinating insight into the science of baseball (you don't need to be an enthusiast to start with but you may end up being one at the end!) and a very engrossing read, highly recommended!

I would suggest trying to pick up the edition with the "new afterword" which discusses the response to the book from the "baseball industry" which treated as arrogant bragadocio from writer Billy Beane, totally missing that it wasn't actually written by Mr Beane and was hardly boastful or arrogant. The baseball industry - the writers, scouts, managers etc - continues to perpetuate their myths even as other smaller teams (and some of the bigger teams) adopt the A's modus operandi with similar successful results.

7 people found this helpful

Gs-trentham

A new way of adding up the numbers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 22, 2011

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In 1990 I fulfilled a long-standing ambition and went to the first two games of the World Series. Cincinatti Reds were on their way to sweeping the Oakland As. The previous year, the As had won the Series for the ninth time, a total still exceeded only by the New York Yankees and the St Louis Cardinals. But in the 21 years since that defeat the World Series hasn't seen the As again.

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis suggests a simple explanation: the game's finances had gone stratospheric, leaving the As unable to compete for the superstars. At the same time, he explains how they remained seriously competitive without going bankrupt: they disregarded the gut instincts of scouts immersed in subjective assessment of players, adopting instead an analysis of statistics weighted in favour of certain key elements.

At first, the book looks at how and why the analysis worked, but it evolves into the story of a single season when it was the essential rationale that governed the way Oakland identified and signed players. So it becomes a human story, focussing on the unlikely heroes out on the diamond and on the General Manager who believes implicitly in the information emerging from the computer of his Number Two. The General Manager is Billy Beane, a former player who should have been a star but never quite made it, and is now a quixotic leader who prefers to be somewhere else when his team is playing. It will be a hard-hearted reader who fails to empathise with Beane as the season unfolds. Never mind the mathematics, the book is worth reading if only to sit beside him while he trades away his best players in order to sign unrated others.

Lewis doesn't claim that the As found a one-size-fits-all infallible blueprint; unarguably, several million dollars into the annual bank balance of a Barry Bonds, an A-Rod or a Jeter make for an interesting alternative. Moneyball, really, is simply a one-off example of brilliant sports writing by an author whose true beat is big business. In this edition, Lewis unfortunately, cannot resist an appendix to deal with a faction in baseball that decries his efforts. He should have let the book speak for itself. It is certainly good enough.

2 people found this helpful

M. Hillmann

Independent approach to sport coaching

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2009

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American baseball - I wouldn't even read a book about British cricket and I played that avidly as a kid. I do not know what a walk is or a strikeout or a home run but this book proved compulsive reading.

Oakland A are a small, unsexy US baseball team who consistently got to near the top of the baseball leagues on a fraction of the money and budget of the leading high profile teams like the Boston White Sox or the New York Yankies. When you think of intellectuals influencing the course of human affairs, you think of physics, or political theory or economics. You do not think of baseball because you don't think of baseball as having an intellectual underpinning. But everything does have an intellectual underpinning and when an original thinker applies his mind startling results can be achieved.

Billy James, a Kansas University educated pork and bean factory worker was fascinated by baseball and studied it assiduously. He published his first leaflet : 1977 Baseball abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information That You Just Can't Find Anywhere Else. Doesn't sound a best seller does it?

But his thesis was that people in charge of professional baseball believed they could judge players performance simply by watching it. In this conventional wisdom on which millions of dollars was lavished, they were deeply mistaken. It was only by measurement and statistics that you could distinguish the good hitter from the average hitter - it is simply not visible.

James theory was not original - many others had measured players' performance. But he lived in a time of radical advances in computer technology enabling him to analyse vast amounts of data. And he lived in a time when baseball players salaries boomed - dramatically raising the value of his information. He developed computer models that correlated the number of runs a team would score against key statistics he identified but which were not particularly valued by the professional scouts and baseball professionals based on historical analysis. His models proved accurate in prediction future performance. However the baseball professionals failed to see the point. Until Billy Beane came along.

Billy Beane became General manager of Oakland A in 1997 and he had read all of Billy James Abstracts and had taken to heart not just the knowledge, but more importantly, had adopted the attitude of rational thinking and testing the evidence empirically. Billy Beane was not a statistician but he employed one - Paul DePoesta who applied the computer power and models developed by Wall Street Traders to baseball.

Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta developed Billy James approach to rate all the unknown, as well as famous players, in the game. Then they withstood the ridicule of their contemporaries by seeking the unknown or the quirky players, but ones that have a proven track record in some key criteria by which Billy and Paul rated them. They bought players at a fraction of the cost of the high profile teams and became winners. They achieved consistent success on the baseball pitch reaching the playoffs season after season from 2000 to 2004, when this book was written. And success at a fraction of the cost of the high spending teams. Once the value of their discoveries was recognised they had no hesitation in selling the stars they had created and bringing in more unknown players.
But it was not just in buying unknown players with special talents that Oakland excelled. It was also in identifying what each individual could contribute to the team and coaching them intensively in that trait and accepting their deficiencies in other traits. This is not just a story about dry statistical analysis - it is full of colour of the individual and quirky characters that Billy Beane turned from outcasts to key players in his teams.

Billy Beane's approach generated an enormous amount of antipathy among conventional baseball professionals, but Billy was not intimidated. .

This book is a lesson in life and in business - do not try and change people, nobody is talented in everything but if you build on people's strengths you can overcome their weaknesses in a team; don't follow the herd, think for yourself, look at the evidence, measure the outcomes; take some of Billy Beane's courage.
P.S. I love the names in the US - where else do you get Pauldepodesta working with Billy Beane.

3 people found this helpful

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