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Michael Lewis

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Kindle Edition

by Michael Lewis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “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).

One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century

Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games?

In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers 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). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers 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 numbers 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 had 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. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted.

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?

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316 pages
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W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

March 17, 2004
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694 KB
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There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.
Highlighted by 2,590 Kindle readers
That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone.
Highlighted by 2,414 Kindle readers
“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient,” said Palmer. “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
Highlighted by 1,070 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

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

From Booklist

Unlike professional football and basketball, Major League Baseball has no cap on the amount of money a team can spend on its players, which makes it nearly impossible for "small market" clubs to compete with the behemoths in Gotham and L.A. On the other hand, as Lewis shows us in his engaging saga of the Oakland Athletics, there are always ways to win on the cheap. The hero of Lewis' tale is Oakland General Manager Billy Beane, a bust as a player but a deft judge of talent. Lewis was granted what appears to be unlimited access--he often found himself in the Oakland executive offices when a big trade was going down--and his book reads like it. He also does a wonderful job of picking the brains and explaining the motives of the baseball statistics geeks who are helping redefine the way the game will be played in the twenty-first century. With so many baseball books to choose from, it is difficult to single out a few as must-haves, but this one comes pretty close. Kevin Canfield
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

May be the best book ever written on business.

About the Author

Michael Lewis is the bestselling author of Coach, Moneyball, and The New New Thing, among other books. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their two daughters

From AudioFile

Before Bill James, baseball junkies, even those selecting players, were relegated to assessing players and teams using only mundane statistics. Then, the Oakland Athletics, under General Manager Billy Beane, adopted James's radical methods--and philosophy--with dramatic success. Michael Lewis tells the surprisingly fascinating story behind the success of the A's, whose choices of players were often derided by other teams. Lewis's reading is excellent; he loves the story and the people, and the joy he experienced writing MONEYBALL comes through as clearly as any fastball. Not just for baseball fans, this story will impress anyone who understands that the way things are done can always be improved, even the seemingly subjective process of picking star athletes. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000RH0C8G
Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (March 17, 2004)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 17, 2004
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 694 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 316 pages

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Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children.

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justlikethegame

Finding a new way to win

Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2013

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Michael Lewis is an engaging storyteller. I came to this book via the film with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill and I'm glad I read the book. Of course, as with all books, there's more to the story than the film suggests. The book includes the fact that Beane inherited the statistical analysis approach he uses with the Oakland Athletics from his predecessor, Sandy Alderson. The film gives the impression that Beane arrived at it after meeting his assistant GM. However, even though he did not originate the approach Beane was among the early adopters of it and seems to have been willing to fully commit to it. Beane himself is portrayed as a very intense character, often prone to violent outbursts, but still an effective leader.

What I love about this story is that it is about a team faced with what seems like intractable adversity who find a new way to compete. Although I don't believe that statistical analysis alone is as effective as it sometimes seems, I do believe that it is far more valuable than its opponents would contend. Practitioners should take the same warnings as those provided for people looking into the stock market: "past performance is no guarantee of future gains." Once that is understood, the stats are far from meaningless. Baseball, like most forms of conflict and competition, is a fluid situation with innumerable variables at play including luck and chaos. Reality cannot be reduced to numbers, but it can be better understood with the RIGHT numbers.

The profiles of Billy Beane and key Oakland A's players from this period are seen by some readers as digressions, but I experienced them as along the theme of adaptation to adversity and finding new ways to win. Beane did not experience much success as a major league player, but he adapted and went into scouting and then management at which he has been very successful (though not as successful as he would like). The two players most prominently featured are Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford, both with very interesting stories. Hatteberg moved from catcher to first base after nerve damage in his elbow. Bradford was a pitcher with an unconventional delivery whose pitching style looked awkward despite his competence at deceiving batters.

Some have criticized this book because the Oakland A's have not performed well in the past couple of years under Beane's continued tenure as GM. That criticism is as absurd as readers of Jim Collins' book *Good to Great* who dismiss his conclusions about successful companies. Both books are about practices and processes that contribute to success. In the case of Moneyball, the rest of the league has been adopting these approaches and they have become less and less of an advantage. Also, the game goes on, and teams are finding new ways to compete. The point is, according to the conventional wisdom of the time, no team with a fraction of the payroll of the NY Yankees should've been able to compete or have similar success to the Yankees, but the A's did. The story is, in a sense, time bound, but the principles about adaptation, being stalwart in the face of those who resist meaningful change, and finding value where others see none (aka market inefficiencies), are all themes Lewis illustrates and develops effectively.

The baseball minutiae can bother some readers, but I found it necessary to the story and it is spread out and well explained by the author. Overall it is a very enjoyable book and, in my opinion, very inspiring stories.

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O. Halabieh

Value Investing meets Baseball!

Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2012

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This book tells the story of the Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane and his team building philosophy/approach. Billy has focused on drafting undervalued or overlooked players and building a great team on a budget. Unlike most of his GM peers, Billy and his team rely on empirical statistics to make decisions on a more systematical fashion. He understands that to beat the other teams who have much largers budgets he cannot play the same game they are. Instead he applies - what I call - a Benjamin Graham value investing style approach to picking players (stocks) and building a team (portfolio). The outcome a team that pays the lowest on a per win basis within the league.

Michael does it again, with his great story telling approach to reporting. A recommended read for any baseball or business enthusiast alike.

Below are key excerpts from the book:

1) "The meetings, from their point of view, are all about minimizing risk. They can't afford to have guys not work out. There's no point in taking risks on players temperamentally, or legally, unsuited to pro ball."

2) "We're blending what we see but we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see."

3) "When Alderson entered the game he wanted to get his mind around it, and he did. He concluded that everything from on-field strategies to player evaluation was better conducted by scientific investigation - hypotheses tested by analysis of historical statistical baseball data - than by reference to the collective wisdom of old baseball men. By analyzing baseball statistics you could see through a lot of baseball nonsense."

4) "Managers tend to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than pick a strategy that is most efficient," said Palmer. " The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move."

5) John Henry: "People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence - as if it's inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individuals perception/belief. The same is true in baseball."

6) "The important thing is not to recreate the individual," Billy Bean would later say. "The important thing is to recreate the aggregate."

7) "No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you're fu**ed."

8) "The day you say you have to do something, you're screwed. Because you are going to make a bad deal. You can always recover from the player you didn't sign. You may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price."

9) "Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put dollar figure on it."

10) "Know exactly what you want and go after him." (Never mind who they say they want to trade.)

11) "Every deal you do will be publicly scrutinized by subjective opinion. If I'm [IBM CEO] Lou Gerstner, I'm not worried that every personnel decision I make is going to wind up on the front page of the business section. Not everyone believes that they know everything about the personal computer. But everyone who ever picked up a bat thinks he knows baseball. To do this well, you have to ignore the newspapers."

12) Bill James: "1) Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness is a strength. 2) The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind. 3) Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards."

13) "I learned that if you look long enough for an argument against reason you will find it."

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N. Tiwari

Review from a non-baseball person ---- it's a good book

Reviewed in Canada on October 19, 2023

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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.

One person found this helpful

Barbara

Regalo apprezzato

Reviewed in Italy on November 12, 2023

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Lo cercavo da tempo, conoscevo la storia. Molto apprezzato dalla persona alla quale l’ho regalato

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Cliente Amazon

Todo perfecto

Reviewed in Spain on September 23, 2022

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El libro llegó perfectamente y a tiempo.

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Renato Ruas Pinto

Excellent book

Reviewed in Brazil on November 7, 2020

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I have seen the movie and enjoyed it so I decided to read the book. As always, the movie only scratches the surface of a fascinating history. I know very little about baseball (as a matter of fact, I think it is really boring), but Lewis writing made it easy for me to understand the principles behind the management system proposed by Billy Beane. As an engineer, it was cool seeing science and hard and cold data driving the decision-making process and get good results out of it.

Marco Odasso

Wow!

Reviewed in Germany on September 30, 2021

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When reading about sabermetrics in baseball, you either are so much into it or you start and wish to suicide immediately after page 1o or 2. Well, this book is a greatly entertaining adventure about baseball and how some “nerds” changed this beautiful game forever. The author has this weird gift to make you feel as you were there when Beane is negotiating a trade on the phone or when players discuss how to face what seems to be their Moby Dick more than a tough pitcher. Everything while explaining how data drove a club to success while surrounded by teams with tons of money the A’s didn’t have. Beautiful book!

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