|
|
Moneyball: The Art of
Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
|
|
 |
- Hardcover: 288 pages ; Dimensions
(in inches): 1.01 x 9.68 x 6.14
- Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company;
1st edition (May 10, 2003)
- ISBN: 0393057658
|
|
 |
Book Description
The Oakland Athletics
have a secret: a winning baseball team is made, not bought.
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?
Book Info
The story of a small group of
undervalued professional baseball players and executives who turned
themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major
League Baseball; the Oakland Athletics. Author explores the secret
of success in baseball, looking in all the logical places, and shows
how the real source might just be a cache of numbers.
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
|
|
