Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

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The only negative review so far at this site seemed to confuse the author's craftmanship with his subject. This is a well-written, quick read, which, if you are any kind of baseball fan, will cause you to stop repeatedly and think about what you've just read.

Every baseball fan has asked themselves over and over, why are marginal players overpaid? Why are millions invested in ONE player to the detriment of the team? Why does ownership seem trapped in some preconceived notion of what a ballplayer should look like? This book seeks to answer those questions and present an alternative view of how to run a winning team. And here, in a nutshell is that answer:

Position players should be signed based on the On Base Percentage. Pitchers should be signed based on Strikeouts, Walks, Home runs allowed and groundballs.

There. That's it. Time to go home and enjoy your vast savings, Mr. Steinbrenner.

Of course it's more complex than that, but perversely, Major League Baseball seems to have based its criteria for quality on a completely subjective and error-prone system: Wins, earned run average, batting average, runs batted in.

The book does a wonderful job of demonstrating how a small germ of an idea took hold, slowly grew, and then became embraced by people with the position to do something about it. It's the Revenge of the Nerds and it's positively engaging.

Billy Beane comes off as some 21st Century tortured prince, except he's not Hamlet trying to avenge his father's death, he's every jerk high school jock you ever met who, as an adult, hates himself. Freud wouldn't even get out of bed for this one.

It's sad because he and his computer geeks could actually save baseball from itself. But there is not one incident of joy reported in this book. It would be nice to read that he turned down the Red Sox job because he wanted to stay close to his daughter, but she is never mentioned as a consideration. It's just a shame that someone whose eyes were opened to the real value of ballplayers doesn't carry the exhileration of someone lost, now found, but rather wields it like some terrible weapon.

And objectivity, statistics and mathematics notwithstanding, the fact is that nine Miggy Tejadas are preferable to nine Scott Heddeburg (sp?).

Lewis, who previously wrote some of the best books on Wall Street's go-go '80s (Liar's Poker) and Silicon Valley's go-go '90s (The New New Thing), here turns his attention to professional baseball. Now, I should preface this by saying that I used to love baseball and these days it doesn't interest me much at all. There was a time when I was a total stats geek, I bought all the Bill James abstracts, played tabletop games, etc., but a combination of playing in college and the escalating money completely turned me off to the game. I knew this was supposed to be a good book but had no intention of reading it until Nick Hornby's rave review in his column in The Believer. I figured if one of my favorite British novelists liked the book, there must be something to it. I picked it up and within ten pages I was totally hooked.

The basis for the book is the question of how the Oakland A's, one of baseball's poorest teams as measured by payroll, managed to win so many games in the first few years of the new millennium. Lewis's potentially boring answer revolves around inefficiencies in the market for players, but he weaves this story around the A's General Manager, Billy Beane. Now, if you have some axe to grind with Beane, you might as well not read the book, 'cause Lewis tends to be rather fawning in many places. Still, Beane's own background and mediocre career form the perfect framework upon which to build this story about evaluating baseball talent. Beane was a hugely athletic, "can't miss" prospect, who turned down a joint football/baseball scholarship from Stanford to sign with the New York Mets out of high school. His pro career turned out to be utterly undistinguished, and this disconnect is what drove him to seek new methods of scouting and evaluating baseball talent. It also helped matters that the A's new owners refused to spend any excess money, and demanded that the team be treated as a business. Beane jettisoned conventional scouting wisdom (and to a certain extent, methods), to focus on statistical indicators not widely followed inside baseball. Here, the book takes a detour into the realm of "sabremetrics" (the statistical analysis of baseball), and various attempts to arrive at more meaningful ways to calculating a player's offensive value.

The result of developing a criteria of player valuation that was radically at odds with the prevailing wisdom of the market was that Beane was able to get the players he liked for very cheap. The rest of the book is devoted to detailing this process. Chapter 5 is probably the best, detailing how the A's orchestrated the 2002 amateur draft so that they got an inordinate amount of players they coveted for below market value. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the loss of their three star players after the 2001 season and how managed to compensate for this. To show the Beane methodology in action during the season, the reader is taken inside several trades and roster moves. This includes a chapter on the mid-season trade for relief pitcher Ricardo Rincon, bracketed by chapters detailing Beane's pursuit of certain players who were not considered major-league material (Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford). The book ends on a valedictory note, as the A's set a record by winning 20 games in a row and other teams start to buy in to their methods.

It should be noted that the book is far from perfect. Lewis has an unfortunately tendency for repetition when it comes to important points and themes, hammering them home, again and again. And although he does point out many of Beane's logical inconsistencies and emotional flaws, Lewis does often come across as more of an enamored fan than a strict journalist. Some critics feel that the A's success detailed in the book was based on several star players obtained the old-fashioned way, thus disproving the whole premise. However, it has to be understood that the practices detailed in the book can't really be proven to work one way or another for another decade or so. Still the insights into challenging conventional thinking and searching for alternative data or data patterns will likely appeal to readers of Lewis' other works and are applicable far beyond baseball. And while the jury is still out, several other teams have since hired general managers with the same basic philosophy as Beane. Ultimately, it's an interesting story, and one that Lewis tells very well -- even for non baseball fans.

For a former baseball player Billy Beane is a rare bird as a baseball GM. He used real baseball statistics, the kind the sabermetricians use to make great trade and bring a strong team back to Oakland. He had a great advantage over other GMs because he took advantage of their ignorance and tendencies to rely on the somewhat biased eyes of basebll scouts. What Michael Lewis did with this book was to show the world of baseball how Billy Beane did it and now I am sure that other GMs like Brian Cashman at New York and Theo Epstein in Boston are catching on. I don't know how much Steve Phillips put into action when he was the Mets GM. His lack of great success there indicates that he [robably didn't follow it enough. But now as an ESPN commentator he definitely mentions it. This book si so good that the term moneyball now means the strategy that Billy Beane used. So the title of this book became a baseball term! This book is a must for managers, general managers and owners of professional baseball teams. It is also great for the fans and the fantasy baseball enthusiasts.

Along with Mike Schell's books and the ones like "Curve Ball" written by Albert and Bennett this is one of the most thoughtful and scientific books on the game of baseball, how to win at it and how to build a successful team. The other books I mentioned were written by professional statisticians. It is the great success of the statistical science of sports, sabermetrics that we are now witnessing a scientific and statistical approach to baseball and other sports that had been lacking for many years. What Beane proved with regard to money was that a small market team like Oakland without the big money of a Steinbrenner could build a great team through smart trades and drafts based on looking at the right statistics on the players, the statistics that determine value in terms of run production for offense and run prevention for pitchers and defense.

The amazon reviews of this book are almost unanymous in their praise of Lewis' book. Read it and enjoy it. If I haven't convinced you, read some of the other fine reviews here.

I got the impression from reading reviews and snipits from Moneyball, that the book would give me a "fantastic" new behind the scenes view of the A's front office and Billy Beane. The book had it's moments(specifically when Lewis went in depth about the A's "new philosophy" and how things went down before the trade deadline), but the thing I took from the book more than any other, is that Lewis is a master of filler. I got the impression that he went in-depth about the family-life/history of Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteberg because he wanted to make his book a more respectable length, because lets face it, the fact that Chad Bradford throws side-arm, or the fact that he was taught to throw sidearm by his highschool coach/preacher has absolutely nothing to do with the economics of the game and he loosely tied Bradford in with Voros who makes the miraculous discovery about how pitchers don't consistantly give up the same number of hits year-in and year-out(I'm not trying to demean the discovery).

I've seen some of the reviews saying "WOW THIS IS THE BEST BASEBALL BOOK I'VE EVER READ", if that's the case, baseball books are in a equally sad state on par with the game and it's economics. It wasn't a bad book, but out of the 5 books I've read in the last three weeks, it falls in at number five from best to worst. As a baseball fanatic(and self-proclaimed stat nerd) I can't even fathom how this book could possibly be interesting to the average fan or baseball novice.

I never understood nor really liked baseball. I bought the book mostly to read about the inspired use of statistics, and the creative thinking that went into looking for the real keys to victory. I can safely say that while I may not have fallen in love with baseball, I will never find it boring again. If you have someone you want to turn into a fan, this book a superb gift option. The amount of detail in this book--for example, just the description of the strike zone and what different pitches and batters do to narrow the zone, what can be known about specific individual propensities and vulnerabilities associated with that little box, are truly inspirational.

This is a really excellent book. If we managed the national security budget the way Billy Bean managed the Oakland A's, we'd have faster better cheaper military hardware, and a lot more plowshares. I was also impressed by the way in which Billy Bean built a team, in which players who might not have been individual stars excelled at setting up others in a true team effort where the group as a whole is stronger than the sum of the parts. Others have written better reviews from a baseball fans point of view--as a non-baseball fan, I can attest to this book's being an "aha" experience.

See also:
Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Not only is it the first look inside the most successful franchise - sure, there's the Yankees, but when historians look back, it will be Beane's A's that are remembered as the innovators. Even non-baseball fans will enjoy the crisp writing and phenomenal story-telling. Lewis' previous books are a high standard, but Moneyball may be even better. I'm still amazed that Beane allowed so much access - either Lewis is every bit as persuasive as Beane or Beane has something up his sleeve! The true star of the book may end up being Paul DePodesta, who will likely be the next great GM, following JP Ricciardi and Theo Epstein as "Beane Counters" and likely the men that saved baseball. I can't speak for the rest of Baseball Prospectus, but this has to be the best baseball book not written by us in the last decade.

Having read all of the Bill James Baseball Abstracts since they were first widely published, as well as articles and books from others in the field of sabermatics; and having been a Met fan since their beginning in 1962 and remembering the playing career of Billy Beane, I looked forward to reading this book. What a disappointment.

After the first third of the book, which laid out the foundation of the Oakland A's methods of evaluating players, referencing the seminal works of Bill James and others regarding on-base perentages, pitches seen per plate appearance, et al, the remaining two-thirds turned into what I consider a PR puff piece on the greatness of Billy Beane, the man who saved or at least reinvented baseball.

Not only did I find the book rather ponderous from the midpoint on, but I also thought the descriptions of Beane's habits to be depressing and very sad. Without a doubt he has retooled scouting and player development using the methods of sabermatics, yet he doesn't want to watch, actually almost cannot watch, the games themselves. When he does watch, he cannot enjoy what he is watching. Somehow, author Lewis does not see it this way, or chooses to make light of it as simply a quirk.

With too little discussion of the technical nuances of his methods for my taste, the book is really a character study of a very complex and flawed individual, a man whose whole life revolves around baseball, but not the game as it unfolds on the field but instead the game of buying and selling commodities. It is almost as if he is only in the game to prove to others how smart he is, to gain revenge for the injustice of his playing career, and to do this by controlling and in some cases demeaning others (scouts, Art Howe, et al.) His front office staff come off far better, as men who love the analytical techniques they are bringing to the game, but also as men who love to watch the game unfold. In the long haul, it is they who seem to have the brightest and happiest futures, not Beane.

In summary, I was very disappointed in the book -- the exerpt in Sports Illustrated and an earlier article in the New York Times Magazine told me as much as I believe was necesary to understand the methods, and the study of the man was too much a glorification of Bily Beane and too little an objective look at a very complicated man.

Michael Lewis, whose previous books have taken us inside the worlds of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, takes us to the offices of the Oakland Coliseum for a behind-the-scenes look at Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta, and the Oakland A's.

This is unlike any baseball book you've ever read, as Lewis reports on conversations that Beane had with other GMs and pulls back the curtains on the inner workings of a major league baseball team.

If you're not a baseball fan, this book will appeal to you for its in-depth look at a management team at the top of its game; if you are a baseball fan, you will be amazed by the level of detail that Lewis brings to the subject.

This book deserves a spot among the best baseball books ever written, alongside such classics as 'Ball Four,' and 'Veeck as In Wreck.'

Will this be the legacy of the Oakland A's? Nine consecutive losses in games that could have clinched the American League Division Series? Did you watch last night's Game 5 of the 2003 ALDS, Oakland against the Boston Red Sox? It was a remarkable bit of baseball. Even skipping all the baserunning errors and pitching changes, Oakland only trailed 4-3 in the bottom of the 9th, with Boston's highly suspect bullpen poised to give the game to Oakland.

This is how the inning unfolded for Oakland: Walk. Walk. Sacrifice bunt. Called strike three. Walk. Called strike three.

No runs. No hits. No swings. No errors. Three men left on. Red Sox 4, A's 3.

The legacy of Billy Beane is a story that's not yet fully written. There are now three AL teams that play Moneyball -- Boston and Toronto as well as Oakland. Two of those are playoff teams, and Toronto is on the march, perpetually improving third-place finishers in a strong division. The story of "Moneyball", as told by Michael Lewis, effortlessly recounts the "stathead" revolution: how analysis of baseball stats went from the only three stats shown on TV in the '70s (BA, HR, RBI), to the more complex methods espoused by Harvard men like Paul DePodesta, who came to power at the height of the small-market revolution. Unbeknownst to baseball's asleep-at-the-wheel Commissioner, there is a way to win ball games without expensive free agent signings. Billy Beane's A's have won four straight AL West titles, espousing the virtues of patience, power, pitchers who throw strikes. Under his philosophy, teams can win with or without the high-salaried slugger (Jason Giambi, who crawled his way to a .250 batting average with the Yanks in 2003), without the highly-paid manager (Art Howe, who sleepwalked his way to a last-place finish with the Mets in '03, and hopefully won't be back). Oakland wins every year, even as their salary plummets. They'll lose Miguel Tejada this winter, and still win at least 95 games in 2004. This is baseball... without the baseball.

Where are the limits to winning Moneyball? You go deep into the A's lineup in the bottom of the 9th in the One Big Game they couldn't win: where was the slugger? Where was the scary bat? For a team that prides itself on the big picture (the three-run homer), where were the fundamentals? Why didn't Eric Byrnes touch home in Game 3? Why did two different innings in Game 5 end when baserunners were gunned down (by a mile each) going for the extra base? Why did Ramon Hernandez sac-bunt in the 9th, giving the Red Sox pitchers the out they couldn't get themselves? Why didn't Melhuse and Long *swing* at strike three?

In the long run, Moneyball has proven itself to be a winning philosophy. The sabermetrics revolution is in its early stages, not its late stages -- in spite of Oakland's repeated playoff failures; in spite of Anaheim's throwback World Series win in 2002; in spite of George Steinbrenner's bank vault and cable millions. This is the wave of the future, the natural answer to baseball's escalating salary structure: you can win without paying $6 million a year to a .260 hitter who doesn't walk, or without paying Todd van Poppel money to Todd Van Poppel.

However... why are the A's 0-9 in championship games?

Why didn't the team take their bats off their shoulders when it really counted?

The big controversy in baseball recently is the fact that there is a huge disparity in the wealth of teams. The New York Yankees, for example, can afford to spend about 140 million dollars a year to buy their players, while teams in smaller markets, such as the Oakland A's, only have about a quarter of that. Despite this, and unlike other small market teams, the A's have been consistently competitive for the last several years. This book, Money Ball, attempts to explain why.

It concentrates primarily on the A's young general manager, Billy Beane, and the new ideas he's brought to the game as they regard evaluating talent. There are a couple of good ones. He concentrates, for example, on on-base percentage as opposed to simple batting average; the theory being that the more often you get on base--in any way--the less often you're making an out. In evaluating players, he looks for those who have already accomplished something, as opposed to those who merely have potential. The author then shares with us this gem, which is almost astonishing for its blatant obviousness. "Every batter should also possess the power to hit home runs, in part because home run power forced opposing pitchers to pitch more cautiously, and led to walks, and high on-base percentages." To the extent that these are the qualities that made Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds the best players in the history of baseball, it would be kind of difficult to argue with this proposition.

In fact, except for a couple of good points here and there, the book is pretty much empty of insight, and monotonously boring as well. There is a chapter in which old time scouts discuss players they wish to draft, and how they are outfoxed by Billy and Billy's computer addicted assistant. Woo. There is a chapter having to do with the pro baseball career of Billy Beane, which mostly took place in the minor leagues, and which was about as undistinguished as it gets. There is a chapter on the men who revolutionized the way baseball statistics are kept--among them Bill James and his Baseball Abstract--in the early seventies. Now, if reading about men who compile baseball statistics sounds exciting, by all means, run out and buy this.

The writing style is pedestrian and displays zero wit. Indeed, and incredibly, the author actually uses the f-word in his narrative on occasion. He may as well hold up a sign: I'M NOT CLEVER ENOUGH TO THINK OF A BETTER WORD.

The worst aspect of the book is that the great and cunning machinations of the remarkable Billy Beane can't be judged. It's too early. The author goes into great detail about the players he selected in the 2002 draft and how he outwitted the Neanderthals in the rest of the league to get them. Beane is gleeful at its end because he was able to get most of the players on his wish list, and we are meant to be awed by his skill.

Except, as of today, nobody has ever heard of these guys. I don't believe any are in the major leagues yet, and I can only find one of them on the A's Triple-A Sacramento team: Nick Swisher, who as of today is hitting .264, with 20 home runs and 87 walks. Of course, some or all of these guys might be great some day--and Swisher certainly looks promising--but as of now, who can tell? It's like praising one's selections in a horse race before the race is over. What's the point?

Again, there are a couple of good observations here, and one can't deny that the A's have been a good team, but the case made here is not compelling enough--not yet anyway--and the prose is dreadful. Maybe, some day, the book will be worth the money. Not now.

Baseball of yesteryear was played with a lot less money and players were evaluated on various subjective criteria. Now the money involved is much more and some people, including Billy Beane, Bill James, and others, are saying that statistical analysis can be used to put together a good team.

While reading this book you may re-think how a baseball player is evaluated. It's interesting how Beane's philosophy of avoiding outs (including sacrifices) at all costs and emphasizing getting on base (through walks) contrasts with so many people, including his own coaches and experienced players.

Naturally, it is fun to compare Oakland's success under Beane to other organizations; let's say the Atlanta Braves (John Schuerholz) and the New York Yankees (Brian Cashman). Since 1998 (when Beane became GM) through 2002 the A's have won 457 regular-season games, finished first in their division twice and won no playoff series. In that time period, Schuerholz's Braves have won 493 games won their division each of those years and have won 4 division and league championships. Cashman's Yankees have won 497 games, 8 division and league championships and 3 World Series. Maybe these three general managers operate pretty well given their respective environments. Since Beane did not go to Boston we will never know if he could have made the Red Sox more successful (although Bill James is in their front office).

This book is definitely worth the read. It gives the reader a lot to think about and perhaps the reader's view of the game will be different. Those who are in fantasy leagues might be particularly interested in some of the analysis. Some of the hero worship of Billy Beane could be toned down; he has only been at this business for 5+ years. On the other hand, Michael Lewis depicts Beane as more than human who can't stand to watch his own team play. Maybe he'll be the Branch Rickey of our times but it will take several more years to find out.

Perhaps the most troubling for the sport are the conclusions near the end of the book: is this all worth it? The fans, the owners, the coaches and managers and even the players want the "flashy" baseball. Move the fences in and hit more home runs. Do the hits and runs and the base stealing -- that is what sells tickets and makes the sports highlights. How many championships have you won? Do we really want the game to be managed by spreadsheets and statistical projections?

Michael Lewis is a good storyteller, although for non-fiction writing he tends to embellish quite a bit or even make things up (I've read some of his other books where I am quite familiar with the subjects), but this is still an insightful account of how A's general manager Billy Beane built a competitive team in spite of one of the smallest payrolls in professional baseball.

Particularly fascinating is the way Beane and his cohorts evaluate baseball talent. They challenge a lot of the typical assumptions that many in the game have about what makes for a good prospect. Often the player who looks the part ("looks good in a baseball uniform" as Beane puts it) or has the big fastball ends up a bust, while, for example, the small or slightly overweight player who gets on base a lot or makes the opposing pitcher throw a lot of pitches ends up being successful. Likewise the pitcher who doesn't look big enough (Tim Hudson) or was written off as not having enough heat (Barry Zito). Beane is certainly not right about everyone (e.g. the high school prospect Jeremy Bonderman, now in the starting rotation for Detroit) but his alternative analysis born of the necessity of limited money brings some fresh thinking to how to evaluate baseball talent and potential. So this makes the book insightful, even if the reader has no interest in the Oakland A's or Billy Beane in particular.

There is a saying "If you torture the data long enough, you can get it to admit to anything". Michael Lewis starts with the premise that Billy Beane is the best and smartest GM in baseball, then butchers the statistics to make it seem so.It's simple, the A's don't win so many games with a minimal payroll because of their on base pct. or because Billy Beane outsmarts his fellow GM's constantly. They win because they drafted (before Beane) three of the best youngs starting pitchers in baseball.A fact that gets amazingly little mention in the book.
Predictions:A) When Zito, Mulder, and Hudson become free agents; Beane will will become a free agent right along with them and leave. B)When the before mentioned pitchers leave, the A's will stink, no matter how many pitches Scott Hatteberg takes.

In 2002, the season that this book concerns itself with, the Oakland Athletics tied for the league lead with 103 victories. The book Moneyball frankly admits that it doesn't wish to concern itself with pitching, but rather with hitting--runs and on base percentage (OBP). The reader is told time again that runs and OBP define the game, that pitching is secondary and fielding a distance third. This strikes me as fundamentally ridiculous: the way baseball teams win games is not by scoring runs, but by scoring more than the opposition. And that means pitching is essential.

Let's look at the 2002 Athletics. Despite all the talk about runs, the A's were eighth in the league. In a league with only 14 teams, that puts them in the bottom half. Only one player (Miguel Tejada) had 100+ runs. And what about On-base percentage? The A's were a bit better, but only 5th in the league. Not one of their players, including MVP Tejada, was in the top 10 in the league in OBP. By their own metrics, this hardly seems to indicate they tied for the league lead in wins. By using common sense, however, we can deduce that the A's pitching was probably very good. And indeed it was. The Athletics had three pitchers (Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, from lowest to highest) with Earned Run Averages (ERAs) under 3.50 and two with ERAs under 3, respectively placing 3rd, 6th, and 10th in the league. The A's pitching staff led the American league in ERA, shutouts, and fewest homeruns allowed. After the season was over Barry Zito was awarded the Cy Young award for the best pitcher in the league.

The point of this is not to (neccessarily) criticize sabermetrics or Billy Beane's strategy. This is a book review, and Michael Lewis could have written a better book. He devotes much page space to lengthy biographies of A's players and Billy Beane himself, whom the author seems to revere wholeheartedly, while not answering fundamental questions such as the title for this review: "What about pitching?" I have nothing but respect for the way Billy Beane's Athletics always seem to be in the thick of the hunt despite a low payroll, but that does not make this book any less flawed

Believe it or not, I got a wrong impression about the book from the write-up on the dust-cover; I swore this was a NOVEL, a writer's fantasy about "what if" a baseball team were put together in a non-traditional way, by people who throw away the old assumptions and proceed on a state-of-the-art basis. But of course this is no fantasy; it's about the actual Oakland A's of recent years. I felt sheepish about my misunderstanding because I'm a long-time fan of sabermetrics; I just happened not to have known the exact story about this book. I wonder if any other readers suffered my misunderstanding when they first read the dust-cover blurb!

If you are already a keen student of the "new analysis" of baseball (a la Bill James, John Thorn, Pete Palmer etc.), you'll enjoy this confirmation of what you pride yourself on knowing; if not, you'll have the wonderful adventure of getting a steep learning curve on the science of baseball and how for years and years the "old boys network" has failed to see the forest for the trees. Also, you'll laugh an awful lot, and your lexicon will gain some new catch phrases; my personal favorite is, "Put a Milo on him."

My father-in-law gave me Moneyball for Chirstmas. I took it to White Sox spring training in Tucson, Arizona in March 2008. What a great way to spend a week. Solid baseball, great baseball reading and no snow.

Others have gone into great detail, so I will make my review short. I have a new found respect for the A's, Billy Beane & Paul DePodesta. They have taken baseball to a new level and built some great teams. The White Sox now have Beane favorite Nick Swisher, but in return Beane extracted solid pitching prospects from the Sox organization.

If you love baseball read this book. You won't regret it.

Finally, as I have suspected for a long time, ESPN analyst & baseball hall of famer Joe Morgan is truly nothing but a gas bag. Good player, but a worthless analyst.

Let's see ... as of April 2005 Jeremy Brown (one of the picks highly touted by Billy Beane in the 2002 draft and detailed in Chapter 2 of the book) is playing double-A ball with the Midland RockHounds. His stats for 2004 were .256 BA, six home runs and 49 RBI.

As of April 2005 Jeremy Bonderman (2001 1st round pick for the A's; this pick so enraged Beane that he threw a telephone through the wall, and in part led to the dismissal of the scouting director) is 2-2 for the Detroit Tigers, with a 4.28 ERA. In 2004 he was 11-13 with a 4.89 ERA. He has been starting games for the Tigers since 2003.

It's a bit too early to say that Bonderman will be a success or Brown a failure, but this and other examples in Moneyball lead a questioning mind to wonder if Beane may be using sabermetrics to an extreme. Unfortunately the author doesn't question anything in this book. His writing is filled with slavish praise for Beane and his like-minded front office, and derision for those who haven't embraced sabermetrics fully. The book also doesn't mention the effect of the A's pitching trio (Mulder, Hudson, Zito) on the team's success. As a result, I agree with an earlier review that this book resembles a PR piece more than an unbiased review of Beane's methods. Even as the author admits he "fell in love with the story", being more objective or even playing devil's advocate on occasion would have this a much more interesting read. Disappointing book.

Lewis has written what is one of the top 5 baseball books of all time.
The book, unlike what some baseball broadcasters have said, is not exclusively about Billy Beane. It focuses on the Oakland A's and their different way of viewing the potential of baseball players by using statistics such as on base percentage and not simply using scouts to provide judgements based upon watching the player play in a few games. The book if it was written a couple years later could have just as easily been written about the Boston Red Sox, which adopted this statistics based approach after Theo Epstein took over as general manager. Lo and behold, the Red Sox after 84 years of futility, won a World Series largely because of this new way of looking at baseball.

The book also provides a wonderful historical background for this approach and isn't written like the reader has a degree in mathmatics. Every theory is well explained for the average person who hated and struggled through high school statistics to understand. A historical background for the theories used by Beane and the Red Sox, and as mentioned briefly in the end of paperback edition, later the Blue Jays and the Red Sox, is provided. One of the main characters in the book, Bill James, is the father of many of these statistics and the way of looking at baseball used by Beane.

The book also isn't just about boring baseball statistics either. Lewis goes into depth about why Beane looks at baseball the way he does. According to Lewis, it's because Beane was a player that, according to the old way of looking at baseball using scouts and data such as 40 yd dash times, was a can't miss prospect. The scouts ignored statistics that would have raised red flags about Beane's major league prospect status. Beane never rose above a major league bench player. This experience, according to Lewis, drives Beane to never make the same mistake that major league general managers made in drafting him so high.

If you're a baseball fan and want to understand how the Oakland A's have won all those games in recent years even after losing players like Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi, read this book. After reading this book, you'll also come away with some idea of why Beane traded away two of his best pitchers this offseason too.

Very interesting indeed but quite misleading to anybody outside of baseball. It should be pointed out that the biggest reason for the A's success is strong scouting and player development that has produced the core group of players like Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Tejada, Chavez, etc. These guys weren't picked based on some computer printout or webpage, they were selected by their scouting dept. and are now the core of the team. Rick Peterson is also one of the best young pitching coaches in the game and deserves credit. He barely got mentioned in the book. Somehow I don't think that this book came out how Billy Beane would have wanted it to and I would venture to say he is somewhat embarassed. Sure, Hatteberg and Bradford are great signings but only two examples and the team isn't built around them. The draft strategies being emloyed now by Oakland are due to baseball economics and highly risky. We won't know until years down the road wether some of these drafts are a success or a failure. The statistical info. is a neat little discovery by the computer people and Bill James, etc. but it is given far too much credit in the book for the success of Oakland.

...we need to find space for Michael Lewis' "Moneyball"

This deservedly sits on my shelf alongside books by Kahn, Halberstam and Angell.

A brief description would be "the story of Billy Beane" and his tenure as GM of the Oakland A's.
That's selling it short. By a mile.

This book is educational, informative and inspiring. It is a book that makes you look at baseball with new eyes. It takes you, briefly but lucidly, into the world of the draft, high school sports, minor leagues, retired players, coaches at all levels, computers, the language of statistics...and above all, the inside world of major league baseball. But this time, from a point of view...from a manner of thinking...you have never considerd.

For some strange reason, it now makes me look at my world of medicine in new ways.

Here's the thing: it's more important to not make an out, than it is to get a hit.
It took a few minutes for that to really sink in, but that subtle shift in perspective makes an enormous amount of difference. It really does.

Lewis, through the tale of Billy Beane, makes this idea crystalline in clarity with statistics and theory, but not robbing the story of any of its' humanity.

Beane was a high school phenom; Lewis does some of his best work describing what it must be like to be one. He doesn't make it in the bigs, but through some pretty radical decision-making, ends up the GM of the A's.

You will follow a few players from their drafting to singular moments in their careers, and you will cheer. Out loud.
I did.
I read this entire book on a flight from Detroit to L.A., and many of my fellow passengers thought me daft. A loon. Here's this guy, in his window seat, woo-hooing while reading a hardcover book. Laughing out loud. Saying "Yesss!" like some bad Marv Albert impersonator.

Scott Hatteberg will stick with me for the rest of my life. I feel like I know the guy. I wanna have him over for dinner. As I do Billy Beane, and Mr. Lewis as well.

There are over a half dozen other people who spring to life, due to some terrific writing, but if you've read this far, I want you to discover them on your own.

How many times in your life will you read a book that changes fundamentally the way you look at something? Something that you have thought pretty much the same about since childhood.

Since Little League and watching my beloved Dodgers back in the 70's, stealing second was "good", a sacrifice bunt was "going by the book"...there are whole tenets of baseball wisdom that are challenged here, but challenged for the love of the game, not the contrary.

His quote from Bill James (a person I now feel I must seek out and buy all his books...) about errors being a statistic of "opinion" made total sense to me; I almost felt like an idiot that I never thought that way about it myself.

If you love baseball, if you only like baseball, if you like a great story well told, your next purchase NEEDS to be this book. I guarantee...guarantee, mind you...that you will not be disappointed.

As a fantasy baseball devotee and a regular reader of Rob Neyer's columns on espn.com, I was excited to see how a non-specialist, Lewis, would react to the quirks of the baseball world. Lewis's reaction is the defining baseball book of this generation. Lewis masterfully weaves together A's GM Billy Beane's personal story and conversion to statistical analysis with theory and reasoning behind that analysis. Lewis also does a superlative job describing the other side: the baseball old timers who distain number-crunching and instead look for intangibles when scouting ballplayers. Why look into how well the hitter controls the strike zone if you can simply see if he has "the Good Face". Imagine an accountant eschewing numbers to see if a company just looked right, just felt right in her gut; well, that's how baseball did, and mostly still does, operate.

Not some esoteric tome, but a terrifically engrossing and informative book. I think even my mom would like it.

Mr. Lewis is a talented writer, and he is clearly a thoughtful observer of the people and events he chronicles. It is therefore disappointing that on its most basic level, this book is not reporting but propaganda. A thoughtful reader will, I trust, discover that its premise is flawed in two respects.

First, it is reductive in the extreme. The model which, we are given to understand, Billy Beane employs to such great effect, treats a baseball game as nothing more than a generator of "market information." Mr. Beane is noted, among other things, for hardly ever watching a game himself. We might expect the same from Mr. Beane's Socrates, Bill James. One wonders if Mr. James feels that the games themselves are, like the management of the Cleveland Indians, "dumb. You know, not bright, slow." If the reader wanted to be similarly reductive, he or she might consider the implications of the following coincidence: one of the most important features of Mr. Beane's "market information" model is the base on balls, which, he acknowledges, was the one offensive achievement which escaped him as a player.

The second flaw in the book's premise is that the model is internally inconsistent. One might ask, for example, whether Paul DePodesta really believes his computer when it tells him that a team of nine Scott Hattebergs will score more runs than any other team in the major leagues. But one needn't resort to hypothetical questions to discover the flaw. A team that wins 100 out of 162 games has a winning percentage of .617. A team that wins three out of five games (i.e., a division playoff series) has a wining percentage of .600, and a team that wins four out of seven games (i.e. an LCS or World Series) has a winning percentage of only .571. Surely a team that is so carefully constructed to accomplish the first ought, in six years of trying, to be able to accomplish at least the second, if not the third. It rings hollow for the architect of the team, who has been portrayed as a thoroughgoing rationalist, to throw his hands up, bleating "My s--- doesn't work in the play-offs. My job is to get us to the play-offs. What happens after that is f-----g luck.," and Mr. Lewis to endorse this contradiction with the high-sounding but fatuous observation "The baseball season is structured to mock reason." By reaching such a conclusion after more than two hundred seventy pages of careful analysis, Mr. Lewis becomes what he has beheld.

To every rule, there is always the exception. Take the world of major league baseball. With free agency driving player salaries to unbelievable heights, it's an accepted piece of conventional wisdom that only rich teams can be successful today.

If that's really true, then why have the Oakland A's, with one of the lowest payrolls in the game, been one of sport's most consistent winners these past few years? That's the question that Michael Lewis answers in this fascinating book. At the heart of the story is the general manager of the A's, Billy Beane. Beane was once a major leaguer himself. He was labeled a "can't miss" star by those who are supposed to be able to predict such things, but ended up achieving marginal success. How Beane is turning the game's accepted notions upside down is the heart of this story. The 2002 season looked like an impossible one for the A's...they had lost three of their best players to free agency.

Everyone thought the game was over them...everyone but Billy Beane.

As the book opens, we join Beane and his staff on the day of baseball's amateur draft. We witness the A's enjoy an almost magical success in getting the players they want; in part because few, if any other teams want them. Does Beane know something no one else does? The answer is a qualified yes. It turns out he's putting to work statistical models that have been developed by the writer Bill James and others over the past two decades, This information is widely available and widely known to fans...but given little credence by most of the men who still run the game.

As we read on, we learn the logic behind the A's decision to hand their starting first base job to Scott Hatteberg, a former Red Sox catcher who could no longer catch due to an injury; why they coveted Chad Bradford, a pitcher buried in the minors by the White Sox, but who they knew would develop into one of the game's best relievers; why they were willing to trade for all-star second baseman Ray Durham, even though there was no chance they would be able to re-sign him at the end of the season.

Lewis' narrative is engaging and vivid. He puts us in the board room and the locker room as the season unfolds. It's a great story, especially for baseball fans, but really worthwhile for anyone intrigued by the idea of what fresh approaches and unconventional thought can bring to an individual or an organization.

A grand slam all the way!

This book is very well written, it's an excellent, refreshing book on the inside workings of managing the drafting, signing and paying players. Billy Beane has turned the GM job into an art form. He has made trades, analyzed and critiqued them, and showed up other GMs. If I were another GM, and I saw Beane coming towards me, I'd cross the street. His approach is unique and amazing. Great title, and it's appropriate.

I bought Moneyball sight unseen based on the recommendation of ESPN's Dan LeBatard to wit: "Lewis dissects how the Oakland Athletics have won more in recent years than . . . ", "the A's are smarter than everyone else, and this book shows how", and ". . . are now using science, math, formulas and Ivy League educations to help change how baseball is viewed, scouted, studied, and played." So while I didn't expect a scholarly work such as Fisher Black and Myron Scholes did on options pricing that ultimately led to winning the Noble Prize, I though the book would be somewhat analytical in nature; however, it doesn't contain one chart, graph, or table. Instead it is filled with claims that are not backed up by data - though the implication is the data exists. So what is about? Primarily is it a number of vignettes from the 2002 season featuring Billy Beane (A's GM) and to a lesser extent Paul DePodesta (A's Harvard educated resident "quant"). So what are the major things we learn - or more correctly, what are the key unsubstantiated claims? (1) high school pitchers are twice less likely than college pitchers and four times less likely than college position players to make it to the major leagues; (2) the most important statistic is the number of runs a team scores and the only things that correlate with it are on-base percentage and slugging average; (3) managerial tactics such as the bunt, steal, and hit and run are either pointless or self-defeating; (4) every batter should possess the power to hit home runs because home run power forced pitchers to pitch more carefully and this leads to walks and high on-base percentages - so-called "small ball" is a losing strategy; (5) the value of speed, fielding, batting average, and RBIs is greatly overrated and therefore overpaid for; (6) the same is true for relief pitchers and closers; (7) an extra point of on-base percentage is worth three extra points of slugging percentage; (8) there is no such thing as a "clutch" hitter; (9) you can calculate an "expected run value" for every player; (10) the only criteria used for pitchers should be walks, strikeouts, and home runs - things like velocity, hits, and ERA are irreverent.

A very brief summary of the 12 chapters: 1 - Billy Beans high school years as a baseball phenom; 2 - Beane/DePodesta vs. the A's scouts on talent evaluation; 3 - Beane's minor/league career, move to front office, and "enlightenment" through Sandy Alderson; 4 - the baseball subculture of statistical analysis and people like Bill James, Carl Morris, Eddie Epstein, Dick Cramer, . . .; 5 - the Jeremy Brown story and the 2002 amateur draft; 6 - what the A's did when they lost Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, and Jason Isringhausen after the 2001 season that allowed them to win even more games in 2002; 7 - how they made up for Giambi's lost "expected run value"; 8 - the Scott Hatteberg story; 9 - mid-season trade for Ricardo Rincon; 10 - the Chad Bradford story; 11 - the night that A's won their 20th in a row; 12 - vindication as other teams (e.g., Toronto and Boston) adopt Oakland's methods of player evaluation.

One thing you have to understand is that statistical analysis works in the long-run. So it works well for building a team for the 162 game regular season. However, it does guarantee anything about the playoffs - "Tim Hudson, heretofore flawless in big games, and perfect against the Minnesota Twins, had two horrendous outings. No one could have predicted that."

So if you are looking for something that gives you insight into the modern/scientific way to structure a cost effective baseball team this book whets your appetite and nothing more.

Moneyball is one of the most enjoyable books I've read in quite some time. It very bluntly states why teams like the Kansas City Royals continue to wallow in their misery while teams with some semblance of intelligence in the front office can thrive, all in a very concise and easy to read manner. Key discoveries, like McCracken's theories on pitchers not being able to control balls in play, and other defining moments in the way baseball statistics are looked at are given ample space to develop without overwhelming the reader with regression analysis.

Looking past the brief sabermetric focused parts of the book, it is simply a great tale with many intriguing characters. Scott Hatteberg, the converted catcher who has to learn a new position. Jason Giambi, who is what most Oakland As will become after their six years of indentured servitude. Jeremy Giambi, his defensively challenged brother. Chad Bradford, a soft throwing pitcher with an unorthodox delivery. Jeremy Brown, a overweight catcher who has a propensity for finding his way on base. And of course, Billy Beane, a man who gets plenty of publicity today, some good, but a lot negative from people too narrow minded to think in new ways.

One question that some people believe remains after the novel is "what happens when all of baseball thinks the way the As, Blue Jays, and Red Sox now do?" The answer is contained in the book - its not likely to happen anytime soon, dispite the overwhelming evidence for many teams to have a complete brain overhaul. Commentators like Joe Morgan, (occassionally Peter Gammons), GMs like Allaird Baird, and managers like Larry Bowa will be in power for the next decade or two, and don't look like they'll change their ways short of a 162-0 season out of the As.

Field of Stats

Although the steroid scandal may have eventually accomplished the same thing, "Moneyball" destroys any persistent romance surrounding professional baseball. It's an antidote to all those paeans glorifying the love of the game: "The Natural," "Field of Dreams," even the raunchy lens of "Bull Durham." Players don't rise and fall due to the nobility of their character, the sheer beauty of their swing, the sage advice of a wizened baseball scout, or even their batting average, per se. What Moneyball does is show how the Oakland A's, and a few emulators, dismissed all this lore and culture in favor of multiple regressions and other advanced statistical tools. It's a fascinating book that could have been a dry one--full of detailed statistics and equations--except that Lewis cleverly balances the mathematical perspective with the same character studies that have graced sports biographies for years.

The book centers around former big league prospect Billy Beane, a man with great athletic ability who didn't make it in the bigs, partly because of his perfectionism and resulting temper. Years later, Beane is the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, a team with stingy owners who'd rather save some bucks than buy a pennant (see "Yankees, The"). Faced with a shoestring budget, and enamored with the new baseball analysis cultivated by Bill James in his "Baseball Digest" system, Beane and his advisors invest in players as if they're brokers on Wall Street. James and other highly-educated baseball fanatics (often from Harvard, often lawyers or scientists with a mathematical bent) discover that the old wisdom wasn't all that smart: Their analyses yield cold, objective facts, and suddenly, as in the old "Firesign Theater" skit, "Everything You Know Is Wrong." It's not batting average and RBIs that are most important, it's on-base and slugging percentage that predict the one thing, the only outcome that matters--who wins. Throw out fielding statistics--these are too dependent on luck and the kind of pitches served up. Furthermore, invest in bargains: Overlooked players who get to first through walks rather than singles (the phrase, "a walk is good as a hit," was never so true as it is here), guys who aren't great all-around players but who fill complete missing elements in your roster (sort of like diversifying your portfolio, Beane and others take their cue from a market mechanism known as "derivatives"), and those who otherwise don't fit into other GMs' and scouts atheoretical notion of what makes a great player.

The results are convincing. With one of the least expensive teams in baseball, the A's repeatedly make the playoffs. Beane acquires college players and castoffs from other teams like a man who collects trashy art, and XXX shows how his "I must be insane to offer you these bargains" style of purchasing ball players pays off, mostly through chapters devoted to one particular exemplar of Beane's philosophy.

There are a few problems with the book, as there are a few problems with the stats-driven approach to building your team. The most egregious of these is Lewis' concentration on the successes predicted by statistics. For a book driven by science, Lewis ignores the other 3 cells of the implicit 2x2 table of success/failure by "uses Beane method"/"doesn't use method." The most significant is the failure/Beane method cell; Lewis just doesn't write about those players who didn't pan out as mathematically predicted. The only examination of failure is Beane's rather clinical excuse for never advancing very far in the playoffs--in a short series (I.e., when N is small), luck (i.e., the statistical error) tends to become more powerful and empirical "truths" suffer as a result. The fans suffer too, but their enjoyment of the game is always secondary to winning. Therefore, Athletics almost never steal bases (the percentages dictate no), and managerial and player judgment is minimized in favor of the all mighty victory. You have to admit it works, but when Beane shrugs off the post-season failure question almost with a "that's not my job," you have to wonder whether "Moneyball" is enough. Maybe it's just the best oine can do on a budget. (On the other hand, XXX Lewis to mention--even in his most recently written epilogue--that Beane's right hand man Paul DePodesta was fired after 2 seasons with the well-financed Dodgers.(A 71-91, 4th place finish in 2005 didn't help DePodesta.) Along with this bias towards success stories, XXX reveals a few bad writing habits. He'll sometimes describe something with sentences repeatedly beginning with the word "that." As in: "That the book doesn't look enough at failures. That the book was a best seller. That the book was reportedly misunderstood by many when published." Lewis also lapses into a high-falutin' prose style, somewhat emulating "King James"--Bill James of the pioneering Baseball Digest school of analysis.

Still, "Moneyball" deserves its reputation and its sales. Beane's number-crunching, myth-busting approach isn't always pretty, but it makes sense and meets the bottom line of both winning and preserving capital. An excellent and accessible book that has it both ways, an argument for using "cold" higher math in sports, and a spirited study of the ballplayers who add value to the original purchase, and the GMs who know what it takes to buy low and sell high.

As a huge baseball fan and also a "stathead" (i.e. a baseball statistics geek), I read this book two years ago, when it first came out. In general, Michael Lewis is a tremendous writer with the ability to explain complicated ideas in a straightforward manner. In Moneyball, his writing shines with the underdog portrayal of the Oakland A's, the comeback story of Billy Beane (from failed prospect to successful GM) and the inspiring tales of Scott Hatteberg and Jeremy Brown.

Yes, hindsight is 20/20 and the A's are struggling this year with a miserable offense, but we have arrived at the point where we can take a critical look at what's become known as the "Moneyball draft," a keystone event in the book. For the 2002 draft, Beane decided to go with the numbers over the scouts and the A's had 7 first-round picks. Of these picks, two (Nick Swisher and Joe Blanton) are now playing with the major league club; a third (Mark Teahen) served as trade bait. The others are yet to make an impact; and remember that the A's emphasize college picks, so the players from that draft are in their mid-20s now.

Is it pure coincidence that Swisher and Blanton were the two A's picks that, according to the traditional scouts' consensus, were legitimate first-round picks? This gets at what's come to bug me about Moneyball. Instead of synthesizing the best of traditional scouting and statistical analysis, Lewis attempts to replace one dogma with another. As any good statistician knows, a blind faith to statistics can lead to serious problems. At times, the talented high-school shortstop may be the best pick available, or the bunt may be the most appropriate strategy.

Let me conclude with a baseball tale of my own. Twenty-three years ago, a young shortstop from the Dominican Republic came up to the majors. He had tremendous raw talent with good speed and a decent bat, but a terrible on-base percentage in the low .300s. Today's Oakland A's under Beane would never consider acquiring someone like him, based on their philosophy that plate discipline can't be learned. Yet, over time, this player's walk totals started to rise, from 32 to 56 to 66 to 82. His plate discipline improved so much that even as some of his skills declined in old age, his ability to get on base made him a valuable bat in the lineup. Twenty-three years later, he's still playing today- at age 45. His name is Julio Franco.

Here is a book that can be appreciated from so many different angles. For fans of baseball (which I'm not) the allure is obvious. For fans of statistics, this book offers amazing insight into how numbers can be employed in real life with very pwerful and very real results. For fans of human nature, this story offers a great look at how mistakes can be repeated and then perpetuated until someone with a strong mind and a stronger will comes along to break the cycle. And for fans of character-driven stories, Moneyball, like any Michael Lewis tale, has that in spades too.

If any of that sounds good to you, give this one a try.

First of all, I must admit that I have been one of Lewis' fans since his classic Liar's Poker. How could I miss this one which Tom Wolfe described on the inside back cover as Lewis' grandest tour de force yet? However, being a Chinese trader who's ignorant about baseball, I could only complete the first two chapters (42 pages out of 288) and put it down. The large amount of baseball jargon and player name just stopped me from reading onwards. In fact, this review is written with the sole purpose to warn fellow Lewis' fans that this book, unlike his previous ones, require readers of certain knowledge and interest of baseball. If you're not a baseball fan, I strongly suggest you to give this book a pass.

The author's contempt for traditional baseball wisdom and leadership and his hero worship of Billy Bean the GM of the Oakland team distorts the few insights the book offers. Sure there is far too much "conventional wisdom" and old-time, seat of the pants flying in the game. And what game doesn't have that? The stock market? The attribution of genius to the number crunchers who figured out that on base percentage was more important than batting average and the few other items of this nature certainly doesn't justify a book. In many cases the author grudgingly admits that a lot of people had kind of figured these things out anyway - like that luck plays a big part in any single game's outcome. The liner right at the first baseman, the bloop single... Casey Stengel and Connie Mack knew that.

The book is also disfigured by a certain intellectual snobbery. The new age wizards are all from Yale or Harvard it seems. If you want to irritate baseball people that's a good way to start. The story about the release of a veteran player days before he qualifies for a pension by the hero Billy Bean is mentioned coldly, factually. One can't tell whether this is to illustrate Billy's admirable ruthlessness in pursuit of victory or his bad side which the author couldn't quite condemn out of gratefulness at being allowed inside the clubhouse. It could make a non-A's fan hope they lose.

The book also has page after page of "filler" anecdotal stories about ballplayers which I enjoy as an old-time fan but which have little relationship to the theme of the book.

Verdict: as a baseball book, fair. On a personal basis, kind of nasty. I wonder if Billy Bean liked it?

I might add that it is obvious why the book virtually ignores the three star pitchers obviously responsible for the A's recent success, Hudson, Mulder and Zito. It is because they were not selected on the new, miraculous, computer-analysis basis but presumably by the old time "good face" scouting demonized so acidly in the book! The book is very selective in this area.

This is a very interesting book that will probably come across as more impressive than it should to casual baseball fans. For those who have been reading, enjoying, and agreeing with Bill James for years, it will largely be old hat. Basically, the book is about baseball professionals finally taking seriously many of the ideas and concepts that Bill James has been articulating the past quarter century.

To Lewis's credit, he is quite up front about the central role that James plays in this book. Lewis even treats James as something of a genius, both as a baseball theoretician and a prose writer (James is an absolutely riveting writer; anyone doubting this should purchase immediately his THE NEW BILL JAMES HISTORICAL BASEBALL ABSTRACT). What I find a bit more curious is Michael Lewis's obsession with Billy Beane. No question, Billy Beane is a great general manager, and there is equally no question that the Oakland A's are a team driven by the front office. The problem is--and in fact Lewis's book hints at this fact, though he only hints--that the A's are a great organization. What makes the A's great is not Billy Beane, as good as he is, but the whole group of first rate personnel comprising the Oakland front office. Most of those people were not hired by Billy Beane. The overwhelming focus of this book on Billy Beane is more than a little surreal.

Although I think this is a great book, I also think that Michael Lewis chose the wrong subject. The really interesting story here is NOT how Billy Beane has managed to build a winning team on so little money, but rather the impact that a complete reconceptualization of what contributes to winning baseball games could have on the game of baseball. In that regard, Billy Beane is only a part of the story, and the issues surrounding the Oakland A's budget a bit irrelevant. If the Bill James's-inspired theories are correct, the size of a team's budget is fairly irrelevant. If the New York Yankees changed their playing philosophy, they could still use their money to buy the players with the highest on base percentage and the pitchers with the highest strike outs to walks ratios and who give up few home runs. Budget really is quite irrelevant to all the central points of the book. And to test out the theories about how to win a baseball game requires more test cases than merely the Oakland A's. Myself, I do believe the theories are sound. The 2003 Toronto team has built its team around many of the same ideas. All their hitters work pitchers deep into the count, take a lot of walks, have solid on base percentages, and have some power. The Boston Red Sox seem to be trying out some of these ideas. Personally, I think focusing on the Oakland A's is a misleading error.

The confusion at the heart of Lewis's book is confusing a strategic approach to baseball with the entirely separate issue of Oakland's tight budget. The latter merely masks the more important story. Moreover, budgetary concerns are highly contingent. If all the teams in baseball were to adopt a team policy of building their teams around players with some power who had high on base percentages, this will in turn effect the pricing of players. It is a mere coincidence right now that some of the players Beane's regards highly are not desired by others. Besides, even Beane acknowledges the greatness of players like Giambi and Bonds.

Nonetheless, for those unfamiliar with these alternative ways of valuing ballplayers, this is a great introduction. Just take all the Billy Beane obsessiveness with a container of salt. And remember that it is just an accident that money is a factor in this story at all. That will change as soon as the rest of baseball changes its thinking about the nature of the game.

As an amateur Sabrmetrician and devotee of Baseball Prospectus, I was very excited to hear of Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball." I've always admired the A's of the contemporary small-market days and how they are comprehensively a better team (except in power) than my own Texas Rangers, who have almost bottomless pockets.

I was not aware of Beane's playing career and found that part of the book particularly interesting. Lewis seems to indicate that much of what has motivated Beane to utilize a sabrmetrically-based approach to baseball are his own demons from his playing career.

Whatever the reason for the A's (and now Jays) systems of operations, the results speak for themselves. Hopefully the rest of the league will be as flinty and resistant as they have so far so we can see the dinosaurs taken to the cleaners a few more years before they are rendered extinct.

Required reading for anyone who appreciates the game of baseball. Michael Lewis gives all the facts on why the Oakland A's are so successful in baseball with ~$50M budget against teams spending 2-3 times as much. This book is not a glorification of the A's GM, Billy Beane but a complete dissection of the ways baseball teams must operate to compete successfully. If I was a baseball owner, I would require my General Manager to read the book and explain why our payroll is so high with poor results (NY Mets, Baltimore Orioles). Overall great book.
JTS

Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" is a wonderful book that attempts to answer a strange paradox according to conventional baseball wisdom: How do the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest teams in baseball, win so much and win so relentlessly? The answer is, of course, the system that General Manager Billy Beane built that challenged irrational baseball orthodoxy and made the most with the least in an inefficient system.

Beane himself was once touted by scouts who thought he had all the right attributes: speed, power, athleticism, and, yes, "the Good Face." When his major league career ended bitterly as an unambiguous failure, he turned his other talents to bringing rationality to an irrational baseball establishment. His new tools: statistical analysis, a willingness to discard conventional wisdom, an ability to think, and a demeanor designed to bait unsuspecting GMs into making foolish deals.

One of the best scenes from the book is Billy Beane in action during the 2002 trading deadline when he cobbled together a few good and undervalued players to add to the Oakland juggernaut. The funniest line in this section comes from Beane's dealings with the hapless Tampa Bay Devil Rays, a team he fleeced before: "[W]hile Tampa Bay's management was willing to talk to Billy, they were too frightened to deal with him." A god among mere mortals indeed.

To me, the most engrossing part of "Moneyball" is the Oakland A's 2002 amateur draft which would lay the foundation of the team in the coming years. While other teams were quite content to gamble and to dream the very possible dream of mediocrity in selecting raw and untested high school players, the A's used their seven first round picks to draft a bunch of college no names the baseball establishment scorned. Why? They were either too short, too fat, too skinny, too slow, or even too ugly to become, in the minds of baseball scouts who supposedly knew better, future stars. Beane rightly dismissed this subjective and irrational hogwash by highlighting attributes the scouts should have paid attention to instead: on base percentage, slugging percentage, walks, strike out-to-walk ratios, and other quantifiable measures that correlate highly to future success.

A word on the recent controversy between White Sox GM Kenny Williams and Beane when the former accused the latter of talking too much to Lewis and making Williams look stupid in their lop-sided trades. In "Moneyball" there is not one section where Beane says anything directly disparaging about his fellow GMs, but the Oakland GM's record nonetheless speaks for itself: GMs like Williams are letting irrational and institutionalized baseball prejudices blind them and Beane took advantage accordingly.

In the end, baseball commissioner Bud Selig could continue to continue to chant his mantra that "small market teams can't compete" over and over until he secures taxpayers' dollars to build every stadium. Teams could continue to ignore the mounting evidence that college players are a good bet and instead blow their money and time chasing down high-risk high schoolers or over-valued mediocrity. In the meantime, the Oakland example will show (and continue to show) that how wrong--and yes, how needlessly stupid--they are.

Highly recommended.

Rarely do you come across a book on pro sports like this one, that manages to infuriate one group, enlighten another, and, at the end of the day, have a significant impact on the sport it covered. Moneyball essentially is a baseball how-to guide on constructing a team through maximizing the talents and abilities of low- to medium-cost players, rather than building one by overpaying for high-priced talent or marquee names. It is also a study of how one man -- Oakland A's GM Billy Beane -- and his followers go about finding these low- cost players, and what qualities and statistics they look for and value the most. Overall, it brings to the forefront a debate that has already played itself out in Major League Baseball in the 1-2 years since this book hit the shelves -- old-time, traditional scouting vs. statistical analysis and theories.

Michael Lewis is provided a great deal of access to the Oakland A's mid-season, and it's surprising to me that Beane allowed so many of his ideas to be publicized while he is still in a competitive position. Lewis portrays Beane as restless, not satisfied with mere wins, but seemingly moreso with constant tinkering with and improving the team. The actual game on the field is of little use to him, but the numbers that flow in once the games are over are his main course. Beane challenges what he perceives as the outdated scouting machine across the league, the idea that a player's value can be assessed by watching him throw or hit, looking at his frame and how he can fill out physically, and "meaningless" stats like batting average and RBI. Instead Beane ignores a prospect's physical attributes (see Jeremy Brown), and focuses instead on a player's ability to draw walks and get on base. Lewis deserves a great deal of credit in taking all this information, analysis, and statistics and writing it all in a way that readers can easily understand.

As for Beane's theories themselves, several of them have worked their way into the game already. The Red Sox built their 2004 squad with Moneyball in mind (GM Theo Epstein is one of Beane's disciples) and won the World Series employing OBP guys like Mark Bellhorn, and buying low on plenty of middle-tier free agents in the past two years, most notably slugger David Ortiz. But there are also a bunch of his ideas that are a little puzzling, and quickly have been tossed aside by baseball minds. The idea that the dominant closer is a myth (and that any journeyman can close out something like 98% of leads in the 9th inning) has quickly gone by the wayside -- even by Beane and his followers (Oakland and Boston have both invested in high-priced closers in the past two seasons). And Florida quickly disspelled Beane's staunch belief that bunting and stealing bases are counterproductive and meaningless, by merely winning the World Series in 2003 through speed and aggressive baserunning. And I wonder what Beane has to say about the impact of Dave Roberts on last year's ALCS.

Whether you buy into what Beane is selling or not, whether the introduction of "rotisserie"-type analysis and team-building is upsetting to you or not, the book is great, and on top of that, it's had a significant and increasing impact on Major League Baseball.

If Lewis had decided to play devil's advocate instead of lap dog, and scrutinized some of the assertions being made, then this might've really been something. As it stands, the narrative's defining quality is negligence. That's why the 2 stars.

It's already been said here, but the A's were very fortunate in that they had three young pitchers get very good very quickly, insuring several years of productivity before facing the prospect of free agency.

In the playoffs, it comes down to pitching, defense, and timely hitting, only one of which Beane and co. have deemed to be important, which may explain the wall they hit when they get there. Their biggest oversight might be their devaluing of producing in clutch situations. In the last 4 playoffs, the A's opponents have gone 9-0 when facing elimination. I guess guts DO count for something, huh Billy?

I give credit to Beane for at least trying something different. Given the cash-strapped A's, their mangled stadium (courtesy of Al Davis), and lukewarm fanbase, this is not an organization that can win going toe-to-toe, even if I don't necessarily buy into their 'brave new world' of organizational philosophy.

Ignore the scouting department and have Harvard economists surf the internet...I don't think the emperor is wearing any clothes, but I guess we'll see.

Michael Lewis attempts to address what should be the wildly anomalous winning of the bargain-basement Oakland A's. While it is an open secret that Billy Beane relies on new-wave objective analysis, his past, his motivations, and the extent to which he uses it was not widely known. Lewis takes an adoring look at the A's organization, Billy Beane, the growth of sabermetrics, and baseball as he recounts a meandering tale that brought us the current edition of the A's.

Michael Lewis in unabashed in his admiration for Beane, and spares little time to give Beane's critics voice. (Even then, he does so in the weakest form, by quoting the less-than-geniuslike Joe Morgan, and even then giving Billy Beane the last word) Many reviewers have chosen to take Beane to task for the A's lack of postseason success, which is not relevant to this book. Instead Lewis tells a story charmingly and brimming with lightweight, character-revealing anecdotes. Lewis's prose is very down-to-earth, and he conveys ideas with tremendous clarity, and especially excels at introducing new concepts, contrasting them well with the previous line of thought.

Moneyball is a fun read that gives a terrific look inside the front offices of baseball that is very accessible to the casual reader. While the author's perspective does color the tale, this does not alter the fact that the book is very enjoyable and even worth a reread.

For as much buzz as this book got, I find it to be pretty light on substance. Basically, the premise is that the A's eschew traditional scouting, which is by and large based upon "potential" and instead look to stats to see how a player has actually performs as measured by stats like walks and on-base percentage. That's about it. It's too early in the game to judge if any of the picks or way of doing business here is a success. I guess if the A's want to run their team like a fantasy baseball team, that's great, but as history has shown although it has given them a competitive team, it has yet to field a great team. Sure, their GM makes some good trades, but he makes some gobblers too (that don't make it into the book). Overall, the book did not seem balanced, fair, or even insightful. A good example is the discussion on Giambi...on how Oakland had to really do it's work to try to replace their premier player who was going to the dark side (the Yankees). I guess the fact that Giambi was a guy who came up before Billy Beane and was picked by the traditional scouting system wasn't mentioned because it was contrary to what the author is trying to say. Has Oakland done a good job fielding a team? Sure...but so has Kansas City, Minnesota, Toronto and Montreal, all with teams that have a comparable payroll to the A's. I'm guessing in a few years once the current Oakland roster cycles through and they go back to mediocrity you will not be seeing teams hiring stat-nerds to sign players with.At least it was a short, quick read. My take is that the less you actually know about baseball, the more you will enjoy it, because for the rest of us most of the conclusions are just bunk. It strikes me that the author knew what the book was going to be before he started and then went out and filtered the "facts" to support it.

Update 2007
Ok, I can admit where I might be wrong...their record the last several years says they might be onto something...still waiting for them to create a great team at this point. From a read standpoint, it is ok...if you are a baseball fan, you know this stuff by now. If you are not a baseball fan, you will probably be bored.

I enjoyed reading this more than any other book I've read in a while.
It's about Billy Beane and how the A's have been run in the last couple of years.
It has a lot about Bill James as well... and mentions Rob Neyer a few times. It's not even really about money, which is surprising, coming from Michael Lewis, and with the title.. It's about baseball. And it focuses on the A's, going all the way until January this year.
As an A's fan, I'm worried that it gives away too many of Beane's secrets!
ALthough, there is a passage that puts me to ease a little (page 241)

"IF one didn't already know better, one might think that Voros McCracken's article on baseballprospectus.com would be cause for celebration everywhere inside big league baseball. One knew better. Voros knew better. 'The problem with major league baseball', he said, 'is that it's a self-populating institution. Knowledge is institutionalized. The people involved with baseball who aren't players are ex-players. In their defense, their structure is not set up along corporate lines. They aren't equipped to evaluate their own systems. They don't have the mechanism to let in the good and get rid of the bad. They either keep everytyhing or get rid of everything, and they rarely do the latter.'
He sympathized with basball owners woh didnt' know what to think, or even if they should think. 'If you're an owner and you never played, do you believe Voros McCracken or Larry Bowa?' The unemployed former paralegal living with his parents, or the former All-Star shortstop and current manager who no doubt owned at least one home of his own?"
Voros McCracken's astonishing discovery about major league pitchers had no apparent effect on the management, or evaluation, of actual pitchers. No one on the inside calld Voros to discuss his findings; so far as he knew, no one on the inside had even read it. But Paul DePodesta(assistant GM of the A's) had read it. Paul's considered reaction: 'If you want to talk about a guy who might be the next Bill James, Voros McCracken could be it.' Paul's unconsidered reaction: 'The first thing I thought of was Chad Bradford."

The article that Voros wrote is on baseballprospectus, about how pitchers don't control the hit percentage of balls in play, so the most important thing about them is the nubmer of strikeouts, walks, and home runs. [...]
This is just one of the many great points about the way baseball is now analyzed.
Run, don't walk, to get this.

Mr. Lewis has really created a gem in "Moneyball." It's hard to imagine a book about sabermetrics and statistics becoming an interesting and compelling story. Lewis has someone melded together a character study of Billy Beane along with the revolution of objective statistics in baseball in a way that doen't make people roll their eyes. This book is truly wonderful and probably one of the most important books on baseball since Bill Jame's baseball extracts.

On top of the interesting bits regarding the behind the scenes workings of a major league ball club is something even more substantial. This book can change the way the reader views all levels of baseball. What should high school coaches teach regarding hitting? This book suggests patience and knowing one's strike zone. Should pitcher's be worried about arm strength or deception? The book could easily be used to help coaches of all levels of baseball groom young players to be more effective ballplayers. It will even help those coaches with game strategy. In that sense this book is revolutionary. Sabermetrics used to be for a special class of baseball fan who spent more time at their computers than actually watching or playing baseball.

Now sabermetrics belongs to the masses.

And just imagine if this book sparked interest in applying objective criteria in other areas of life. What's the best way to manage a group of office workers, who is the best candidate to hire for a particular job, how can a business owner use previous sales numbers to formulate a strategy for the future? It may seem like a stretch but this book could change the way readers think about a whole host of issues, some not even close to relating to baseball.

Everyone can learn a lesson from this book and no baseball fan or businessmen should go without reading it.

In Moneyball, author Michael Lewis sets out to show how you can win as a major-league franchise when your roster looks more like the Bad News Bears than a professional outfit. Whether or not he convinces you the reader of his purpose is up to you (I don't necessarily agree with it), but it makes an interesting and illuminating read.

In many ways, it is an alternative history of baseball in the modern era: in a time when home-run sluggers are prized above all else (nevermind how they got those homers), the Oakland A's of Billy Beane take a different tact. Smallball is king in Beane's view, one that he formed while as a member of the Oakland management team. Beane's own brief career is documented by Lewis, as well as the rise of baseball stats guru Bill James and the cult of numbers he helped inspire (sabremetrics). Beane is one of the few baseball men who not only reads James's theories, but tries to apply them to his team.

The story almost speaks for itself: at the time of writing, the A's had managed to continuously appear in the playoffs. Doubters will scoff that Beane's methods fail in the long run: where are the World Series rings? The fact that a small-market team like the A's can manage a run like they have, with the limited resources they have, seems to be overshadowed by that glaring lack of wins when it counts.

And so, without denying the veracity of James's arguements as they are presented in the book, I personally didn't buy Beane's approach. Too often, it seemed, Beane and his cohorts were reducing the game on the field to a series of continuous data sheets, typing out the player's ability to get on base over their ability to hit home runs or run the bases. While it's good to try and overthrow some of the baseball "traditions" that have actually served to harm the modern game, Moneyball offers a solution that is almost "scorched earth" in its approach: throw out the old rules and concentrate on stats previously ignored.

On some level, Moneyball doesn't necessarily champion Beane's approach, but Lewis plays into the hands of the A's by (inadvertantly by his postscript account) making Beane out to be a wizard at figuring out the game. This is the same Beane who traded Johnny Damon to the Red Sox (readers in the post-Red Sox Series win last year could be forgiven for laughing a little at Beane's short-sightedness). This is the same Beane who traded two of his "big Three" pitchers in the past offseason. This is the same Beane who struggles to manage what little cash he has, and he is prone to mistakes. While Lewis doesn't shy from that side of the equation, he almost never addresses the failures of Beane's system as much as its successes. There is something unique about Beane's approach, that is for sure. But Lewis almost destroys his own arguement by leaving out those details that don't fit with his hypothesis.

Also, for a baseball book "Moneyball" is totally lacking in terms of giving the reader a "feel" for the team in question. Beane and his hired helpers are (rightly or wrongly) the focus of the tome, to the exclusion of players like Barry Zito or Tim Hudson. In a way, it's misleading to list it as a "sports book"; it would be a more accurate fit on the business list.

All in all, "Moneyball" is a flawed but necessary read for those wondering what modern sports culture is all about. You come away from it feeling some sympathy for the way Billy Beane has to run his business, but you don't get a feel for the players affected by that business. You never really see the success on the field; you just get Beane and Lewis telling you "it works". That part of the equation keeps me from endorsing this as accurate or solid. But it will challenge your view of our nation's pastime for the better, as you learn what smaller teams have to sacrifice in order to surivive.

How exactly does one of the poorest teams in Major League Baseball, the Oakland A's, manage to win so many games year in and year out? This is the question that Moneyball seeks to answer. The answer, it turns out, is that Billy Beane, the general manager of the ball club, is one smart man.

Beane, while maybe not as book-smart as other GMs in the game, has the uncanny ability to assemble a team of misfits and win ball games. The secret of his success? Statistics. But not traditional statistics like batting average and RBIs. He thinks outside the box when he looks at statistics.

His right-hand man, Paul DePodesta, encouraged Billy to look at other statistics that are not as highly regarded by other teams: on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Beane listened when nobody else would, and has been unafraid to fly right in the face of conventional baseball wisdom. Based on the team's record over the past few years, it seems to be working for him.

This book is, in a word, engaging. The author Michael Lewis does an excellent job of painting a portrait of Billy Beane as, at times - especially when things don't go his way - unable to control his emotional outbursts, but also as a man who is wiser than he wants to let on. If other teams latch on to Beane's personnel strategies, he's no longer of any value as GM. Luckily for him, the other GMs are too stubborn to buy into his philosophy.

Moneyball is a must-read for any sports fan, baseball or otherwise, but I also recommend it to anybody interested in thinking of new ways to accomplish old goals more efficiently, through patience and proper analysis of a wealth of information.

First off, I'll confess I detest the game of baseball. I can't watch it on TV, and if I make it to the seven-inning-stretch of a live game it is due to a combination of free tickets and a good conversationalist in the next seat.

That said, I've enjoyed Michael Lewis' "Liar's Poker," "Next," and "The New New Thing." So I gave it a shot.

Michael Lewis manages to make the economics of baseball interesting entertaining by following Billy Bean's management of the Oakland A's, winning a tough division despite a cripplingly low budget for player's salaries. Economics itself is a difficult subject to make compelling prose of, but Lewis proved he could do that from his first book.

For someone who finds himself disgusted, not so much with the amount of money in professional sports, but the inscrutable way that money is distributed among owners and players, it is exciting to read about a guy doing what EVERYONE in pro sports says is impossible. It's not David and Goliath with some sort of divine intervention or freakish streak of luck: it's David beating Goliath by being willing to look at the problem a different way.

This is an excellent book for anyone who is fascinated with the debunking of conventional wisdom, or who loves seeing someone make the unjustly wealthy look flat-out stupid.

If you're a baseball fan, especially one who roots for an underdog or small-market team, I can only imagine that the book would be that much better.

Okay, I admit I rarely watch baseball. Like many unknowledgeable viewers, I find the game slow. Sure, my friends say, there's lots of strategy. But it's not the kind of game you can just watch a few times a year, like football, and still get involved.

But this book is only secondarily about baseball. As a career consultant who helps clients navigate tough decisions, I'm fascinated by the psychology of decision-making, and I read everything I can find. All the research comes to the same conclusion: statistics win over experience, every time.

And that's the story of Money Ball. A contrarian GM looks at the numbers to choose undervalued players. To Billy Beane, each player is an asset in a portfolio. His goal is to buy undervalued assets and sell overvalued assets.

The difference: Investors just hold assets in their portfolio. Billy Beane is more like a real estate investor who fixes up houses or waits till the world comes to his small town. After buying undervalued players, he showcases their true value by setting them on the playing field. A pitcher who "looks funny" turns out to be a star. An over-the-hill player thrives in a new position.

So what's the lesson for the rest of us?

First, Lewis raises the question of valuing people who do different kinds of jobs, where results aren't measured as easily. Ultimately, we're all assets. Employees working for a large firm need to regard themselves and their employees with the same kind of detachment. Investments in HR programs either raise the value of their assets or they're a waste of money.

And there's an inadvertent lesson here, too. Statistics help Billy Beane choose undervalued players so he can win division titles with a smaller budget than the competition. But when Billy faced his own big decision -- accept a Stanford scholarship or go pro immediately -- he had no statistics. We still need a method to make those kinds of decisions, and that's why I enjoy working with my career changing clients. You need more than a comparison of pros and cons.

Moneyball is the most captivating and interesting book I have ever read. It's a book that shows the secrets of success in baseball. Author Michael Lewis writes about Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, and his innovative method of scouting and management that changed the way baseball is played. Beane was able to maximize the market of talent with a minimum of spending. Alongside assistant Paul PoDesta, he broke down statistics to figure out how many games needed to be won to make the playoffs. A formula was created that evaluated every action on the field into a point system. What that point system determined was how many runs the A's would have to score to win. The Oakland Athletics, with the payroll worth nearly 1/3 of the mighty New York Yankees, are capable of competing every year for a championship and that's thanks to Beane. As a fan of a team with a low payroll, I get a thrill of them defeating the usual powerhouses. Moneyball gives the fans of small market teams a reason to believe that next year could be their year. This book is a must read for all baseball fans and I highly recommend it.

This book is almost impossible to put down. Billy Beane's belief of how to build a team is a glimmer of hope for anyone who is a fan of small-market ball.

This book provides a very interesting look behind the scenes of a big league club, and why the A's can't afford to maintain the status quo. Even if you aren't a baseball fan this book will grab your attention, because in the end it isn't so much about baseball as it about bucking trends and taking a risk on what you believe in.

Some people seem to think Moneyball is mostly about Billy Beane being a genius, and as such there has been some backlash from those who don't see him that way. I don't think that's what the book is really about - it's about how a smart guy (Beane) figured out how to stay competitive with less money to spend than the competition. Essentially, Beane figured out what types of players are undervalued and spent his money there. It's hard to argue with the results in the regular season, although the team hasn't won in the playoffs.

Moneyball also talks about Bill James, my favorite baseball writer. James labored for years developing theories that were mostly ignored by the baseball establishment. Now many of James' ideas (and those of other sabermetricians) are being accepted by sportwriters, broadcasters and general managers.

Moneyball isn't just about baseball. It's about business, about using new knowledge rather than discounting it, and about evaluating risk. Some of the ideas in Moneyball could be applied to other endeavors.

I can't help it. This is Lewis' best since Liar's Poker, even better than The New New Thing, and only behind Liar's Poker because you've read him before. You can look a long time for another book that teaches so much and makes it so much fun.

I see a lot of good reviews by baseball fans, and the book deserves them. But I'm in finance. This book will teach you more useful finance than most textbooks. All you have to do is imagine a board of directors instead of the tobacco-chewing scouts; or a bunch of fund managers, traders and analysts instead of first basemen and catchers and you'll see the same basic truths about statistics and human nature apply.

In the mid-1990s, the owners of the Oakland Athletics slashed their payroll. Their past GM, Sandy Alderson, decided that he needed to build talent from within. Four first rank players emerged from this effort, three infielders and one pitcher. In the late 1990s, new GM Billy Beane continued this effort and developed two more first rank pitchers. The "Big Three" pitchers and the three infielders created the nucleus of a team that - despite its low payroll - won a lot of games.

In the mid-2000s, all but one of those six players left the A's because of salary considerations. The effort to build from within hasn't yielded the successes of the 1990s. The team now loses a lot of games.

That's the story of the A's in a nutshell. The moral of this story is that if a team can get lucky it can build from within for a few years and win. But eventually, the team has to pay out the money to players. It's not much of a story unless you're a baseball fan. I am.

Mr. Lewis, who is a good writer, took this basic story and embellished it with a myth. The A's supposedly had a magic formula for success. They found players that others didn't because they used an unusual methodology. The A's GM Billy Beane was elevated to the level of a genius.

The thesis for this book is just plain wrong. It's entertaining to read, but it belies facts.

The book focuses on the annual draft in 2002 when the A's were able to pick 7 out of the first 39 players. Supposedly, the A's unusual methods would have yielded both easy to spot gems and diamonds in the rough. They didn't. The draft eventually produced one second rank pitcher, one second rank outfielder, and one middle-talent infielder, none of whom play for the A's. The A's methods at finding young talent have been, as of late, not particularly good.

It was a good thing that this book came out when the A's were winning. It was the equivalent of writing a story about a craps player with a "method" who has an unusual run of good luck. If all goes well, the story comes out before the luck runs out. That's what happened here. But in hindsight, this book looks just plain silly.

I thought this book was worth reading, but that Michael Lewis was not the best person to write it. He does a good job of introducting James, an everyday person who introduces an intriguing new set of statistics that convincingly illustrate which player skills lead to baseball victories. Interestingly, these are not the skills that most ML baseball teams attend to when recruiting.

Lewis alternates between idolizing Billy Beane (the Oakland A's GM who acts on James statistics), and portraying him as a raving maniac. In a postscript, Lewis admits that he skewed the manic portrayal (and that Beane wasn't too happy about it). Can't say I blame him. As a reader, I found the inaccurate portrayal baffling, and found it lessened the book and my view of Lewis as an author. Substantially.

Lewis reveals his scientific naïveté again and again by providing narratives of a few baseball games when Oakland A's players, chosen for their embodiment of James' theory, experience success. After reading these, a mental image of a 7-year-old running to his mother saying, "Look Mom, it's true" came to mind. If a scientist were to test whether James was right, she would also consider for each of these anecdotes whether there was another explanation. She also would look at cases when James' theory fails, and explain them. I found these narratives sometimes dragged on pointlessly and detracted from the book's readability. I believe James' theory, but think a more balanced look at when it works and doesn't would have been much more interesting.

Lewis ends by contending that despite his book, nobody in ML baseball has changed their practices (other than the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox, who as he explains during the book, start to emulate the Oakland A's). It appears he reached this conclusion by anecdotal evidence, so I think it's preliminary (and contentious) to make such an assertion.

I'm glad to see that many have become interested in sabermetrics, and hope that a better author writes more on this topic. I don't anticipate reading any more Lewis books, but would read others on this topic.

I read the whole book on a plane while flying to Asia and thoroughly enjoyed it. I agreed with most of it's assessments on Bill James and his mathematical analytical approach to baseball's success; that arrogant Old Guard baseball men can't seem to understand enough to create good baseball teams; that having a 95+ fastball doesn't mean the pitcher will be great or that having a 6'5" body with great throwing arm and power translates into a great hitter.

However, there are some silly assessments in this book I have to point out.

1) One page said the Mets made a stupid move drafting Scott Kazmir, who was a high school draftee. Kazmir???????? The same Kazmir who has amazing stuff and probably will be one of the great lefthanders for years to come??!!!!

2) The Sox was looked upon as idiots in the late 90s for not utilizing Scott Hatteberg correctly. You got to be kidding me. Those same Sox teams lead the league in runs for many years (scored over 900 runs with Mo Vaughn and John Valentin.) I won't say those Sox teams were idiots; they just had a different philosophy on hitting that was equally good as the As.

3) Again on Sox (yes, you probably know I'm Sox fan now!!) They were looked upon as clueless when it came to trying to acquire Cliff Floyd. C'mon. It's a trade for someone who can spark a team to the World Series. And if I remembered correctly the prospects the Sox gave up were not that great.

4) Even though I love As' philosophy on building winning teams, it's not the only formula that is successful. As the Angels, Marlins and Red Sox showed, you can win World Series w/o getting players that have high OBP.

Again, I love this book. However, it doesn't take a genius to know that'it's very biased towards the A's.

How is it that the Oakland A's have won the AL West in 2000, 2002, 2003 (and are all but assured of winning this year, 2006), as well as the wild card in 2001, even though they are in the bottom third of all major league baseball teams in total payroll? That is the narrative that Michael Lewis uses to tell the story of his book Moneyball. One of the central tenets of Moneyball is that there are objective statistics that although often ignored and undervalued, can, with some specificity, predict certain players' performances in certain areas. It is, however, only half the story, and as your rotisserie league friends will no doubt tell you, old news. The real story that Moneyball drives home is the challenge in getting people who actually make the decisions about the baseball teams to listen up. Lewis repeatedly describes how the Old Boys Club of major league owners (who Lewis affectionately refers to as The Women's Auxiliary), players, and journalists (former Cincinnati Red and current ESPN commentator Joe Morgan is appropriately skewered) reject this statistical approach that has sometimes been referred to as sabermetrics and the teachings of sabermetricians like Billy Beane (the book's main protagonist and current A's GM), Bill James, Dick Cramer, and others. And on the Old Boys Club the point is lost: that objective statistics have the potential to give small-market teams who cannot afford to compete financially with larger market teams for key players, the best chance of winning. When people point to the fact that the A's have not won the World Series since 1989 in spite their almost unparalleled success over the past eight years (roughly since 1999) is when Moneyball makes its point.

Hidden in baseball's past statistics is the answer to the future of baseball. The Oakland A's have shown the way it can be done. Now one of the guys using this same approach has gone to Boston and erased the long time curse of the Red Sox. In a few years when the real stats that matter are used by baseball management it may not seem so important. But right now it is.

Fascinating reading, and hard to believe. Hard to believe how stuck in their ways, and how deep in the sand have been the heads of baseball management until now. And for the most part nearly all are still stuck. That will change as those who don't learn the new ways will not be able to compete.

In a way, it strips away some of the human fallible quality that pervades baseball. Even more so how it has been managed. But once the genie is out of the bottle you aren't going to put it back in. The world of baseball has changed. Learn why and how in this book.

I think this book book caught on to the hype of the state of baseball a few years back when the baseball commissioner proclaimed that small budget teams cannot compete. Then came the Oakland A's and proved that they could achieve success with clever management.
This book provide insight into how the Oakland A's and particularly the human hero Billy Beane was able to find players cleverly based on stats.
But this book made managing a baseball team like an online fantasy league as it is led to believe that a GM could basically evaluate players purely on stats and math. It dismissed the traditional ways of evaluating players based on their physicalilty as unworthy.
I hope that there's another book or an updated version of this book to come out later on pointing out the weaknesses of the moneyball approach as this is not the only way to win on a small budget. There is a reason why the Oakland A's have not been able to get out of the first round of the playoffs. While there are other small budget teams such as the Florida Marlins that have won the world series with, gulp, bunting and stealing bases (areas that are dismissed by the moneyball approach) and scouting players based on their physicality, not just numbers.

Michael Lewis has certainly written a very engaging book which shows how the rules of the game have changed ever since Bill James' Baseball Abstracts became common currency in the front offices, but no one really took James' in-depth analyses to heart until Billy Beane came along, who used them to evaluate the talent pool in the minor leagues and colleges.

Lewis spends the first half of the book explaining this approach, which stresses on base and slugging percentages, and devalues traditional stats like HR's, RBI's and steals. This was a bitter pill for scouts who gauged players on their stature, rather the numbers. The result being that they went after buff high school ball players, rather than stallwart college players.

Beane had been one of those high school players who never panned out in the big leagues. The bread and butter players tend to come from the college ranks, and Lewis demonstrates how Beane was able to see past traditional stereotypes and field players on the A's who first and foremost got on base.

Lewis fills his story with a fun array of anecdotes and observations which gives the reader a vibrant image of the A's front office and the chagrin of scouts, managers, and players alike in having to play Beane Ball. This turned out to be a boon to the economic savvy new A's owners who were determined to keep costs down and efficiency up. Beane also knew how to play the trading deadline better than anyone, which allowed the A's to make amazing second half finishes.

All this discounted the prevailing notion that one had to have big bucks to field a great baseball team. The A's consistently won 90 games, defying the odds with a payroll a fraction of the cost of the Yankees, and nearly beat the Yankees in the playoffs. But, one is also disheartened at how baseball is reduced to numbers, with players being swapped around the big leagues like trading cards, so that baseball owners meet their bottom line.

They used to call me "Moneyballs" in college so when I noticed this on the best seller list at the local independent, I got more than a little excited. Alas, I was to be surprised by yet another book NOT about Heavy Hop Dop. This is a book about my favorite sport! Baseball. And a good one too. It reads fast and even amuses in places. I'm not an A's fan (even if I did get all A's in school), but this "Moneyball" is an entertaining read. Play balls! HHD.

Ever since free agency became integrated into baseball culture, the current wisdom has always been that the small-market teams must finish at the bottom because they don't have the resources to compete with larger market teams such as the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Chicago White Sox. The 1997 Florida Marlins spent their way to winning the World Series, but had to conduct a fire sale the next year in order to avoid bankruptcy. This, say the pundits, is in keeping with the current wisdom.

But there is an exception, and a rather large one at that. The Oakland A's, for years the epitome of the small market team, sharing a small market with the National League San Francisco Giants, have managed to win more games (553) from 1998 through 2003 than any other team save for the large market New York Yankees (598) and the Atlanta Braves (594). Now here's the kicker: In 2002, Oakland won 103 games, as many as the Yankees and two more than the Braves, with a payroll ($42M) only one-third the size of the Yankees ($133M) and half that of the Braves ($94M). Is this merely the exception that proves the rule, or is something else going on here?

"Moneyball" provides some of the answers. It is an in-depth look at how the Oakland A's, without the money of the Yankees, managed to win as many games by just looking at the baseball universe in a different way. The old rule was "you gotta spend money to make money." The '97 Florida Marlins spent their way to the World Series, and lost about $30 million in the process. They were forced to dump salary the next year and ended up alienation an already small fan base, which cut attendance even further. Billy Beane, the GM of the Athletics, realized early on that you can't spend what you don't have; thus consistency is the ideal. In this case, consistency is gained by getting the best players for the least money. To achieve this, Beane just looked at the same thing in a different way. Judge players by the things they can control rather than the things they can't control.

This is vividly illustrated in the case of Jeremy Brown, a catcher with the University of Alabama who was pooh-poohed by major league scouts, including Oakland's, as a "bad body catcher." But when Beane and his staff looked at Brown, they saw the only player in the history of the SEC with three hundred hits and two hundred walks. For Beane, the ability to control the strike zone was the best predicator of future success, and the large number of walks was an indicator of how well Brown was able to control the strike zone. The same held true for a pitcher. The speed of his fastball wasn't as important as the ratio of walks to strikeouts. Brown may have been slightly overweight and slow afoot, but he understood the strike zone. The same with pitcher Barry Zito, another overlooked Beane discovery. Zito may not have had that blazing fastball, but he knew how to manipulate the strike zone. What Beane and his staff did was simple: take statistics that already exist and rank them differently. If the game from the hitter's view is not to make outs, then the stat of on-base percentage becomes the best indicator of plate success.

What Beane and his staff knew that the others didn't was that, when humans are involved, the physics of baseball changes dramatically. There are an almost endless variety of books on the physics of baseball, illustrating the Newtonian principles of the curve ball, but when the human factor is computed the game comes down to probabilities. Newton ceases to reign. Heisenberg rules. While Beane's methods do not assure absolute success they do cut down on the probabilities, and that for the serious baseball fan is what the game is all about.

The paperback edition contains a beautifully written postscript entitled "Inside Baseball's Religious War." It is a counter-attack against the critics of the book and at the same time a devastating example of why baseball is in the mess it's in. The critics missed the point, seeing "Moneyball" as an exaltation of Billy Beane instead of as an examination of his system and why it has worked as well as it has. If baseball is to prosper, it has to forego the myopia that plagues it, and that is the real point Lewis is making.

"Moneyball" is extremely well-written. It is a quick read and a good read. However, there are some problems with the information presented here. Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder are all unbelievable pitchers and have much to do with the success of the low-budget team in Oakland; however, they are barely even mentioned in the book. Michael Lewis spends more time on finds like Scott Hatteberg. However, most of the A's success is due to the Big 3. And Billy Beane deserves a lot of credit for finding and drafting those guys. It's just not spelled out in this book.

To read this book and have no knowledge of baseball, you would think that all other GM's were idiots. Guys who just didn't get it. After reading this book, I'm not sure how Billy would find guys like Vlad, Sammy, Pedro, Ichiro (well, basically foreigners who wouldn't fit his statistical model). Sometimes, relying on scouts is a good thing. And sometimes drafting high schoolers (Griffey, Kerry Wood, Josh Beckett) is also a good thing, even if it is a bigger roll of the dice. But Beane does have an admirable plan.

All in all, this book is a worthwhile read, even if it does have the noteable ommission of Hudson, Zito, and Mulder.

Moneyball is about Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane's efforts to use statistics to get a competitive edge that translates into more runs scored versus the opponents and more wins. If that's all the book was about, it would be a bore. The story is enlivened a little by the fact that Mr. Beane has less money to work with than most other clubs, so we've got an underdog to root for. But Mr. Beane also turns out to have a volatile temper and a mindset that makes it hard for him to make good decisions in the heat of battle. Those problems kept him from having the "all-star" career that many expected for him as a player. So ultimately the book is about a man getting grips on himself so he can be more successful. Now, that story (if was the entire focus) would have been fascinating . . . but Mr. Lewis clutters the book up with unnecessarily long and boring nonmathematical descriptions of mathematical issues . . . and hurts his story.

That said, chapter two ("How to Find a Ballplayer") has some of the funniest dialogue in it that I have ever read. I had to stop reading the book every so often to stop laughing long enough for the pain in my abdomen to go away. I kept racing through the book to find something else as funny or as good . . . and didn't find it.

Mr. Beane believes that he needs to maximize on-base and slugging percentage for his club and the percentage of strikeouts and ground balls hit by opposing batters. So he focuses on finding players who are good at creating these results. Some of his searches take on a comic character when he finds players who are very deficient in fielding or speed.

This book will appeal most to those who admire Mr. Beane and those who run fantasy baseball teams on the Internet. Such readers will enjoy understanding more about the practical issues involved in applying statistics to baseball in the big leagues.

I was extremely surprised that Mr. Lewis did not briefly show someplace the statistical analyses that favor the quantitative ideas expressed in the book. This book could have been an entry point to interest young people in statistical analysis, but the book's content falls far short of that level. I mention that point because I did a science fair project as a youngster based on Branch Rickey's writing about what factors influence winning pennants. That article, although vastly out-of-date, probably did more good than this one will to encourage the statistical study of human behavior.

One of the better parts of the book is the chapter on Scott Hatteberg (chapter 8) which describes how he came to focus on batting discipline . . . which made him attractive to the A's after his catching career was over. I would have enjoyed understanding more about how disciplined hitters came to be that way. Instead, the book provides much too much information about why most hitters are undisciplined.

If you have never dreamed of being a general manager of a baseball club, you will probably find this book to be a little below average as a sports story.

As I finished the book, I wondered what it would take to stimulate millions of people to start doing these same sorts of measurements and analyses for reducing poverty, housing the homeless, conquering illiteracy and many other social ills. Now, that would be a book!

I am not much of a baseball fan, but after reading a review of this book I was compelled to borrow a copy. The story is set against the backdrop of baseball, but it reads more like the solving of a great scientific mystery.

Anyone growing up in America, whether or not they even watch baseball, knows the basic stats that ballplayers are judged by: Batting average, RBIs, ERA and so forth. You can't escape them. And these are the numbers that make or break careers. Want to improve your team? Sell that .280 hitter and bring in a .295 hitter. Get a pitcher with a lower ERA, an so on. This was the received wisdom. To everyone but players of "Rotissiere Baseball", that is.

"Rotissiere Baseball" is a paper-and-pencil version of the game popular with thousands of fans who trade players and play games based on the roll of the dice and statistics that they've compiled- statististics very different from the ones commonly reported. The players- many of them mathematicians, actuaries and others with a mind for numbers. These stats- termed "sabermetrics"- were empirically derived and then validated againt actual player performance. And yet they were completely ignored by the people who could most benifit from them- the owners and managers of the major league teams.

With one exception: The A's Billy Beane. An ex-player himself, Billy didn't have the math skills of those who compiled the sabermetric model, but he did have an uncommon amount of intelligence, and knew a good thing when he saw it. He used the sabermetric model to identify undervalued and overvalued players, and quickly traded his way to a top performing team with a relatively small budget.

Now that wasn't the only reason for the A's success, and Beane's skill went beyond just his utilization of the model, but it's the central issue in this story. The book isn't just about the math, of course; the portraits of Beane and the players he selects are every bit as fascinating. A good read for baseball fans, and a fascinating introduction to an arcane world for the math minded.

If, like me, you're one of those hopeless stat geeks who never get tired of "who's better?" discussions, "Moneyball" may well be right up your alley. Chronicling how the cash-strapped Oakland A's regularly compete with the huge-spending likes of the Red Sox and Yankees, "Moneyball" sets out to demonstrate that how plentiful your resources are isn't as important as how you use them. In one sense, it's about how A's general manager Billy Beane, himself a washout as a player, manages to build successful teams on a tight budget with a bunch of guys even I haven't heard of. But in another, deeper sense, the book is about how any enterprise can be improved if it's remade along rational lines.

Beane's business plan for the A's rested on a bold premise, namely that much of the traditional "knowledge" accumulated by baseball insiders was, well, b.s.. After all, Beane had tanked in his professional career after being tagged as a can't miss prospect, so how much could scouts know? Beane's plan, while radical, was also so fiendishly simple it's hard to believe it wasn't more common. Under Beane, the A's started judging prospects not by how athletic they were, or how good they looked in a uniform, but by how well they had performed in games. And if that meant hiring a group of Harvard graduates like assistant GM Paul DePodesta to pull names of college players off a computer, so be it.

Of course, the A's also faced the problem of money, since their payroll had to be kept at about 40 million dollars, or 15 million less than Alex Rodriguez makes. The solution? Treating the team like any other business, Beane and co. used cutting-edge research and technology to break players and stats into parts. Since they couldn't afford highly desired players, the A's had to figure out what was most important and go after it. And if the research is to be believed, it's the ability to get on base by any means necessary. On-base percentage takes on an almost mythical importance in "Moneyball," with the A's searching relentlessly for guys who could get on base and do it cheaply.

It's this aspect of the book that gets the most attention, and quickly becomes the most fascinating. Lewis emphasizes how the A's front office, with plenty of help from stat guru (but don't call him a statistician) Bill James, was able to look at numbers and find the underlying truth. As Lewis makes clear, it's not just looking at numbers that determines a player's value, it's looking at the *right* numbers. Lewis often draws parallels to the business world, and these comparisons serve to illustrate how one can make a killing with superior knowledge and counterintuitive thinking. It was strategies derived from the research of stat geeks that enabled the A's to improve their record in 2002 despite losing three of their top players to free agency.

Lewis also takes some time out from the analytical stuff to paint a vivid portrait of Beane himself. Lewis lets us see him plying his craft in the draft room and at the trading desk, demonstrating the shrewdness of a swindler. He often appears to be playing a different game from his colleagues, which is exactly what Lewis wants us to think. And we get to see Beane's (sort of) human side while he works out, and stresses out, during games. His frequent profanity-laced tirades and incessant tobacco chewing may not be too savory, but Beane is clearly just like the rest of us in at least a few ways.

Lewis gives us snapshots of some other, secondary characters as well. There's Paul DePodesta, Billy's Harvard-educated sidekick. There's Jeremy Brown, the overweight college catcher who was scarcely rated as a prospect despite having set records at Alabama. There's Scott Hatteberg, who was cast off by the Red Sox but given a new life in Oakland thanks to his ability to get on base. Finally there's Chad Bradford, the submarine-throwing pitcher who became a premier setup man with an 84-mile-an-hour fastball and a delivery that scraped the mound. We get to know all of these guys, and why they fit so well into the A's scheme.

Lewis also happens to be a pretty damn good storyteller, with a an engaging and uber-readable style. Bill James said baseball statistics fascinated him because they had the power of language, and Lewis's discussion of this seemingly boring subject demonstrates why. By framing a book about baseball in the language of business, Lewis makes his story accessible to enthusiasts of both. Not to mention, the book is worth reading simply for Lewis's brutally hilarious description of Jeremy Giambi's outfield play. High comedy, friends, high comedy.

I don't think "unputdownable" is a word, but if it were it would definitely be applicable to "Moneyball." I could even be convinced to say this is the best sports book I've ever read, and I've read some good ones. You don't necessarily have to agree with the A's strategies to enjoy the book, but you may well find yourself turned into a stat geek by the end. And for all you dolts out there saying Billy Beane had nothing to do with drafting Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, it's right there on page 39 from a member of the A's scouting department: "Billy made us take Zito." So that's one down right there.

I was finishing Moneyball during games 4 and 5 of the 2003 American League playoff series between the Sox and As and nothing could have been a more fitting ending to my combination reading/watching experience than the last at bat for the A's. Details below:

Lewis does a fine job of detailing how the A's GM ends up drafting players who walk a relatively high percentage of time in order to build a team that scores as much runs in the regular season as the Yankees on 1/4 the payroll. I was able to observe and appreciate many of the player decisions that Billy and Paul made empowered by sabermetrics. Hatteberge would walk; Tajeda would swing, etc. etc. Reading the book helped to reinvigorate my appreciate of baseball and each of 2003 playoff series.

If you recall the 8th and 9th innings of game 5 in Oakland, you will remember that the A's batters were successful in drawing a ton of walks. In the 9th inning the Sox had walked a couple more batters and the As had the bases loaded. The batter, Adam Melhuse does the job that Billy and Paul predict: he gets the pitcher to throw a ton of pitches until the pitcher either walks the batter or throws a strike (hopefully that the batter than handle). The count is 3-2; the batter, Melhuse gets a pitch in the strike zone...and watches it sail into the catcher's mit (another A was caught looking on the 2nd out of the inning as well--see below).

I sincerely respect the job Billy and Paul have done, but all things considered it seemed fitting to me that when it came down to the last 2 outs, the As died with 2 of their 3 batters betting on the opposing pitcher's willingness to throw a ball 4 rather than their own ability to successfully put the ball in play. I guess that's what you get for $40 million.

The Press Democrat
OAKLAND -- Adam Melhuse sat quietly at his locker, fielding wave after wave of questions about what he did -- or didn't do -- just moments earlier.

Melhuse had been caught looking at a third strike when he needed only to put the ball in play to tie up the decisive game of the Division Series against the Boston Red Sox on Monday night.

After Terrence Long also struck out looking, sending the A's to a 4-3 loss that ended their season and disappointed the Coliseum crowd of 49,397, Melhuse tried to put it in perspective.

"It's not life or death -- it's just a game," Melhuse said.

"That said, I'd have given my left foot to win that game. Literally, I would have chopped it off."

I really enjoyed every chapter of Michael Lewis' Moneyball. It took me only one week to read, and I found that I could never put it down once I started reading (I'm a college kid, I even missed an early class from reading this book too early in the morning.) I enjoy the field of statistics, and I am a big baseball guy, so this book made sense for me to buy.

What I found most fascinating was the way the A's evaluate batters and pitchers. THeir drafts really did go very well each year, although they never did really explain why high school pitchers are worse to draft than college pitchers. For batters, on base percentage, number of pitches taken, and slugging percentage, and extra base hits are the best ways to evaluate, while for pitchers, it's strikeout to walk ratio, homers allowed, ground ball to fly ball ratio, and extra base hits given up. What makes it so fascinating is that the standards for evaluating players (avg/HR/RBI for hitters, and W-L, ERA, WHIP for pitchers) are very rarely, if ever, considered when evaluating the talent.) What Billy did at the Trading Deadline was unique, and I think that other GMs should get some ideas from him and try to rip off other GMs like Billy did. The stories of Scott Hatteberg, Billy Beane himself, and Chad Bradford were also really interesting.

However, a little too much credit is given to Billy Beane. More credit should have been given to his assistant, Paul DePodesta, his scouts, and his coaching staff, in particular Rick Peterson, his pitching coach. This book also doesn't mention the aspects of the A's that have failed since Beane took over as GM (never past the first round of the Playoffs, an offense that even with Jason Giambi was only mediocre overall because of the greatness of the Big 3 in the starting rotation, and some bad acquisitions (Terrence Long, Carlos Pena, Johnny Damon, John Mabry, among others), and the fact that his choir boy manager in Art Howe was right more times than he gave him credit for. Billy Beane might be very creative and might be very successful in correlation to his team's payroll, but he is far from a "genius".

Just one piece of information that confuses me: after this book was written, at the trading deadline in 2003, Billy Beane traded a couple of decent pitching prospects for Cincinatti Reds outfielder Jose Guillen, who is the total opposite of a player Billy Beane likes. Guillen might have put up good power numbers the first part of the season, but he draws very few walks, takes very few pitches at the plate, strikes out a whole lot (1 in every 5.2 plate appearances), and his career OPS before 2003 was below .700. He's also been a big disappointment this year as an Athletic.....which makes me wonder why Billy thought he would be a great acquisition.

Any organization that is dedicated to preserving the idea of baseball as a mythic game and flourishes on celebrating its' tradition will attack "Moneyball" like Michael Moore does Bush. "Moneyball" is the kind of book that will have thoughtful baseball fans wondering two things: 1. Is it really this simple to find undervalued guys based on one or two traditionally overlooked stats? 2. When will people stop criticizing the Oakland GM Billy Beane for things like his arrogance and aggresivness and actually look at what that has accomplished?

In this age of players holding out for huge contracts before they've even played one inning, Beane is a great anecdote, refusing to draft players that have all the right aesthetics, baseball-related or otherwise. It's very funny, in a sad way, that Billy Beane seems to be the only baseball guy who actaully looks at what a player has accomplished so far. Everyone else, he correctly claims, looks at what a guy MIGHT become, as opposed to what he has done. Why take a high school golden boy who statistics say has an overwhelmingly low chance of high major league success and has spent his last 2 years mowing down skinny future engineering majors named Scooter over a proven college player who has posted good numbers against much stiffer competition and has much more experience? When I was in high school, everyone was drooling over our shortstop who could hit the ball a mile and run like the wind, but could do nothing in between. At the same time I knew a guy that played for a local college that routinely posted great numbers and had great showings agasint other guys being scouted, but he didn't fit the traditional baseball paradigm and was therefore forgotten about and I always wondered why. This book finally gave me my answer. This is exactly Beane's strategy, to find guys who fit the stats that he thinks are important and let the numbers and odds dictate the rest.

Something should be said too about not just the content of this book, but the way it is written. The most interesting story is, bar none, the story of Beane's own personal failure as a can't miss prospect. Everyone else who speaks of players talk fondly of a player who reminds them of themselves in their glory years, but Beane picks people who are the exact opposite of what he was, a high school golden boy who had all the potential in the world, but had not accomplished much stat-wise. There is even a story in the book in which Beane talks with a scout who once scouted him and loved him, despite admitting he never looked at a single stat of his.

The way this book punches a hole through not only traditional baseball and strategy but the real psychological makeup of those who run it is nothing short of amazing. You'll be fascinated by every single story in the book, even though they are all about guys who you probably never heard of and might not for years. And that's exactly Billy Beane's idea of a great #1 draft pick.

Lewis is a gifted writer who draws attention the great things that Billy Beane has accomplished in Oakland. This is really the first time that Beane has been given the credit he deserves in the mainstream, and it is long overdue.

When discussing Beane's player evaluation techniques, Lewis outlines a field of study known as "sabermetrics." For anyone who has not yet been exposed to sabermetrics or has only a passing familiarity with the subject, this will be an eye-opening book and could change the way you view the game of baseball. Many of the things you thought you knew about baseball will be proven incorrect, and you will be introduced to a number of new concepts that you will undoubtedly use in the future.

On the other hand, for anyone who is already quite familiar with sabermetrics (and more specifically, Billy Beane), you will not get much out of this book. Chapters 2, 5, and 9 will be informative, but the rest is either filler or a review of concepts you already know. You won't regret reading the book, but it may not be a particularly memorable one for you (it wasn't for me, hence the three stars). For people in this situation, it would be fine to wait for the book to come out in paperback and save a few bucks.

Overall, I would recommend reading Moneyball, but don't set your expectations too high if you're already familiar with the subject matter.

As a long suffering Anaheim Angels fan (until 2002!), I've always found the on-field success of the Oakland A's interesting, primarily because it usually came at the expense of the Angels. This book explains where that success comes from: GM Billy Bean and his view of baseball fundamentals. That part of the book is interesting, if not new. Michael Lewis certainly revels in the "art of the deal" sections of the book, similar to his approach in "Liar's Poker".

However, what's missing from this book is perspective and balance. Everything other team in baseball is portrayed as free-spending dolts blinded by their illusions, which I found simplistic, unfair and unrealistic. In baseball (which is a $3.5 billion-a-year business), on-field success doesn't always translate into off-field success. Lewis fails to acknowledge that there may be legitimate business reasons behind many teams' free-spending approach to talent, beyond the straight-foward reason of winning baseball games. Star players help land lucrative television deals, draws fans to the stadiums and generate merchandise sales. If the teams happen to win some pennants along the way, all the better!

I just expected a book called "Moneyball" would attempt to explore this aspect of the business of baseball.

The most important number in baseball is World series won. How many does Beane have...none. He hasnt even made it to the pennant games yet and they way things are going the A's never will if Beane is the GM. Thier window of oppurtunity passed when the "overpaid" and slick fielding (which doesnt matter to Beane) Derek Jeter threw out the overweight and slow Jer. Giambi at the plate on a great play in 2001. The As would be bottom rung if not the the 3 hammers they have in the rotation, non of whom were picked out of the crowd by Beane. Everyone knew that Hudson, Zito and Mulder would be very good. Groupthink has obviously taken a hold of most of the reviewers, who all seem to say the same things. "OBP is important, Ks are important, not making an out blah blah" and so on as if everyone in the baseball world doesnt know that. Looks like Beane pulled another fast one on all the people who rushed and bought his book.

I agree with the reviewer who said the book is enlightening and troubling.

One thing I would add is that although the book is well-written (Lewis tells a great STORY), the author seems unable to distance himself from his subject, and I found that slobbering annoying at times. Lewis's tone implies that Beane and DePodesta can do no wrong, and everyone else is stupid, ignorant or both. That is inaccurate, but I guess if one is admitted to the inside circle and has access to the major powerbrokers in order to write a book on this subject, perhaps one's judgement might be co-opted.

I'm a hardcore A's fan, and believe me I appreciate Beane and DePodesta's work, but it might have helped to do more interviews outside the organization to get another perspective on team-building. Lewis paints a convenient picture of 'Us' vs. 'Them', which I doubt is completely accurate.

On the positive side, I can't wait to read Lewis's next book in which he follows up on the 2002 draft class.

I received Moneyball in the mail yesterday and read it today. It moves along faster than the game ... and the message is applicable all over the map: people (and things) are overvalued or undervalued for reasons that have more to do with tradition and unproven paradigms than with relevant qualities.

Anyone who manages or hires, anyone who thinks there's something wrong with the current "system" (for doing whatever) can gain tremendous insight from Lewis's book. "If professional baseball players could be over- or under-valued," writes Lewis, "who couldn't?"

Skip this book at your own peril. It's inspirational, in the best way: it doesn't ask you to believe in anything but the idea that we still can learn a better way.

Reading through this book, one gets the impression that arcane baseball stats that most major league GM's don't care about but should, coupled with the sly and shrewd businessman that Billy Beane appears to be has been a winning combination for the Oakland A's. A team that virtually everyone counted out after the 2001 season came back to win over and over in 2002. Although I'm not an Oakland A's fan, I found myself grinning at the moves that Beane makes again and again to not only keep his team winning, but spend as little as possible in the process. Lose your three best players? No problem. Just reload with cheaper replacements. Lose more players after the season? No problem..cheaper replacements are on the way. The A's and other small market teams like the Twins who also are winning poke a huge hole in Bud Selig's contention that these "small market teams" should have been contracted just a year or two ago.

Another thing I noticed about this book is how Beane dispenses with the conventional wisdom of running a baseball team in favor of his own method. So far it obviously has worked, and worked well. And yet only two other major league teams as of the book's publishing have embraced this method. The other teams seem insistent on running a team as inefficiently as possible. All the better for Beane to continue to work his magic.

Numerous folk have commented in reviews of this book that it will be harder now for Beane to continue to be successful because this book shows how he has managed to do this. I don't think so, in fact I think in some ways he wants the rest of the world to know how he has done all this. He secretly wants recognition for the way he has managed to beat "the system."

Not only a look at an unconventional way to run a baseball team, but this book is also a look at an unconventional way for anyone to successfully run any business. A fascinating read.

What a pleasure it was to see my favorite author, Michael Lewis, taking a hard look at my favorite subject, baseball. Lewis won me over w/ Liar's Poker a decade over, and I've been thrilled w/ his progress as a writer and his Crichton-like ability to master new subjects.

I found astonishing about this book was how Lewis could take a mathematical formula, OBP, and weave it w/ astonishing personal stories. Lewis and Beane seem to stick w/ hitters, who seem a little easier to pigeonhole numerically.

Enjoy as Lewis describes and unveils an adult statistician who still lives at home, the shock of an "undraftable" catcher going in the first two rounds, a hilarious encounter between a weary pitcher and a hitter waiting on "his pitch" and the story of a "can't miss" prospect -- Billy Beane -- who self-destructs and lives his life proving he won't do it again.

What a joy it was to follow Lewis down this road, and I'm eagerly awaiting his next journey.

Tom Sakell
Baltimore, MD

Before reading Moneyball, I had two Bill James books in my bookcase, but they were strictly for show. Before reading Moneyball, I never once cared about the drafting and development of minor league baseball players. Before reading Moneyball, I never paid much attention to the reading of box scores. This book (which is extraordinarily well-written) has changed all that.

Michael Lewis presents a unique and different view of measuring the value of baseball players, and a new way to evaluate players' talent. It's impossible to come away from this book without an altered view of baseball in general. After finishing Moneyball, I sat down and watched the Cubs-Pirates game from start to finish, looking at the nuances at the game I had missed before. I haven't done that in years.

More importantly, this book got me thinking. I'm not sure that Billy Beane has revolutionized baseball. Much of Beane's ideas were also lifted from the Cleveland Indians' approach to scouting and player development from the early 90s. Led by Hank Peters and his assistant John Hart, the Tribe signed such luminaries as Manny Ramirez, Albert Belle and Jim Thome to long-term contracts, then developed their skills with an emphasis on long counts and walks. Lewis fails to mention this point, but his reports on theories of the game are fascinating.

Lewis' reporting is top-notch. The chapter where Beane and his staff work to conduct the 2002 amateur draft is completely riveting. Also, the account of Beane's "trawling" for players through trades is equally first-rate. And I don't think Billy Beane has been deified at all. He treats some people who are rather integral to his success rather shabbily (think Art Howe or Miguel Tejada).

However, it is impossible to deny Billy Beane's influence on the game. The Red Sox and Blue Jays have both hired Beane disciples to run their front office -- heck, the Red Sox even hired Bill James. Any book that can rekindle a fan's interest in baseball deserves five stars. I'm already deep into my first Bill James book, which had sat untouched for the last eight years.

Definitely worth the money.

Michael Lewis is a great author, and really goes inside a war room in baseball. I love books about sports, and i sometimes aspire to be a baseball GM, and such.

Yet i don't believe the Lews portrays many characters correctly. For example Grady Fuson (the A's old Scouting Director) drafted the likes of great pros like: Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Eric Chavez. Lewis gives him absolutely no credit.

Also Assistant GM Paul DePodesta has said that Lewis can over dramatize some of the things they talked about, (like the importance of stats). Lewis also doesnt state that the A's drafted some guys too high, because they couldn't afford the best guys on the market.

With all that said Moneyball is a very good read, and takes you right to the GM's office Of a great franchise

Michael Lewis' Moneyball, is a great introduction to the increasing role statistics play creating a winning baseball team. Lewis profiles the A's owner, Billy Beane, and shows how Beane has managed to create a winning team despite a small budget. It begins to put to rest the use of worthless stats, such as RBI, which is really only a measure of how good the batters are in front of you.

As a former baseball coach, I was interested in the chapter on how Beane selects players from the amateur draft. He creates a strong case for players attending college before entering the draft, especially if one's life long dream is to play for the A's.

If you enjoy Moneyball, I would suggest reading other similar books such as Baseball Between the Numbers, The Fielding Bible, Mind Games, and The Baseball Economist. In general, anything by the Baseball Prospectus people is a great choice.

This was just a terrific book, putting an incredibly human face on a game and a financial analysis of success.

I just finished reading Moneyball for the first time. I was generally impressed, and a lot of the ideas about baseball seem to be fairly on target, but I think they need to stand the test of time before we can accept them as unquestionably valid. We're not there yet.

Anyway, I was curious about how a lot of the players mentioned in the book fared in Major League Baseball, and checked out the stats on many of them. Now there is one part of the book where Ray Durham (A's second baseman) is taking batting practice while coaches Ron Washington and Thad Bosley are chatting behind the cage, obviously with our author Michael Lewis nearby and listening in too. Now "Wash" and "Boz" mention that they each got lots of stolen bases in their careers. Wash claims to have gotten 50 or so one year (my memory's vague on this detail as I write this) and Bosley acknowledged when Wash said that Boz got 90 one season. Durham is shocked by this. While I read it, I took it as fact. If you take the time to look it up, you'll see that they're obviously having an inside joke at someone's expense, either Durham's, Lewis' or both.

Wash played 12 yrs, almost all as a utility infielder. He had as many as a total of 10 stolen bases in only one season, never made double digits in any other year. Ron Washington did not play on the speedy Royals in the 70s. His first season was '78 with the Dodgers, then he went down to the minors again until he was back up with the Twins in '81. Looks like he started in 82 and or 83, that's it.

Bosley's top steal total was 12 in '78 with the White Sox. He usually didn't even get 90 ab's in a year. Utility outfielder for every one of his seasons in the majors.

Now it didn't seem to me that Lewis was presenting this info as if he was in on the joke. I wonder what anyone else's impression was, if they seemed to sense any irony on his part. It would be a bit embarrassing if Lewis printed this without fact checking it, especially when he's as irreverent as he is toward his targets (scouts, baseball management/establishment) for basically not bothering to check real facts (statistics). It's at least as important for a non-fiction writer to be checking his facts as for a baseball general manager.

I also took some time to dig up stats on the A's 2002 draftees. Nick Swisher is doing very well, Joe Blanton is a #3 A's starter now, but no other draftee of theirs that year is spectacular -- most aren't even in the majors yet. One prospect they ridiculed and passed on, Prince Fielder, is looking like a new star for the Brewers. So while the A's got a huge number of the guys they wanted, those guys haven't by and large panned out to be all that great, no more than any other team's, that I can see. Their picks seem to about on par with other teams' picks.

So while the book's premise is intriguing, from what I can see, it hasn't proven itself to be true yet by a long shot. That may change over time, and we can see a handful of teams now mimicking the A's philosophy (Red Sox, Blue Jays, Padres for starters). Time will tell.

Knowing this, that the jury is still very much out, I have to say that to me it seems like the attack on Joe Morgan in the last part of the book is way over the top and out of line. Morgan has a right to his opinion, and he's paid money to give his opinion on TV. A career like his gives him the right to speak his mind, and actually he has more credibility than Beane or Lewis based on that alone. It would definitely be better for Morgan if he'd examine the evidence a bit closer, rather than refuse to read the book. Lewis meanwhile attacks Morgan for wrongly claiming Beane wrote the book (among other things). As far as I can tell, Morgan never said that. Morgan did say that Beane says in the book that he is "smarter than everyone else." (which isn't literally true, but it's the gist of Beane's attitude, honestly) Beane is quoted often in the book, saying lots of things, from cover to cover. That doesn't mean he wrote the book, and if Morgan says that Beane said something in the book, that's not the same as Morgan saying Beane wrote the book. My gut says Lewis is dishonestly twisting what Morgan said, of disingenuosuly throwing fuel on the fire. It is possible I missed some quote of Morgan where he clearly says that Beane wrote the book -- and I did look for it. I've looked at the quotes that Morgan's critics (incl. Lewis' in the book) cite as 'proof' -- and none of those quotes state what they say it states. But if anyone can find where Morgan actually says that Beane wrote Moneyball, I would like to see it.

I'm kind of neutral where Joe Morgan is concerned. I think he'd probably learn something by reading the book, and I think Lewis also goes too far in his claims and attacks. Moneyball has some interesting, intriguing ideas in it that may or may not be valid over the long run. But the experiments are underway, and in time we'll know. My gut says some will turn out to be true and some not.

In my view the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis was not very good. The book does not make a lot of sense unless you know a lot about baseball. The book talks a lot about how the careers of different people in baseball started and also how the people ended up. But almost nowhere in the book did it tell how the people ended up where they were. There are too many different things that should be explained that are not in the book. For example the book skips from when Billy Beane the manager of the Oakland A's started off in baseball to when he is the manager but it does not explain what happened in between.

The book does not relate to almost any thing we did this year in English class other than an article that says that money does not buy happiness. In this book is the opposite almost every thing has to do with money and how having more money in baseball means more wins.

The Book does not discuss any social values. All the book deals with is how to win in baseball when a team does not have a lot of money to spend as compared to winning when the team has a lot of money to spend.

There are many different areas of concern discussed in the book, such as what players a team should trade, to how for how much money, whether some one is worth keeping even if they are worth a lot of money, and whether or not to base your choices on a computer program that might not work, which are all discussed in the book.

Michael Lewis isn't only a great sports journalist, but one of the greatest writers of my generation. He has created a new way to showcase the secret lives of sports by going behind the scenes and telling us a story of the puppeteers that control certain aspects of their game. In Moneyball, we dive in head first into the life of Oakland A's GM, Billy Beane, and how he used Bill James' analysis of baseball to create a winning team season after season. It's hard to do that today in this ever-increasing world of high contracts and young kids making millions of dollars, not knowing what to do with it. Lewis' journey amasses one season with the Oakland A's but really makes you feel like you've been there the whole time. Great book, excellent read, highly recommended!

When I was growing up I devoured any book written about baseball. As I've gotten older, my passion for the game has waned. Though still a fan, I'd not read a baseball book in several years until I finally got around to reading this one.

Reading Moneyball four years after the events occured sheds new light on things. The first portion of the book focuses on the personality and playing history of general manager Billy Beane and then has an inside look at the 2002 amateur draft, where many of Beane's philosophies are put into action. Beane is ecstatic when Scott Kazmir and Prince Fielder are selected by other teams thus allowing him to get the player he covets, Nick Swisher. Swisher has panned out nicely for the A's. Jeremy Brown, the other draftee Lewis focuses on, has not had the success anticipated (he had his first big league at bat just last night).

The rest of the book has some interesting moments as well. There is a lengthy discussion of sabrmetrics and the role Bill James and others have played in shaping the A's philosophy. Also, a couple of really interesting profiles of Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford which shed some light on the strange paths some people take on their way to major league baseball.

Lewis focuses a lot of attention on Paul DePodesta, the assistant GM for the A's. In fact, without saying so directly, I get the impression that Lewis feels he's at least equally responsible for the A's successes. DePodesta has since gone on to an unsuccessful sting with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Reading the book a few years after the fact gives some perspective on some of the mistakes that Beane and the A's have made with some player decisions, but despite those mistakes, the bottom line is that the franchise has continued to excel despite being dramatically outspent and despite the fact that the rest of baseball has been "clued in" to the A's thinking.

As an aside...I find it interesting that all of the attention has been paid to Beane and the A's. This is well deserved, for sure, but lost in all of this is the fact that the Minnesota Twins have been equally frugal and nearly equally successful. How have THEY done it? It might make for an interesting book itself.

Any true baseball fan, even a somewhat lapsed baseball fan such as myself, should do him/herself a favor and pick up this book. It may even rekindle some interest in the game we grew up loving...

Baseball is a funny game, Joe Garagiola wrote. Also upsetting, thrilling, boring, redeeming, and traditional, often all in one nine-inning stretch. Something you don't hear so often is that baseball is scientific, not at least until Michael Lewis blew the lid off this dirty secret in his 2003 book, "Moneyball."

Lewis follows one Billy Beane, a one-time hot prospect for the New York Mets who unaccountably never found success in the big leagues until he even more unaccountably wound up the GM for the cash-poor Oakland As. There he began looking for bargain players who looked less like he did and more like his onetime teammate Lenny Dykstra, who looked all wrong for the game but was a star all the same.

"In his own mind he ceased to be a guy who should have made it and became a guy upon whom had been heaped a lot of irrational hopes and dreams," Lewis writes of Beane. "He had reason to feel some distaste for baseball's mystical nature. He would soon be handed a weapon to destroy it."

One wants to jump in here and observe that one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. But Beane's apostasy is covered with such unflinching zeal by Lewis it becomes hard to say where the subject ends and writer begins in "Moneyball's" colorful musings about the economic and strategic inefficiencies of the game.

There are arguments to be made for tradition, for keeping players around even at the cost of paying them a market wage. But "Moneyball's" iconoclasm is so enjoyably presented, with Lewis's love for telling anecdotes and drop-dead quotes, it emerges as the first great baseball book of the 21st century, and the best anti-baseball book in its snarky, rebellious way since Jim Bouton's "Ball Four."

First of all, Lewis presents some bracing concepts, such as the importance of on-base percentage above batting average and RBIs, in a way that makes such knowledge fun to learn even if you are not predisposed to learn from it. He shines a light on the arcane science of sabermetrics, which breaks down how baseball works, in such a way you find yourself laughing at what is at heart a statistical analysis.

And he does find a human side to the equation, in the stories of players conventional wisdom has given up on and Beane has rescued with an eye for a bargain:

"The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don't know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired."

Inspiring? I don't think so. But "Moneyball" is certainly illuminating, and if Beane comes across in retrospect as a manic somewhat tied down by his own dogmas, Lewis emerges as the leading practitioner of the New New Journalism, writing about the most arcane facts in a way akin to the breeziest fiction read. Whatever critics may say, fiction this is not.

I read Moneyball at the suggestion of a respected colleague. My typical choice of books tend to be more technical, and often feels like work. Lewis' Moneyball though was like taking the afternoon off. But don't be mislead into thinking you won't get much out of it. Lewis expertly takes you inside the game, offering keen insight at the same time. I now look at business and government indicators in a new light, and I don't take any of them for granted as I often did prior to this book.

Let's get one thing straight. This is not a book about baseball.

America's pastime, they call it. But to our national psyche it's much, much more. It's a metaphor for heroism, hope, innocence, youth--the movies don't talk about fields of dreams for nothing. But dreams are about emotion, and emotions can deceive in cruel and powerful ways. And nowhere, according to Michael Lewis' intriguing premise in "Moneyball", does emotion distort with more pernicious force than in the sport of baseball.

Billy Beane found this out the hard way. As an up and coming minor leaguer in the late 80s he fielded with Dykstra and Strawberry for the Mets. Mesmerizing baseball scouts nationwide, he found himself heralded as the sport's perfect man, a power hitter, a nimble fielder, a natural headed for greatness with effortless grace. But after spurning college at Stanford to take the seductive bait of the major league draft, Billy Beane found himself falling a lot faster and deeper than he'd climbed.

Billy was an emotional guy. His minor league teams spent significant sums on the bats he broke when he struck out, the sinks he pulled out from their moorings when his genius failed. In hindsight, years later, he saw how his own nature had been his undoing. And he vowed to bend it to his own will, and define for himself a new and spectacular brand of success in the sport that so spurned him.

No author in America was better suited to bring Billy Beane's story to print than Michael Lewis. There's not another writer at work today with the uncanny ability to bring literary style and journalistic discipline to the world of numbers with such concise and forceful effect. He showed this talent for fusion in his previous blockbuster, "Liar's Poker". But he here he eclipses himself in an investigative masterpiece as informative as it is compelling.

Billy Beane's epiphany about his own failures in the early '90s came in tandem with a radical new school of thought in baseball, one founded in stark statistical analysis, devoid of the trappings of subjectivity and emotion. As Billy followed a new career path in baseball management these new ideas took firm and deep root in his thinking, and he set out on a course to prove them right. Let the old school scouts evaluate players based on gut instinct and showy play. Billy was sure he knew a different way.

Baseball, the chastened Beane began to perceive, was living in the dark ages. Player were culled, and paid, based on subjective premises that had little to do with their ultimate ability to get on base and score runs. The old fashioned scouting system, rooted as it was in intuition, was rife with inefficiencies and distortions. With the advent of free agency, the imperfections of the scouting system were magnified without mercy. In olden times a sub-par player brought up through the scouting system might set a team back 150K. After free agency, it was more like 15M.

All this did Billy Beane learn, through the prism of his own previous failures. And where there is inefficiency, as any Wall St. trader will tell you, there is huge opportunity. A general manager's challenge, Billy's challenge, was to construct a team of professionals stripped down to the barest, and most relevant, essence of their unique individual abilities, with no intrusion from internal doubt or external second guessing. This was the team that would win games, making little boys' dreams come true and a few shrewd men's wallets explode with cash.

The body of "Moneyball" lays out the tale of Billy's tenure as the general manager of the Oakland A's, guiding the reader through the arcane processes of free agency and the psychology of trading. But baseball is only a vehicle for the development of much larger themes. It's man's fundamental struggle in every endeavor he undertakes to strip out emotions from decision making. The quest for the optimum exists in everything. But it's an uphill battle, against the way human beings are wired. Lewis' tale of one man's determination to win, using only the stark truth of mathematical analysis, is filled with countless insights and journalistic jewels. It's like watching one very exciting baseball game, where the win is about something much more than a game.

Moneyball is more about the money and less about the ball, as the book is definitely intended for a mass-market, business-oriented audience. Lewis's general theme is that baseball, like business, is a numbers game, and the victor is usually the person or group who can maximize their efficiency.

True to the New Journalism style of Michael Lewis, you can't come away from this book without feeling emotionally involved and deeply partisan, like you're part of some enlightened David fighting an establishment Goliath.

Serious baseball afficianados will quickly recognize Lewis's oversimplifications and hyperbole, but most can move beyond that to see what is, more than anything, a finally crafted story with deep interest.

This is a very well-written and engaging book about a new approach to building a baseball team. Some of the theories presented in this book are simply mind-blowing! I came into reading this book with an open mind and found myself agreeing with a lot of what was presented. However, I also disagreed with some aspects of the book and now I'm off to read its "counterpart," Scout's Honor (a Braves-centric book!).

The point is not, how many World Series have the Oakland A's won with their revolutionary approach. The point is, what are they getting for their modest investment? They're getting a great deal - for their team's budget you'd expect them to be permanently camped out in last place. But instead here they are making a run for it yet another year. Money alone can't buy a winning team or a World Series ring.

Don't believe me? Go ask George Steinbrenner.

I just finished reading this book, and it is fantastic. It is well written, intriguing, well developed. But there's one fault. Everyone is quick to rate Billy Beane as a genius, and ask how does he do it? But keep in mind, as well as the A's have done, what has playing 'moneyball' done for the Oakland franchise? If I recall correctly they made the playoffs for four or five straight years under Beane, but failed to advance, or threaten seriously. Is on base percentage more important than average? Ground ball outs more important than ERA? Is Beane better than Steinbrenner? Their jewelery would say otherwise. Before we annoint Beane the crown prince of baseball we must remember that although his teams are built well to win in the regular season, he has yet to get a sniff of any success in the playoffs.

You need not be a baseball fan to appreciate Michael Lewis' MoneyBall. Lewis tracks Oakland A's GM Billy Beane, who built a series of powerhouse ballclubs with a major handicap. Despite having a payroll that was petty cash to teams like the Yankees, Beane's clubs excelled. A series of excellent finishes, culminating with a playoff series that took the Yankees to the limit, solidified Beane's reputation. But how did he do it?

Beane's unconventional methods were the key. Using Bill James (of Baseball Abstract fame) as an inspiration, the A's GM hired the best and brightest statisticians and dispensed with the conventional wisdom of opinionated scouts. So what if a college catcher had a "bad baseball body"? Beane didn't care. He was concerned with metrics like on-base-percentage, which turns out to be much better at predicting major league success than a scout's biased opinion.

Dealing with players as business units, each with measurable ROI (return on investment), Beane bought low and sold high. If a closer cranked out a bunch of saves, Beane figured he could trade the pitcher for higher value than he was really worth. Saves were a misleading statistic: strikeouts, walks, and home-runs-allowed were really the only true ways to measure a pitcher's performance. A "superstar" was simply a stat-generating machine and if the same amount of money could be leveraged on someone else that could yield similar stats, why not make a trade?

In retrospect, like all great ideas, Beane's tenets are remarkably simple. It's just interesting that it took baseball over a century to figure out that stats like ERA and RBI were pretty much meaningless. What mattered were stats that historically proved to be predictors of baseball victories: on-base-average and slugging average for batters, for instance. A quick, fascinating read, MoneyBall is an elegant look at a smart GM and his godfather: Bill James.

I prefer fiction, but when given this book that revolves around my love of baseball and youth's rooting interest, the Oakland A's, I had to take it in. It's a fascinating read. I am particularly appreciative of the A's attitude to 'think outside the box.' I came away with a new positive outlook about a few people, player Scott Hatteberg high on that list, and not much respect for others. Billy Beane's approach works, but I surely wouldn't want to work for such a volatile human being. It will be interesting to see how Beane's disciples do in Toronto and Los Angeles. The latter is new, but the former has been going without success for several years. Many of the young players discussed in the books have just begun making it to the major leagues at this writing (spring, 2005) so that is another aspect to watch, how well everyone's plans and drafts work out. The tension between innovation - divergent thinking, and conventional wisdom managed to strike a bothersome chord in me. Philosophically, both are equally appealing to me. In some places, my profession most prominently, I find that innovation by outsiders tends to be counterproductive, if anything. In baseball, there's clearly room for it, but I think only to a limited degree. If Beane's way became the norm, and more than a dozen teams were trying it, the dilution of Moneyball-appealing talent would be damaging to the teams and games, and those teams thinking outside Beane's box would get the productive, more conventional players, probably for less than they could now. Beane's hit upon a divergent way that works on its small scale, but I suspect only there. I'm glad I read it. It was unsettling to my mind in some ways, something I appreciate. Great, it's not.

This is one of those books that had me thinking about it days after I finished it. It is a rare look inside the business of baseball, but even more, a look inside the mind of a true independent thinker (Billy Beane). The book is extremely well written and well researched and an all around great read.

Michale Lewis talks about how Oakland A's trump the biggest and best in baseball with their 'profit on the cheap' business strategy. Year-in and year-out, they get into playoffs with a $40 million payroll and compete w/ the Yankess (payroll $170+).

The ability of Billy Beane and his team (esp Paul Podesta) to hand pick 'low-end' players on the cheap, and win enuff to make A's profitable is a truly memorable story.

It gets deep into baseball statistics and history, but from a bird's eye view, it's more about running a business with a smart strategy (instead of following the lead of the big kahunas).

Recommend it more as a business guide than as a baseball story. But, if you love baseball (or any sport), it's a bigger bonus :)

Have read his one other book - The New New Game. And, it was
fantastic.

This book deserves a thumbs up from me.

This is an enjoyable read, whether you are a baseball fan or not. If you ever have to evaluate performance in any field, or if you are ever evaluated yourself (and this includes virtually all of us), then you should find this book fascinating. Lewis gives us an inside look at the evaluation of baseball talent, and shows us the many ways that people are under or over valued. Just imaging the difficulty of evaluating performance in fields where there are not dozens of objective statistics. How far off are your supervisors evaluations of you, or your evaluations of your subordinates. Raises interesting questions about defining the goals of an organization and analyzing the actions that further their achievement.

As a fan of books that you can learn something from, yet are fun to read, this is a winner. Michael Lewis does a great job of providing just the right amount of depth for the general public on sabermatrics and the data-driven approach to managing a baseball team. The result is an enlightening and amusing story that will make for a fun read.

That answer of course is yes. This was a great book that changed how baseball teams are runned. One of Billy Beane's follewers Theo Epstien has just won a World Series with the redsox. Billy Beane made stats like OBP and OPS more popular for teams to look into when putting together teams. now that sounds like a book for just baseball stat geeks but this is a book for everyone.
Michael Lewis writes about following the Oakland A's for a season and does it in an entertaining way for the stat geeks and a casual fan. From Billy Beanes new way of drafting to his way of implementing stats into finding cheap talent on the free agent market. It even gets one to know Billy Beanne as a failed baseball prospect turned Gm. This book was a terrific read and I would recommend it to anyone.

I have little interest in baseball, but I enjoyed this book as a description of business innovation and resistance thereto.
Lewis does a good job of reporting what the Oakland A's did better than most competitors. But I'm a bit disappointed by his half-hearted attempts to go beyond reporting the A's methods and analyze why other teams are slow to copy methods which improve scores.
One obvious question to ask is whether team owners provide the appropriate incentives for managers to maximize the number of games won. The book hints on page 123 that the answer is no, that the A's payrolls in 2002 were further behind the those of the Yankees than in 1999. But that hint could be misleading, as it only describes an increase in the dollar difference in payrolls, and leaves unclear what happened to the ratio of the payrolls.
One theory I came up with to explain resistance to copying the A's methods is the possibility that people view baseball as a means of measuring players skill for some broader purpose than winning games, and that winning by getting more walks seems like cheating because it doesn't reflect the abilities that baseball was designed to measure. Alas, the book provides few indications as to whether this theory explains much.
Another theory that I suspect is more powerful is that managers who worked their way up to that job through a career as scouts adopted attitudes that implied scouting is a valuable profession, are unable to reconcile those attitudes with the new methods described in Moneyball, and prefer the worldview that says their career has been productive over a worldview which is more accurate but which implies that they have (at least at times) been ripping off their employers. Mancur Olson reported in his book Power and Prosperity that similar problems cause many private companies to categorically refuse to hire people who worked for Soviet state-run firms in the same industry.

With Michael Lewis, everything begins with 'Liars Poker.' When experts compile the 100 seminal books of the last century, Lewis' Wall Street tale might well be on it. It's that good.

That's a lot to live up to here, but 'Moneyball' delivers. Even if you're not much of a baseball fan here (heck, even Lewis admits he's never been much of a fan), this is compelling, enjoyable reading. Maybe a bit too slavish in its admiration of Billy Beane, but other than that, its very insightful. It's obvious that Lewis sees the parallels between computer jocks like Beane's trusty right-hand man, Paul DePodesta and the young 'quants' who began to dominate Wall Street trading in the 80s. It's a very apropos analogy.

I do suggest that you get the paperback. The updated epilogue to the paperback edition was published as a standalone piece in Sports Illustrated and it recounts the brutal backlash to the book from lifetime baseball 'insiders.' There's a wonderful story Lewis recounts about Joe Morgan, who - in disparaging both the book and Beane - is recounted as saying in interviews 'When Billy Beane writes a book like that...'

Meaning, of course, Morgan - picking up the spiel of the insiders - hadn't even read the book before launching these intellectually dishonest attacks. Nice. Anyway, the epilogue lets you in on these wars, which are equally - if not more - fascinating as the original publication.

Michael Lewis seems unaware that the A's front office is hamming it up in front of him. Poor journalism if he couldn't figure it out.

Moneyball reminded me of 1980s-style education theory: throw out everything you know and try everything new. This was an unbalanced piece of journalism. That said, it was interesting. I'd rate the A's way of doing things about 50 percent right. There is a place in the game for "tools" analysis and a place for numbers. Being a Red Sox fan, I firmly believe that Pedro Martinez is a different pitcher before 105 pitches than he is after. I wish Grady Little had consulted that number in October. I do believe that many times a walk is as good as a hit. But Ted Williams walked too much and did not help Boston nearly as much as he would have if he had hit more. In the book, A's managers, coaches and scouts were treated as if they are idiots and there's only a couple of brains, Beane's and DePodesta's. And of all the deals Beane makes, we never hear of the bad ones and when Lewis lauds the deal for Chad Bradford, a reliever who will be out of the game in a couple years, we are not told the player he is traded for, Miguel Olivo, is actually a rising star. The White Sox just traded him for Freddie Garcia, a much better pitcher than Bradford will ever be. The book was good but unbalanced, a piece of hero worship.Too bad Lewis wasn't around last year, when the A's idiotic baserunning allowed the Sox to beat them and Beane whined that if he had $50 million more he's have beat Boston. $50 million more for what, baserunning lessons?

I saw Michael Lewis interviewed on Television prior to purchasing which prompted my purchase. Further, I am a long time Michael Lewis fan ... apart of the wonderful cult that has read and re-read liars poker.

I must admit, I was a bit disappointed with this book. While I like baseball, and it told a decent story -- I just couldn't see the purpose of the story. It lacked a lot of the zest portrayed by the characters within Liar's Poker (the Michael Lewis standard)

Sure, I love the concept of thinking outside the box, and enjoy the quips encrusted within the wisdom, but it was very difficult for me to envision the bigger message I think Lewis was trying to convey. It just seemed like a story of someone using the Internet and statitistics in a neat and innovative way -- in a very traditional almost elitist industry. Makes 300 pages too long.

A fair book, but I would wait until it was on paperback or pick it up in the library.

Hope this helps!

Any veteran fan who is not a stat-head, will not agree with everything written in here. However, it is fascinating to consider. Beane is no hero, but certainly a hell of a GM. I'm fascinated to see how DePodesta does in LA with a bigger payroll. The book is at it's best when describes the stories of the players--Scott Hatteberg, Jeremy Brown and the trades (the chapter on Rincon is classic). It slows down when Lewis falls too much into his financial/math background. Still, anything that challenges the prevailing wisdom (I particularly loved the scene where Beane goes nuts on Art Howe for the lefty-Lefty, righty-righty bullpen match ups--it is one my own pet peeves) is worth 5 stars. Guys like Bill James get their just due. Overall, it is a fanastic read. Besides, anything that upsets that blowhard Joe Morgan this much MUST BE GENIUS!

This book is one of twists and turns, full of literary vehicles. I haven't felt this dizzy since I saw Pulp Fiction (to which I would not give 5 stars). It's great to see those that deserve to win in baseball win--especially against Steinbrenner--at least in the regular season, as the Oakland A's have done for the past several years. And this, on a budget that rivals what the Yankees' bullpen alone costs.

Given the buzz on the book, I was prepared for Lewis' discussion on how statistical science is changing the game, which he does so without losing the quick tempo he establishes from the leadoff page. However, his greatest achievement was a surprise to me--he gets us close in to meet the obscured, brilliant personalities that have contributed to the Little Paradigm Shift That Could, over the protestations of eight generations of baseball scouts and owners barking up the wrong mathematical trees to preserve traditions without foundation.

Most good baseball books are autobiographies, or written by insiders, or written by those obsessed with the game. Lewis is able to write effectively as an outsider, and also closely connect and earn the trust of the insiders.

Beyond the math, I hope that baseball insiders will use the truth of Moneyball to make MLB more competitive than it is today, instead of pleading with Congress to preserve a questionable status quo.

I thought this book did a great job of comparing the two divergent schools of baseball thought - the dominant "old school" approach, exemplified by the old time baseball "lifers" who know what they know because they know it, and the up-and- coming objective, statistical based analysis of the game, embodied in this book by Billy Beane. The book, slanted towards the new wave of baseball men, does a superb job of punching holes into baseball truisms and dopey practices (I particularly loved the section regarding amateur draft day - why do teams continue to throw away high draft picks and millions of dollars on untested high schoolers - high schoolers!!! - when there are so many quality college players to choose from?). But, most of all, what this book does is prove that you don't necessarily need a lot of money to win - just good management, which is something that is apparently in short supply in baseball. Every baseball owner and general manager should be required to read this book.

I give this book 4 stars because it was a great book to read. A real pageturner.
However, Lewis missed the biggest reason the A's were and will be successful for a few more years: starting pitching.
The single (or rather three) greatest reason the A's are winners are because of Mulder, Hudson, and Zito.
Take out these 3 players, and all the stats mentioned in the book (on base percentage, slugging, ob plus slugging, etc) are meaningless to winning. These 3 pitchers consistently kept the A's in the games while their offense patiently waited for the other team's relievers to come out.
How many teams have 3 startes that can give you anywhere between 15-20 wins a season. Many teams have 2, but probably only Yankess can match that capability (but not after this season, as they'll lose the Rocket, Wells, and probably Pettite).
I was only somewhat surprised the A's haven't gotten further in the playoffs the past few seasons. It's almost always the case the teams with strong pitching wins out in the playoffs.
I took a look at the A's team stats for year 2003, and they were in the bottom third in the key stats mentioned in the books (OB, Slugging, BB, etc)

Also, I would liked to have more info on exactly why Billy Bean failed as a big leager. How did he hit over .500 as a junior in high school, then plummet down to .300's in his senior season? Why was he never able to adjust to minor and major league pitching? Book mentioned his mental weakness as well as "every pitcher having a slider". But if he was such a gifted athlete, he should have been adjusted and learned to his major league pitching.

So will we see a trend in current GM's being replaced by Harvard grads with a knack for statistics and scoring models? I don't think anytime soon, althought it is, for me, a refreshing change of order in baseball from old-timers to new faces with modern ideas.

So while my tone in the review might seem negative, I gave it high marks since I enjoyed reading it. I didn't necessarily agree with everything in the book, but objectively, it was a fun book to read with few insights into the game I never realized before.

The importance of not making an out in any particular half inning of offensive baseball comes though load and clear and the ways to do this to get on base and keep the inning alive raises all kinds of questions about the conventional wisdom of the last 125 years until the Billy Beane Oakland Athletics era! The personalities of the managers, coaches, staff and players to carry out blue collar lunch box play by staying close to a discipline that favors the team and winning over personal/agent negotiated stats creates a dynamics of tension that causes those on the outside to second and third guess. When luck is evened out over a 162 game season the faithfulness is justified with results. Now for with a hopefully soon to be realized winning post season playoffs and world series victory, the exclamation point will be placed on the statement for all to see. Changes are coming thoughout baseball even down to the Little Leagues!

Too much of a Liar's Poker view of the world. Billy Beane is like the guy on Salomon's mortgage desk in the 80's who was brilliant because he realized the Ivy Leaguers must rule the world.

The OBP deal is only valid because Tejada needs people on base so he can drive them in. But surprise - "Miggy swings at everything" and rarely walks! He's from the Dominican Republic and those guys swing baby because nobody walks off the island.
Chavez is a slugger and not a walker as well.

You need guys with high OBP's so the high slugging percentage guys can drive them in.

The real secret to the A's regular season success isn't Beane or any Ivy League number cruncher but the ZHM formula - starting pitching Zito, Hudson and Mulder. Their lack of success in the post season is due to a shaky bullpen and poor baserunning and an incredibly poor decision not to offer Jason Giambi the no-trade clause on the contract extension that met the rest of his demands. The A's blew the chance to lock Giambi at much lower price than the Yankees ultimately paid. Hmmm - the best combination slugging + on base percentage player in the game at below market value - That's inconceivable but the A's let Giambi walk.

Anybody out there think the A's would have lost to the Twins if Giambi were wearin' the yellow, white & green in 1992.

The name of the game is to win. The most wins for lowest payroll is still a loser's game.

For years, baseball scouts and other game insiders used incomplete, often unscientific methods of evaluating young talent. They focused, for hitters, on batting average and intangibles such as "good swing" and "good baseball body." In the 1980s, baseball fan and statistician Bill James and others like him began developing or relying on more scientific ways of assessing the true "value" of a player--such stats as on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and (later) win shares. This book details the evolution and implementation of some of these principles, particularly in the Oakland organization under the direction of GM Billy Beane, a former player who had all the intangibles of a great hitter but was a Major League bust. The story is gripping, and Lewis, without undue complication, explains the workings and significance of the new stats. Lewis is able to give his readers compelling details about Beane's business methods and negotiation strategies--secrets Beane probably should have kept secret, both to maintain a competitive advantage and to preserve more cordial relations around the league. May be of interest to even the casual baseball fan.

For any baseball fan, this is required reading. The novel follows the Oakland A's front office as they try to change the way baseball is played. Author Lewis' main point is that the way that the history of baseball has been recorded is flawed, that the stats every fan has read for their whole lives do not paint an accurate picture of the game. Lewis spends the first few chapters setting the stage, how A's General Manager Billy Beane was a prototypical can't miss prospect who failed miserably, how statistician Bill James' gospel reached the masses. The book really picks up steam when Lewis goes in depth of how Beane and his staff implement their vision, epecially in the chapeters on the 2002 draft and 2002 trade deadline.

My main flaw is that Lewis tends to take a very pro-Beane perspective, rarely accounting where his decisions did not pan out. For example, in the 2001 draft, Beane physically berated a scout for wanting to draft Jeremy Bonderman, a high school pitcher. In 2003, Bonderman is playing in the Major Leages. In the 2002 draft, Beane ridiculed the Mets for drafting hight school pitcher Scott Kazmir, who has torn through the Mets system and is rated as one of the top prospects in baseball.

For all his flaws, Beane has come up with a system that has allowed him to challenge the rules that allow rich teams to compete at the highest levels.

I'm not a baseball fan, but Aaron Sorkin is one of my favorite writers. So when I heard that he'd been hired to write a screenplay based on this book, I ordered it from my library, specifically, the unabridged Books On Tape version, a fine reading by Scott Brick.

This is a glorious story of the unconventional triumphing over the typical, and it's easy to see why Columbia wants to turn it into a picture. And why they hired Sorkin. Moneyball is totally a story he can "hit out of the park," his Sports Night was a show you didn't need to love sports to love, either.

Lewis tells his story so well that even a non baseball fan like me can get caught up in the love of the game--at least for the hours I was listening.

Less clear is why Brad Pitt, who is "attached to the project," should star in the film version--nothing against Pitt, but the story I heard doesn't seem to need a popular sex symbol.

In fact, one of the great ideas of the Oakland A's management covered by the book is that they should concentrate on guys who can play, no matter what they look like, not so much on studs who can "sell jeans."

This idea was not exactly loved in big league baseball, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that a movie studio hasn't taken it on either...

I would disagree with some other reviewers... this is a fantastic baseball book, now a few years old (they discuss the 2002 MLB season in detail) but still very, very pertinent to the current baseball climate, and explains a LOT, not only with the way the game is played on the field, but off as well. It is a good business book as well. without laying it on too thick.
However, one really needs to have more than a passing interest in baseball. It helps to already know what on-base and slugging stats means from the beginning of the book, for example. There is a lot of discussion of the minor league life, which tends not to appeal to people just looking for a business book and just go to games occasionally. So, this is a terrific book, but one needs to have some interest in the subject matter first.

Perhaps I'm a bit behind the times, but I had intended on reading this book for many years. As we approach the start of another baseball season, I finally remembered to get a copy of Moneyball. I loved it! I couldn't put the book down. It was a quick read, and great look at the mind of Billy Beane. Frankly, I think I may have become a bit of an Oakland Athletics fan...or Billy Beane fan. I would recommend this book to anyone that has even a casual enjoyment of the game. Its a must read for any true baseball fan.

This book has become the cliche for the transformation of the way that baseball is approached over the last decade or so. This book explains in a detailed but highly readable manner how baseball went from simply a business to a quantitatively analyzed (and analyzable) science. Given the large amounts of money in baseball over the past 20 years or so, it isn't surprising that baseball has undergone a transformation so that the computer nerds have taken over. I'm a fairly big baseball fan, and was turned off from reading this book for so long because it has become a `cliche' and I believed that it would be shallow and trite. It is anything but. This book is an absolute must read for anyone who wants to understand how `professionals` view the game today. It is easy to read, but packed with details about the new way of looking at baseball. There are also detailed character studies of some of the players (like Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford) and front office people (primarily Billy Beane and John DePodesta of the As).

The central theme of this book is why the As were able to remain competitive year after year even though they had a total team salary that was 1/3 or 1/4 of the big players like the Yankees and Red Sox. Judging from the reviews I've read on the Amazon sights, many of the reviewers still don't fully appreciate the arguments in this book. The goal of Beane and his cohorts was to bring a mathematical approach to the game and find out which aspects of the game were overvalued (from a mathematical and financial perspective) and which were undervalued. Beane wanted to quantitatively determine which traits were most important (and not rely simply on scouts judgment), but also determine how these traits were compensated in the market. Many have said that Beane and company look at OBP, slugging, OPS, etc., and disregard batting average and defense. This is true, but the key point here is that these traits were also undervalued by the market (at least when Beane got started). It is this point that allowed the As to remain competitive. They could trade players who were overvalued (like closers) and pick up inexpensive, undervalued, but highly productive, players in return.

The first part of the this book details the development of Bill James and his mathematical approach to baseball. There was apparently a small community of baseball fanatics who had, in the 70s and 80s, analyzed the mathematical details of baseball and determined that things like OBP were key factors, and not BA or defense. It took the major league clubs another decade or more to realize (or accept) this. Subsequent chapters deal with Beane's maneuvering to get players that fit into his philosophy, detailed accounts of some of the players Beane acquired (like Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford), and lots of inside details about the messy business of the day to day workings of a baseball front office.

One of the thing that is stress over and over again in this book is that Beane and his cohorts stress process over outcome. They don't care if, in any individual case, their decision works out. They are confident however that over the long haul they will be right. They are playing the averages, and this is what is keeping them competitive with the big-payroll clubs (it is also why they really can't compete in the playoffs with the big payroll clubs - they are beating the `league average' in the long run, but the teams in the playoffs are far from `league average'). Beane and his cohorts have often been wrong (one obvious example taken from the book is Scott Kazmir - they wanted nothing to do with him in the draft as he was a high school pitcher and their process said that the risk on high school pitchers was too high - I wonder if they would like to have a do-over on that pick?), but because they are playing the averages, their system keeps them in contention year after year.

This is a MUST READ for any baseball fan, whether you agree with the conclusions or not. It is well written, contains lots of detail (and will keep the nerdiest computer geek happy), but is also highly readable and doesn't get bogged down in minutiae. There is so much fascinating info in this book, I couldn't put it down (read through it in a day).

This book is an awesome story of how the Oakland A's produced great teams on little money. Take baseball out of the story and you will learn some solid business principals! In the midst of telling the story of how a team can compete with or without much money is the story of some great men fighting to become the best they can be. Michael Lewis did a incredible job of telling the story of life in business and how sometimes unpopular decisions bring the best results. Great book for any baseball fan or any business man trying to compete with giants. Great Book

I had high hopes of this book. Would it be another winner's story or would it be about statistics and plain baseball?

Actually, the result is kind of both. The book tells us about taking a different approach at scouting while the club is money-strapped. It makes you look beyond the obvious and I must say I had some great results in the Yahoo Hockey League online. But is this the result you go for?

Moneyball is full of statistics and tells us a nice but not compelling story. You kind of read your way through it and say: "Well, ok, that's nice to know."

If you got any spare time and like baseball or scouting go ahead and read the book. Just don't expect too much as I did.

I picked this book up, thinking it would be a great sports read. It turned out to be one of the most insightful business books I've ever read - whose principles can be applied to valuing businesses, real estate, individuals (baseball, in this case - but also football recruiting, which is my passion).
Michael Lewis captured so much in this great book!

Better than Ball Four. If you are interested in the "game within the game" - please read this book. It's everything I hoped it would be and more. Lewis' lessons can be applied to life (and business) outside baseball. It is hilarious, informative, and eye opening. More pitches.

This is a perfect example of edutainment at its best. Terrfic fun while simultaneously teaching you a great deal about the key factors that determine a teams win rate. Aside from the style and the analysis this book also does something even more valuable: It highlights a management approach that is truly based on merit, as opposed to how "pretty" an athelete is or how much charisma they have. For people who believe that the USA is as close as any country to being a meritocracy - this book is a shining example of just that. I am truly astonished and dismayed by the negative reviews I have read. I can't wait for Lewis to write his next book.

Money Ball was a great book. It shows that you don't need money to win in baseball(take that Yankees ;-P) Michael Lewis reavels that the team with the 2nd lowest payroll, the Oakland Athletics, can have so much dominance and success in a game where the best baseball players usually end up with the richest team. Lewis also tells the story of Billy Beane the GM of the Athletics. Billy's bad attitude and foul temper prevented him from making in the MLB. He exerts his attitude as a force over the so-called "experts" when a desicion must be made. Billy constanly goes against what the scouts think a drafts players that nobody has heard of. He shows that there are many aspects of the game that we don't know. All in all, this was an excellant book. My only complaint was that there was a lot of swearing.--- Jesse Hartman

I'm not a baseball fan. Hockey is the game of my heart. Baseball? No way. But, I loved this book. The only other baseball book that I've ever read that comes close to this high-water mark is Ball Four by Jim Bouton. Funny and interesting in its own right. A real joy to read.

Great characters and insight to management. A wonderful story about tearing down a culture from the inside. And who can argue with the Oakland A's success? Here it is September 2006 and they're once again leading their division, 5 games up on the Angels ... and this is the inside track on how they've done it with one of the worst payrolls in baseball.

This book is a wonderful ode to objectivity. Specifically, objectivity in baseball. Whatever profession you're in, you'll read this book and start to think about what you're currently overvaluing and undervaluing. Plus, its a quck read. two plane trips for me. I highly recommend it.

Michael Lewis really excels in Moneyball. The book is so much more than merely insight on the occupation of a baseball General Manager. It is a book about innovation and change. Taking the risk to challenge traditional practices in life and somehow come out successful.

It is very important to understand that this is not a biography of Oakland A's GM Billy Beane. Lewis simply uses him as the prime example of using change to be successful. All of the opinions slated in the book are of Lewis and not Beane. Many turned away from this read feeling that it was an egotistical portrait of Beane...they couldnt have been more wrong.

Basically, Lewis describes the business moves made by the A's at the start of the new millennium. They are a team with a stingy budget that somehow continues to make the playoffs over much more wealthy teams. The recepie to their success lies in using a new, statistical approach to finding and keeping low budget players. This is the primary message of the book.

However this is merely a parable telling us that change is paramount to succeeding. Beane, agaisnt much opposition, changes the way that teams can become successful. Similiarly, the modern business world must continually be apt to innovation to remain competitive as the world becomes more globalized.

This book is both a great summer read for your average baseball fan, yet it also is great for someone looking for some change in their life. Whether you want to read into the depth the book carries or just read about baseball, this is an excellent book.

After reading this book twice over, I am surprised that Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane decided to reveal his operations and modus operandi to Michael Lewis. This is especially since the book exposes some unflattering portrayals of other teams, GM Beane's views on how make trades (illuminating how he operationalizes who to trade for, motivations, tactical and strategic intentions, etc.), organizational management style, which will likely encourage future GMs with Billy Beane's ambitions to keep journalists with masters degrees in economics at shoulder length distance.

Lewis's book can be delineated in two parts. One, a semi-historical breakdown of the rise of "moneyball," which is an adaptation of the theories of baseball historian and statistician Bill James. This is an approach, something we baseball stats geeks call `sabermetrics,' that concentrates heavily on the use of objective, quantitative analysis of baseball talent, based on a faith in statistics, and the privileging of certain statistics (like on-base percentage, OPS [on-base percentage plus slugging percentage], strike-out-to-walk ratios [for both hitters and pitchers]), which supposedly gives baseball executives and managers a better way of assessing players' skills. Lewis does an excellent job of chronicling the problems that James' quantitative approach experienced in becoming accepted in the mainstream (something I can attest to, since I was one of those who read James' Baseball Abstracts back in the 1980s and remember my own baseball coaches warning in those days against taking too many pitches), how there still exists an old-boys club amongst baseball's elite against moneyball, and how people like Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane helped in breaking down those barriers and employ James' theories on a small market team.

Basically, the moneyball approach is a euphemism for the way small market teams like the Oakland A's can stay competitive by drafting smart, expending what resources it has on player development, with a strong organizational encouragement for hitters to concentrate on home runs and on-base percentage (and pitchers to record outs). In essence, it is a baseball application of the old market investment strategy of buying low and selling high. You buy low by looking not for the five-tool players all the other teams want. Instead, you look for the player who may be a little slower, but who has excellent plate discipline, a little home run power, and a pitcher that simply gets people out (without focusing solely on the speed of that prospect's fastball). You sell high by trading these commodities you've drafted, developed, and allowed to blossom over to large market teams for new talent, money, extra draft picks, and the kind of other resources you can not depend on when your team ranks near the bottom of the league's payroll.

The second part of the book is a dissection of the day-to-day operations of the Oakland Athletics under GM Beane. This includes numerous stories on Beane's idiosyncrasies (he doesn't like watching the games his team plays in), his borderline egomania, and how he utilizes the moneyball approach in the everyday functions of his team--in how the front office judges talent, the manner in which it attempts to manipulate hitting styles on its minor league teams (with a focus on walks for batters and use of other teams' reclamation projects on its pitching staffs), judging minor league talent before the draft, etc.

In hindsight, Beane's forthrightness was the most refreshing and surprising part of this book. It's not every day that you hear a baseball GM declare that they only attended church on Sundays because they were hedging their bets. The portrayal of the front office of the Mets and Orioles take a hit in this book (with big market teams who constantly trade for overpriced players seen as a cash cow for clubs like Beane's A's). The draft was also an interesting foray into something that is often ignored in Major League Baseball, as opposed to the extravaganzas that the NFL and NBA drafts have become (this is due in part because the MLB draft is conducted during the season).

:Observations:

Overall, this is an excellent book, although I have one reservation, and that is while Lewis does a remarkable job of illustrating the moneyball vs. old boys club split in baseball, in the process he gives short thrift to the old boys club (again, presumably because of his obvious sympathetic portrayal of the A's and those like-minded believers in the moneyball approach). However, there are numerous criticisms of moneyball, even from a quantitative perspective, which deserves credit. For starters, moneyball ignores or does not give much credence to the importance of the fundamentals of the game (such as bunting, base running [since people like GM Beane consider the stolen base to be generally detrimental], and defense [just read the travails of Ron Washington in trying to turn guys like Jeremy Giambi and Scott Hatteberg into a passable fielders]). Lewis defended the A's post-season ineptitude as a statistical aberration, but you can not ignore how fatal this was for them in the 2003 ALDS against the Red Sox (a series the A's could've easily won had several of its players knew how to adequately field the ball and run the bases). This does not mean you have to go back to the 1985 Cardinals and the era of small ball to win in post-season play, but you only have to look at the way Eric Byrnes ran the bases in the 2003 ALDS to understand the cost of not stressing your players being able to take an extra base, or at least run them properly.

Moreover, by ignoring defense and base running, moneyball underestimates the value of running speed. As ex-St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog notes, running speed is one of those few attributes a player can use on both offense and defense. This goes into the other big weakness of the quantitative approach in baseball. While the use of statistics in baseball is pretty effective, albeit not perfect, in measuring offense, it is less than admirable and complete in aptly measuring the value of defense and pitching. Lewis does try to answer some of this by showing how the A's even attempted to quantify the number of runs it was surrendering by giving up centerfielder Johnny Damon (yes, Red Sox fans, yours is not the only team he's ever played for). The problem with fielding and pitching, though, is that it is purely dependent on where the pitcher pitches the ball and where the hitter hits it. Zone Rating may do a good job of measuring the fielder's ability to get to a ball hit in (at least to this point) his fielding zone, but we have yet to solve the problem of who dictates how that baseball arrives there (and how hard or softly that ball is hit in a particular zone, its angle, etc., the kind of information that can possibly skew statistics). Is the game being determined by the pitcher (at which point pitching statistics become more important) or the hitter? Moneyball implicitly sides with the hitter, but only because pitching statistics are still rudimentary and dependent on variables with numerous externalities (and with sample sizes that are sometimes much too small and subject to non-randomized circumstances).

Still, on the whole, Moneyball is a fantastic book in its in depth coverage of the subjects, Lewis's insider access into the daily lives and workings of a baseball team, as well as knowledgeable explanations of the statistical components to the game (and by extension the moneyball approach). Also appreciated is that this book shows the rise of a method that was for over two decades outside of the mainstream, but is now every bit a part of the game of baseball (with the A's, Blue Jays, Red Sox, even the hated Yankees, employing fellow moneyball enthusiasts in its front offices). If anything, one can only wonder about the possible future of moneyball in Oakland, as more teams begin to apply Beane's successful approach, thereby sapping the talent pool of those gems in the rough his organization was so successful at developing over the years.

At its core, Moneyball tries to answer one big question: How in the world did the Oakland A's win 103 games in 2002, with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball?

The book answers this question by going deep into the management philosophy of Billy Beane - GM of the Oakland Athletics, and considered by many to be the best businessman in baseball.

Beane knows something that other teams don't - that you don't have to have a huge payroll to be competitive in baseball. He knows the most important stats to look at when juding offensive talent (and no, it's not batting average, hits, or home runs) and he knows how to get what he wants from other teams - so much so that other teams are often reluctant to deal with him.

High-payroll teams like the Yankees have recently come under criticism for having huge payrolls and buying out the biggest and most expensive free agents. So why aren't they winning more championships? This book explains the myth surrounding talent, as well as some general misconceptions about how best to play a baseball game.

The book also introduces the wonderful story of Bill James - a writer and baseball theorist (yes, there are such things) who went from working in a pork and beans factory to becoming one of the game's most respected analysts. His story is not only surprising, but flat-out inspirational.

James's statistical analysis has been one of the biggest influences on the A's management philosophy, and has led to a lot of unexpected success.

Michael Lewis has a solid, easy-to-read style, and the subject matter draws you in and keeps you turning the pages.

This is a great book for any fan of baseball, and anyone who is interested in baseball management, and the business of baseball.

Baseball runs a distant 4th in my pantheon of sports behind football, basketball and boxing, but I was still impresssed by the profundity of his arguement on the true nature of the game. That said, this is not just a baseball book. Baseball & the aberrant success of the Oakland A's vis a vis their free market competitors is only the medium for a broader discussion about how we assess and assign value. This is a book for those who champion the rational, the scientific method, the slaying of myth, the quantifiable & demonstrable vs. those who champion mysticism, lazy tradition, and the sequestering of knowledge to "the properly credentialed."

The depth of the parallels that can be drawn from this book to financial markets, geopolitics, and government/business are limited only by the capacity of the reader.

Some investors want the most glamorous growth stocks, no matter what the price. Likewise, some baseball coaches and managers are willing to "pay up" for an Alex Rodriguez or Jason Giambi. And if you are fortunate enough to head up the New York Yankees, you can.

Others have to do it differently or not at all, according to "Moneyball." Chief among these are Billy Beane, who manages to take his Oakland A's to the play-offs year after year, despite being the general manager of the second most impoverished team in baseball. How does he do it?

His central insight is that some baseball skills are much more valuable than others. A related insight is that other managers overpay for less essential skills such as fielding, stealing bases, and "legging out" singles into doubles. Hitting is genuinely important, but everyone knows that. What others generally overlook is the importance of walks. A walk is as good as a single, yet most managers pay for batting averages, not on base percentages (OBPs, or hits plus walks divided by plate appearances), even though statistical analysis shows that the latter ratio correlates much better with runs and wins. Hence the trick is to hire low-paid hitters with mediocre batting averages and other perceived deficits, who are good at drawing walks, and thus get high OBPs through the "back door."

Beane takes a similar approach to pitching. To him, a pitcher's main job is to "deceive" good batters, not overpower them with fastballs. So he hires Jim Mecir, who has a club foot and a "slow" pitch, with spins and angles that most hitters can't handle. Warren Buffett was similarly good at investing in companies with good "franchises," and stock prices beaten down by serious, but not "career-limiting," problems such as American Express, GEICO, and even Coca-cola.

The book's main fault is that it overdraws Beane's prowess in order to capture the reader's attention. Some of the players acquired by the A's in 2002 didn't do so well in retrospect, and some of the players rejected by Oakland did fine elsewhere. But Beane and his staff have done enough right to make the team a perennial contender--and on a tight budget at that.

I was surprised by how sophisticated baseball has become with the application of measurement in some areas and by a few teams. For example, Michael Lewis described how a TV camera from center field was able to evaluate a hitter's performance by marking out the strike zone on the screen and identifying areas in the strike zone where he was unable to hit.

More interesting to me was the modeling that the Oakland A's were able to do to predict success over a season. They were able to predict the number of runs that needed to be scored in order to win a pennant and then determine the staff that would be able to produce that number of runs on the basis of performance metrics.

While it may sound dull to many people, i.e., modeling performance, Michael Lewis was able to present the statistical basis clearly in a manner that wasn't oft putting within a story line that maintains interest. I read the book in a little over a day.

While the book is about how the perceptions of old line baseball people is often wrong and that Billy Bean was able to introduce more accurate statistical methods to value player, it also has value for businesses. Some the errors made by other businesses would benefit from the methods used by the Oakland A's in pursuing success in baseball.

Even though I enjoyed Lewis' Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, and Money Culture, I wasn't planning to read Moneyball. I like to read about money and about baseball, but I don't really care about the economics of baseball. Then I found out that Moneyball is about the Oakland A's, computers, and statistics. I had to read it.

Lewis reveals how the A's became a top team even though they have one of the smallest payrolls in baseball. Billy Beane's (the general manager) method of using massive amounts of statistical information tells him what players to draft and what plays to execute under different conditions. The scouts and even the manager have become less important than his small staff of number-crunchers.

By following certain statistically-determined rules such as "never sacrifice bunt," (the numbers show that historically, it doesn't pay off) the A's have gone to the playoffs year after year. Beane refuses to draft players out of high school, because they haven't faced enough real competition to determine, statistically, if they will be any good. It's only in college and the minor leagues that players compile meaningful stats.

There isn't much money in Moneyball, but there is a lot of baseball and a terrific story about an underdog team that beats the odds by using the odds.

I have read all the current business books, but Moneyball was definitely among the best.

For one thing, I thought that the book was going to be about baseball. It is more like an MBA project study ... " Your assignment is to build a major league baseball team with a payroll of $40M that will compete with, and defeat, the New York Yankees with a payroll more than three times higher."

Only, it is a real case.

And the results are in the paper every morning.

For another, I thought that it was a book about Billy Beane. Frankly, it is more of a book about the repudiation of all the past, present and future Billy Beanes - the talented "5 tool" teenagers, most failures - as they become a lesser part of the overall strategy to building a successful, and sustainable, business model.

And finally, Moneyball is a book from which you can learn - and use in your daily business, even if it is not baseball.

For those of us who must put together strategies, this book is a must-read primer. Beane relies on different sets of data to make decisions, identifies new metrics on which to evaluate talent, eliminates "old school" thinking from cigar chomping talent scouts who previously had made the recommendations that resulted in more misses than hits over the years, and develops a methodology for determining the relative value of players before cashing them in for developmental (e.g., lower cost) opportunities.

Not only does his strategy work (as evidenced by copy cat GMs in recent years), his Oakland team makes money - and lots of it. And, he did it by allowing two MVPs and other "name" players to move to other teams because their cost-to-value no longer fit within the Oakland value proposition.

What this book has given me is the curiosity to seek different data to investigate and evaluate facts in order to find new answers to old questions. Actually, when it is read with Freakonomics as part of a day-night double-header, Moneyball will get your brain working with every turn of the page.

I ignored the hype of this book and held off reading it for over a year - I could not have been more mistaken. The story of Billy Beane and the A's is a story of baseball's Little Engine that Could. (I thought it was about the Yankees buying their way to the baseball title. Whoops!)

Lewis takes you through Beane's background, a draft, subsequent player performance and ultimately how the A's performed. Through it, you are presented with the history of statistics in baseball (starting with the prodigal Bill James abstract) as well as explanations for why the league is so against a data based approach. Additionally, other attempts to apply more quantitative reason are explored, and their failures explained.

There are a couple public knocks on the book:
1 - The book is all about Billy Beane patting himself on the back. I think this isn't valid - the picture of Beane seems very balanced.

2 - That Billy Beane is portrayed as a nutcase. This is the opposite criticism of #1, but again I believe that the book is valid.

3 - All this baseball knowledge can't really be invalidated by math and statistics. Actually, many fields have been overthrown by good mathematical models - quality control, finance and poker are just three.

4 - The statistical techniques are not properly applied. This may have some merit. Could Beane and friends have been making mistakes? Is that why they're not doing as well? Or are other teams just catching up. The author of Freakonomics takes aim at Beane's over-reliance on hitting in his blog.

Desite these knocks, the book is a very interesting read for both baseball fans and people looking to apply statistical techniques to sort fact from fiction. (Traders would be well suited to read this too!) In a sense, this is an application of the Price Theory espoused in Freakonomics, even if the authors disagree on conclusions. In that sense, it's about much more than baseball.

When I first looked at this book, I wasn't too interested in it. After reading some of the reviews, I decided to take a chance. The book had a few central themes. First and foremost, it is about how statistics, when used properly, can make an organization more efficent. Secondly, the book deals with how traditional baseball has resisted the use of statistics to make teams more efficent. Finally, the book is a quasi-biography of how Billy Beane attempted to implement all the above. While this may not sound too interesting, I can assure you, this book was quite entertaining and it hasn't been a bestseller for nothing. I would recommend this book to baseball fans and non-fans alike.

there was a general manager of the A's. He had all the physical talent he needed to become a great professional baseball player, yet he was defeated by his own mind when he went up to bat. While those around him with less physical gifts rose to greatness, he took the less-travelled road of baseball administration. This book starts by contrasting the man's entry into professional baseball and his entry into a new paradigm in the art of picking the right players for a professional baseball team. It seems to be continuously answering the question: what makes a professional baseball player successful? In this book the author notes the attributes that made the main character falter whereas his peers (e.g. Daryl Strawberry) went on to greatness. Wonderfully entertaining book for which I made time to read every night.

After reading this book it is evident that Beane et al. have incorporated statistics and technology into baseball. Having a background in math and computers (and a huge baseball fan), this is of great interest to me. It is always nice to see the intellectuals unventing and incorporating a new paradigm to essentially 'break' the game. It actually amazes me that Beane allowed this to be published. He reveals a bit of his 'tech'. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, read it ASAP!

Then I read "Moneyball." Michael Lewis opened my eyes to nuances of the game I had not even considered. I played
the game, watched the game, and read every baseball book
I could find. This one challenged me to consider the
absurd way players are valued in the imperfect baseball
marketplace, and to question the very statistics I thought
defined excellence in the game. I am giving this book
to my Father because he's both a former ballplayer and
an economist. He will love this book.

Any baseball fan must read this book. It's the story of former super-prospect and current super-GM Billy Beane, the low-budget but successful Oakland A's, and one interesting but not transcendent 2002 season, but it's not about the man or the team or the season. It's a basic philosophy that seems intuitive but is practiced too infrequently: a GM must seek out what is undervalued in the baseball market. So this is all about finding out what is valuable in baseball, defining this great game and what makes a good player. Sabermetrician or not, whether or not you agree, this book should be read by every baseball fan.

This is a great book to read, especially if you are an Oakland A's or Los Angeles Dodgers fan. Why a Dodger fan? Because, Paul DiPodesta, Billy Beane's assistant and the co-star of this book is now the Dodgers General Manager. He just made a huge trade that has left many "conventional" baseball thinkers shaking their heads. But having read "Moneyball", I can look at the moves he's made and at least understand where he's coming from. The majority of fans, writers, and his peers can't understand his moves and as you will find out in the book, that's perfectly fine with him!!

This is one of the most entertaining books I have read on any subject. I love baseball, so I may have enjoyed it more than most, but I do not believe a love for the game is necessary to appreciate MONEYBALL. My wife will judge a book's merits by opening it up and reading a random paragraph to see if it piques her interest. She declared this book a winner after reading about gaudy save totals and inefficiencies in the market for closers. Even someone who has only a cursory knowledge of the game can understand that concept.

Lewis gives a good overview of the history of Sabermetrics and all the characters who helped derive the new formulas for evaluating performance. He also invokes Jim Bouton's BALL FOUR by introducing us to some of the characters in the game. Scott Hatteberg comes out smelling like roses, and will be remembered long after his undistinguished playing career has ended.

Billy Beane is the main character in the book, and he is represented as a tortured revolutionary. The point is well drawn that as a general manager, Beane is consumed by the task of discovering his own antithesis, since Beane himself was a failed prospect of the antiquated methods of player evaluation.

MONEYBALL is a crash course in modern baseball and how the management of the game is changing during the present era. Scouts are being replaced by statisticians; field managers are sent to the top dugout step to appear commanding while awaiting orders from the general manager and his consortium of number crunchers. There is also a great analogy of the changing game of baseball in the '90's with the changes that Wall Street went through a decade prior, as the inefficiencies in the market were discovered and exploited.

There were several instances in reading this book that I was moved to laughter. Lewis has such a great command of his straightforward business style, that it comes as a surprise when he decides to point out an absurdity lurking just below the surface. This is a book for the shelf, to be enjoyed more than once. It will prove an enduring touchstone for future baseball executives, players, and fans, and possibly even stock brokers.

Michael Lewis deftly inserted himself into the A's front office to find out how a professional baseball team with a $40 million payroll can win 102 games and consistently 90 or more wins in subsequent years and compete with teams like the New York Yankees who have payrolls exceeding $130 million.

What he reveals is that by approaching baseball in a more rational, analytical way and doing away with all the traditional conventions, you can compete with anyone who doesn't do the same. Too many GMs and coaches are seduced by speed, home runs, and batters who swing at bad pitches when the simple truth of it is that in baseball the most precious thing you have are your three outs per inning. Anything that risks losing one or more of those outs is something you should avoid. As a long-time fan of the game, it's hard for me to swallow some of the anti-traditional things Lewis describes in this book. But the proof is in the pudding as they say and the A's success over the past several years is hard to argue with.

The focus of the book is A's GM Billy Beane, a former A's player himself who had a world of talent but could not transform that talent into a Hall of Fame career. He didn't have certain intangibles that are needed. Beane now recognizes those talents in the players he drafts, recruits and trades for. Beane's obsessive personality and unorthdox ways make for interesting reading. He's a man who seems horribly tortured by the game and yet thrives on his success in the game as well.

There are excellent mini-biographies in the book including one on A's first baseman, Scott Hatteberg, a Red Sox catcher who was thought all but done with baseball after he ruptured a nerve in his throwing arm. The A's reclamation project recognized a diamond in the rough and brought him aboard to train him as a first baseman, mostly so they could benefit from Hattie's shrewd batting.

Chad Bradford, the A's middle relief pitcher with the unorthodox pitching style and uncanny ability to get outs, is also profiled. A's minor league phenom Jeremy Brown, a former University of Alabama catcher who broke all sorts of NCAA records but wouldn't get a look from most pro teams, is also profiled. You get the sense from this book that there IS no traditional upbringing for a pro baseball player. The A's unusual collection of "misfits" all came from different backgrounds and most have taken a rather odd path to success.

This book is a great insiders look at a pro baseball team and how they approach the game from a very unique perspective. The most fascinating thing of it is, the A's didn't invent what they're doing at all. They're exploiting baseball wisdom that was anyone's for the taking for the past 30 years. You just need to know where to look.

If you're a baseball fan or just someone who can appreciate creativity and ingenuity in a world that promotes imitation, you'll enjoy this book.

"Moneyball" is an oustanding read if your are interested in baseball, economics, and or statistics. Michael Lewis does a great job telling the story of the Oakland A's and just why a team with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball has compiled one of the best records. This was a book that I found almost impossible to put down and I know that everyone at work got sick of me talking about it, but it was fascinating!! Don't miss reading this one!!

"Moneyball" takes the reader behind the scenes of a major league baseball team - how it operates, who runs the show, why they make the decisions they do, etc. The fact that the Oakland A's, the subject of "Moneyball," is the team in question only makes it that much more interesting.

Billy Beane, the General Manager of the A's, runs the team like none of his peers, and has experienced success beyond what his payroll should allow. "Moneyball" tries to explain why. Going back to the ground-breaking work of baseball writer Bill James, and continuing with Beane's predecessor Sandy Alderson, Beane implemented ideas that were in circulation but were never really tried before. The result was a winning percentage that was the envy of just about every team in baseball.

But Beane is not always correct in his thinking, and his attitude left a lot to be desired. Despite his obsession with certain numbers, like OBP, and his belief that they will translate into wins, pitching has remained the ultimate determinant factor in a baseball team's success. The A's have ranked 1st, 2nd or 3rd in ERA every year since 1999, while finishing as low as 10th in OBP. Beane - and author Michael Lewis - conveniently ignore this fact when explaining the reasons for the A's success.

Beane's disdain for the stolen base is also troubling, as it is well known that speed can disrupt a pitcher's rhythm and be a major factor in a closely-played game. The players at the top of the runs scored category are, more often than not, effective base stealers as well. Beane ignores this too.

Lastly, throughout the book Beane complains about his shortstop, Miguel Tejada, because Beane dislikes the fact that Tejada doesn't take enough pitches. He's not patient at the plate. What the book fails to mention is that Tejada finishes 7th in HR and 3rd in RBI and wins the MVP award in 2002! How foolish does this make Beane look? Very, if you ask me.

Still, this was a well written effort, and it was very interesting to follow the behind-the-scenes storyline of a baseball team for an entire season. However, before deifying Beane for his efforts, it would behoove the A's to win a playoff series during his regime. As of this writing, they remain winless, having lost to the Red Sox in 2003. Contrary to what Beane would have you believe, "just getting there" isn't good enough!

Four stars.

Being a British naturalised Kiwi, I could not possibly know (or, to be honest, care) less about baseball. Nonetheless, I found this to be a fascinating book, and have been recommending it to everyone I meet. It contains a fundamental truth of investing that anyone could use, useful precisely because most people (like the low-scoring reviewers on this site) think they know best.

If every armchair sports fans thinks they know better than the others, it stands to reason that most of them are wrong.

The fact that the Oakland A's never won the world series is absolutely not the point. If the market was functioning efficiently, on their budget, they should never have got within cooey of it: The buying power of behemoths like the Mets should have ensured that. What is remarkable - and what is important - is that the A's consistently, massively, exceeded their own expectations.

Sport is a business. I mean that figuratively as well as literally: profit can be measured in dollar terms but also in percentage of wins to losses. Fans seem to forget that. In business, consistently exceeding expectations is an even better thing than winning the World Series, because it necessarily means you've made MONEY. If you're the favourite and you win the World Series, you have only met expectations, and you may even have made a loss.

If baseball were a perfect market, it wouldn't be possible to exceed expectations over a long period. Over a few games, maybe - that could be a fluke. Over two seasons, it almost certainly couldn't be. That means two things: (a) conventional wisdom about the value of certain baseball players and certain attributes is wrong; and (b) The Oakland A's have worked out what is right, or at any rate their model is better than the conventional wisdom.

This is the sort of thing Billy Beane should have kept as quiet about as possible. Michael Lewis' book ought to be a Eureka moment for every baseball manager: if it is, then the market mis-pricing will disappear, everyone will acquire players on the strength of the new valuation methodology and the Oakland A's will gradually fall down the rankings to where they should have been in the first place, given their budget. I dare say that has already started to happen.

What it ought to do is open eyes of managers from other codes, and indeed other businesses: The key is in having sufficient data. If you have enough good quality data (like baseball does) then if your analysis of it is better than your competitors, then as long as your approach is disciplined and consistent, you will, over time, turn a virtually risk free profit. It's called arbitrage.

I haven't even got onto the fact that Michael Lewis is one of the most insightful and witty writers writing in business at the moment, and this book is a pleasure to read from start to finish, notwithstanding my ignorance of its subject. I have read a number of business titles recently, and compared to the rest of the pack Lewis is, if you'll excuse the pun, a major leaguer amongst amateurs.

Highly, highly recommended.

Olly Buxton

Michael Lewis' book Moneyball is in my opinion one of the best economically sound baseball books written. I thoroughly enjoyed what goes into being a GM in the league from drafting big name college stars such as Nick Swisher, finding inexpensive talent and making them stars like Scott Hatteberg and finally work down in the front office. Michael Lewis portrays Billy Beane (GM of the A's) so well you'd think "how aren't other teams doing what Billy does?"
After reading this book I feel Billy Beane should be considered a mastermind of baseball. The book explains how lower income teams folded by July and looking for a plane ticket home in September. Whereas higher income teams looked forward to post-season play. Billy took the A's and one of the more lower income teams, defied all odds, and made them AL West champions.
This book amazes you with the understanding of statistics, how Billy managed his money, and best of all, his knack for "cheap" talent. A GREAT READ FOR ALL BASEBALL FANS.

Moneyball is one of the most intriguing and insightful baseball novels we have ever read. The Oakland A's uncharacteristic approach to baseball is shown by the scouting and statisticians who have helped change the way the game is played. By drafting players who weren't seen fit to be picked in the first few rounds, the A's were able to sign them to a weaker contract than the normal players that got paid millions more for being a spot a head or behind in the draft.

In the novel, Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta use the statistical analysis to predict what the team would need to win for the A's to make it to the playoffs. With mind-boggling formulas, they where able to break down every action on the field into a point system and from there they were able to determine what exactly the team would need in runs to win.

In our opinion, it is the duty of every general manager and owner in baseball to pick up this book and learn about the genius that is Billy Beane. Any time a small market organization can turn into consistent powerhouse, the league and world should learn from their accomplishments.

Without a doubt one of the best books I've read in a long time. Michael Lewis has a tremendous gift for explaining complicated financial issues simply, elegantly, and succinctly. He is also a conceptual thinker of a high order, which is why his books seem more revolutionary than they are: he just explains things better and more provocatively than anyone else.

Moneyball is no exception. Drawing upon the work of a generation of new-age baseball statisticians, Michael Lewis chronicles the uncanny success of general manager Billy Beane and his budget-strapped Oakland A's. In a story that reads far more breazily and interestingly than you might think, Lewis explains how Beane used complex statistical analysis to revamp his organization and catapult the A's to the top of the American League. Beane's success demonstrates convincingly that "conventional baseball wisdom" is an oxymoron. That is, the stuff that really matters in terms of winning baseball games is not the stuff that baseball insiders have been focusing upon for the last hundred-plus years. Beane employs the cold calculation of a Wall Street maverick to the poetic, metaphoric, and staid world of baseball. And in the process, not surprisingly, he offends a helluva lot of baseball sensibilties. (You need only read some of the crappy reviews on this website to see that). But the fact remains that Beane is right, and the future of baseball is Beane & Co. No doubt Lewis' bestselling book will usher in that future far sooner than might have been the case-- which is precisely why Michael Lewis will go down as one of the most important and influential writers of this generation. He is Tom Wolfe and Warren Buffett wrapped into one, and his book is a true joy to read.

I was very surprised when I read this book. I knew that the Oakland A's had a low payroll and an excellent team. I figured that it all had to do with management and thier decisions on players. But I had no idea of the elaborate system that the A's used to find players and how they were able to land them so cheaply. It is truely facinating. The tactics of getting good players for less money than they were worth was eye-opening. Some of the players on the A's were people who no one else wanted because they were not the "typical looking player." The A's took player who were sometimes too fat, too short, and too slow. Everyone continually writes them off becuase they don't do things the conventional way. The thing is, they can't do things the conventional way because they don't have the money.
They have come up with a system that is widely based on the use of statistics and computers and a very strict philosophy on the type of player to draft. This might sound strange now but it is so well explained that at the end you should become a ravid Billy Beane and Oakland A's fan. You will suddenly wish to follow everything that they do.You will understand that thier record 20 game winning streak was deserved and that all the critics were wrong. Moneyball shows that a small market team, when run in a unique way, can be incredibly sucsessful and can give its high priced oppentents all that they can handle.

This book is about the power of critical thinking. It traces the moves made by a general manager--Billy Beane--who, with the help of statistical geeks, was able to find undervalued players and dish off overvalued players. The author points out that players are commonly misappraised because their value is generally tied to things like "looks" and statistics like "batting average" and "rbis" and "saves" and "fielding percentage" which do not adequately reflect the extent to which a player's performance contributes to value to his team. For example, Mr. Lewis describes formulas which have been derived that accurately predict the number of runs a team will score over the course of a season, and these formulas do not depend on some very commonly used (or misused! stats) After you read this book you will get the point that on-base percentage is 3X more valuable than slugging percentage in the formulas. One drawback of the book is that the formulas discussed are not explicitely stated and their validity is not conclusively demonstrated. Another aspect of the book I also wish was expressed in more detail is the new set of pitching statistics that are devoid of any aspect of luck commonly built into today's commonly advertised stats, like "wins" and "era." In the end, the lesson of the book is that you must always ask, "why, why, why." Why do I care if this pitcher has 30 saves? Why do I care if this outfielder made 10 errors. This books explains in a fun way why you shouldn't necessary care about these questions at all!

I enjoyed the concept of looking for objective measurements, challenging traditional views and methods, and choosing what to measure.

The locker-room lanquage was not needed to convey this concept.

I am not a baseball fan nor am I much of a sports fan at all, but I loved this book. I review mainly business books and the business principles of this book are well stated, easy to understand and truly innovative. If you are in a field that tracks statistics (especially the non-profit world) this book will make you think! But be careful, it will also make you question! Moneyball gets you outside the box (scores) of baseball and if you are a decent interpreter it will help you get out the box in your profession. Highly recommended!

I enjoyed the book, and enjoyed reading about the statistics and methods used by the A's in developing their franchise.

However, much credit is given to Billy Beane for building the franchise into what it is today. As the book points out though, he had little to do with the draft until 2002, when he totally took over. So, lets see where the A's are in a few years, when Billy's players make up their farm system.

As for Billy Beane himself.....What a shame.

Prior to reading the book, I knew just enough of the man to consider myself a fan - I tend to root for the underdogs.

After reading the book, I've changed my opinion entirely. Man, what a jerk. He's a man who has little conscience; little control of his raging temper; uses the "F" word in every other sentence, and "wins" by basically screwing people over.

I used to think poorly of players who said, "It's just a business. I'll go where they pay me the most..". After reading about Billy Beane, and possibly the future of baseball, I am almost sympathetic to the players cause.

The numbers may show Billy to be a shrewd GM, but he's not much of a human being.

I don't care for sports, and never have. But this book is a GREAT STORY that just happens to be about sports. It is the classic story of the maverick who defies all the conventional wisdom but knows what he is doing and prevails. On yet another level, it is a terrific story about how one can think in an entirely new and different and above all USEFUL way about something that nearly every American (except me) knows something about has has strong opinions about. In this respect it's very similar to stories about incredible scientific discoveries. Either way, it's a great read that you won't want to miss.

Lewis does a fine job of examining how the Oakland A's began to use statistical data in a fresh and innovative way to maximize the productivity on the field of a team with a low budget. Undoubtedly the A's have had some excellent seasons recently and are once again in the hunt. However the reasons for their success may not be as attributable to the emphasis on OBP and offense built on the analysis presented here as it has been on solid starting pitching. Lewis presents a great case for linking the cold analysis of data to performance and establishes that Bill James and those that followed turned much of conventional baseball wisdom on it's head. It's a great story and any fan of the game will be completely absorbed by it.
It amazes me that the rest of the baseball establishment hasn't caught on to Billy Beane's management style and there lies my main problem with this book. Lewis is so enthralled with Beane that he makes it seem that the rest of the baseball world is comprised of a bunch of rubes just waiting to have their pockets picked by the A's. I think the A's have done a fine job and there is no doubt that Beane is the GM of the hour but time will tell if a team run with his system will be able to hang in there with the big-money boys.
That said I recommend the book to all baseball nerds because it is entertaining as hell, well written and it will make you think about some of the long held assumptions about the game.

I consider myself a baseball fan. However, I indulge my interest by following the Boston Red Sox, which is to say that I have a love/hate relationship with the game depending on how things are going with the Old Towne Team. Recently a friend put me on to this book and I am eternally grateful for the recommendation as things have been going on in baseball that I have been blissfully unaware of and finding out about them was both entertaining and informative.

The recent success of the Oakland Athletics is something I knew about, if for no other reason than they raised hell with Boston's efforts to secure a wild card spot. Billy Beane? Never heard of him. Not as a baseball player (not many others did either) or as GM of the Oakland A's.

Michael Lewis has made sure that we all know about Billy in this eminently readable account of how a young general manager takes players that no one else wants or appreciates and using an approach that has been around for some time devised by Bill James turns the A's into a force to be reckoned with. And he does it with little or no money by the standards of the bigger franchises.

The part of the book where James's theories are explained can be a bit dry, but the book really sizzles when we get into the stories of the players. We are permitted into the drafting process and given an inside look into the acquisition of some of the A's key players and the mind of Billy Bean as he wheels and deals to trade for players whom he needs to fill in the blanks in an organization which appears to have many. It is funny, it is instructive, it is irreverant and it is very, very readable.

There are a lot of traditional wisdoms in baseball and this book exposes many of them. If you want to understand what is happening with teams such as the A's, the Red Sox and the Blue Jays, this book is required reading.

Highly engaging, delightful and heartwarming read, especially for lapsed baseball fans and those who still appreciate baseball. Lewis blends a love of the game, with a desire to really understand what it takes to win and the lives of some of those who make it all happen.

Lewis makes a clear case for competent management in baseball or, as featured general manager Billie Beane points out: In what other organization do you let the show be run by middle management. Or as another wag says: At age fifteen, most of what you now about baseball comes from announcers and eighty percent of what they know is wrong.

Oakland GM Beane has studied baseball as a process that produces results. And rather than count on traditional statistics, he learned that many of the things ballplayers and managers think are important just aren't that important. Using much of the Bill James approach (a baseball fan and analyst from Lawrence, Kansas who for the past twenty-five years helped re-invent the way we look at baseball), Beane appreciates batters who don't make outs and who have the patience to take a walk. Beane penalizes his minor league managers when their players fall behind in the walks per at bat ratio. Home runs matter more than stolen bases and sacrifice bunts. In brief, not making an out, e.g., a failed stolen base attempt, `manufactures' (a favorite baseball verb) more runs than does speed on the base paths. Getting on base and getting extra bases matters more than a high batting average. Pitchers have little control over what happens once a ball is hit into play. Walks, strikeouts and home runs matter more than ERA. While skill matters, luck has an even larger impact on the success or failure of each game.

And there are colorful stories of real people who don't fit the traditional baseball mold yet who make big contributions, truly undervalued assets, including A's minor leaguers Nick Swisher and Jeremy Brown, catcher-now-A's-first-baseman Scott Hatteberg and the A's underhand reliever Chad Bradford

My one small disagreement lies with the continuing myth that baseball is a monopoly. Major league baseball teams do not compete with one another the way competing firms compete. Rather they work in effect as regional offices of the same firm. Competing firms would be glad to put their opponents out of business; major league baseball would die if that were to be the case. The fact that teams compete on the field disguises the fact that teams are economically cooperating with one another. The teams compete against other uses of the fans' entertainment dollar, not one another. Major league baseball is not a monopoly; it is one big company operating in the entertainment or sports business. Even 'free' agents cost two first-round draft choices, and Beane shows how to put these to good use.

Lewis shows, however, that baseball can be rational, a process to be studied, understood and, most important, managed. Good management is essential to success. The A's, contrary to what Bud Selig says, are not an "aberration". Instead, they benefit from good management. In 2002, their division standings were exactly the opposite of the team payrolls. Management matters more than money. Economic inefficiencies can be ferreted out and exploited. Reliance on conventional wisdom and not on researched, reasoned analysis will produce a lot of expensive losses. Just look at the Orioles, Mets, Red Sox, and Dodgers. And then look at Minnesota, Toronto and Oakland.

I'm a "baseball dad" with both a 15-year-old son who plays HS baseball and a 7-year-old grandson who plays little league. I keep the scorebook and the stats for all my son's games and have been doing so for the last 5 years. One of the other baseball dad's recommended this book to me and said I would like it. So based on his recommendation I bought the book yesterday.

This book is terrific. It's an easy read. But more importantly, it gives you an inside look at the MLB draft through the eye's of the Oakland A's. It's a tale of two schools of thought - the old way of selecting players based on scouting reports vs the new way of selecting players based on stats - but not just any stats. And the book provides some interesting background on the stats of yesteryear and today. For example, everyone thinks the batting average is one of the greatest indicators of success - but this book points out it is really OBP and SLG, not AVG that is the best indicator of runs.

If you like baseball, you are really going to savor and enjoy the inside look at the draft, scouts, and a lively discussion of old school vs new school with regard on how best to select players on a low budget.

Run, don't walk, to buy this book. 2 thumbs up!

This book has a lot of funny moments, and makes some interesting points, but it is just an extended article that doesn't prove a point, and seems to be more about the author exploiting baseball fans ...than giving them something memorable.

We learn about Billy Beane's mania and that OBP is important to scoring runs, and signing guys that walk a lot is cheaper than signing 5 tool players with good jawlines. So what?

The A's win a lot of games because they have 3 great, not good, starters. This could not be disproven by any of Bill James' suckup labrats. How is winning 100 games during the regular season not to Hudson, Zito, and Mulder's credit, but losing to the Twins is Hudson's fault? The A's are like the Braves from the previous decade. Like the Braves, the A's don't hit that well. Unlike the Braves, they probably won't keep the 3 star pitchers around, and guys like Scott Hatteberg can not walk their way to championships while giving up 8 runs a game.

Theories are great, but who has more World Series rings, Sparky Anderson and Joe Morgan put together, or Bill James and Billy Beane put together?

Just as Billy Beane uses a relief pitcher's hot streak to temporarily inflate his value, Lewis has used the A's 2-year hot streak to inflate the value of his ideas and to sell books. Not that it's a bad book, it just isn't convincing.

A fair read, amd written well because of special access to the A's while they were winning 20 in a row, but Lewis' soujourn into baseball seems contrived, as if Thomas Boswell or Roger Kahn spent a while writing about all-star mutual fund managers. I enjoyed it, but I really got such a rush from Lewis' other works that I hope he goes back to where he really stands out. Dozens of sportswriters could have done this book, maybe with a little less style, but done it nonetheless.

I'm not much of a baseball fan and rarely pay attention to it until the playoffs. However, I'm a fan of Michael Lewis's ability to explore the nuances of business and the people who engage in it. I'll leave it to others to argue the contribution this book makes to the literature of the sport of baseball. There is no question, however, that it is one of the best business books I've read in recent memory. Like his previous books, Moneyball is a fascinating story filled with colorful, textured characters in which we are amazed to discover the paradox of business success: that winners are always flawed, their success not always as it appears at first. The book has given me a new appreciation of baseball, but more importantly a new appreciation of the need to always challenge the conventional wisdom of experts. Success comes not from having the right answers but by asking the right questions.

It's amazing that with all the complaints by Selig & Co. of how poorer baseball teams cannot comepete, Beane and the A's have built an organization primed for long term success.

As a baseball fan, this book is a great read. It crystalizes what specific factors weigh in to Oakland's player evaluation metrics, and how they leverage inefficiencies in the market to their advantage.

One of the greatest tragedies in baseball is the failure rate of young players. For so long, we've assumed that it's because hitting a round ball with a round bat "square" is so difficult. However, as Beane and the A's have proved, teams are looking for the wrong skills!

Beane has assembled a roster of players that other teams have passed on and cast off, and with it, taken the mighty Yankees to the brink twice in the past 3 years. What's most remarkable is that this isn't an "abberation," but a system of player development that should keep the A's in competition until the rest of the league catches up.

Lewis doesn't get into the actual "meat" of the statistical methods used, but this is a great start for any fan of the game. Especially if your team has been in a state of never-ending "rebuilding."

Lewis does a fantastic job at writing about objective sports management theory. Although the book focuses on baseball, the principles he writes about can actually be applied to any type of management. Lewis also is great at taking a potentially boring topic (general management of a professional baseball team) and making it very interesting.

The only inappropriateness of this book for anyone would be the language. There are multiple uses of "F" words, and other various swear words. Overall though, it's not over the top and it is always used in quotes.

Excellent book! Even if your not a baseball fan you will love this book.

Have you ever felt like everyone one around you is dumb and they are doing things the most inefficient way possible? Even when you or others try to show them the error in their ways with cold hard facts to back it up, but they continue doing it their way saying things like "we've always done it this way" "if it's not broke don't fix it" etc.... Billy Beane felt the same way, so he went out and showed everyone just how efficiently he could run a baseball team. He had less money, assistants with ivy league degrees instead of baseball pedigree, discarded/has-been/no-name players, and he some how found a way to win tons of games over multiple seasons and get tons of value out of seemingly nowhere.

I really liked this book!

In the early 1990s Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A's, combined Bill James statistical data for baseball junkies, hired Harvard graduates and brought the power of technology to baseball.

Neccessity is the mother to invention. The Oakland A's ownership did not have the money to compete for players in a league with no salary caps. And he figured out a way to build a competitive baseball team using statistical analysis.

Up to that point, baseball relied on having 100s of scouts watch players and rate them numerically with KPI's like hitting, hitting for power, speed, arm stregth and fielding ability. The rating's input was only as good as the amount of times the scout saw the the High School or College player. And the ratings were subjective, unique to each scout, so there was no way to compare ALL scouted players. Scouting main objective was to provide a GM input in the amateur draft.

Beene did not have the money to employ enough scouts to cover the country. So he decided to only draft college players as opposed to HS players because the former had a rich and accurate database of statistics.

It is more complicated than this - but Beene believed that the most important hitting skill was "on base percentage". So he drafted players in each round based on this object number

He went on to use Harvard graduates to refine the objective number. One iteresting refinement was actually divided each ball park into a gride using thousands and thousands of rows and columns. By doing this he deducted hits that an average fielder should have made an out and added hits that an exeptional fielder denied a hit.

His concepts now are widely used. So much in fact that the "playing field" has been leveled and the richer teams now again have the advantage.

Michael Lewis is a great writer. His other books have all been successful. The latest of which was called "Blind Side" that was made into a movie and Sandra Bullock just one a Golden Globe for here performance in the movie.

This book burst on the scene in 2003 to spark an intense debate about how and why some Major League Baseball teams succeed and others seem hapless in their efforts to build a winning franchise. Using as his model the Oakland A's, author Michael Lewis emphasizes the efforts of General Manager Billy Beane to use sophisticated statistical models to draft, trade for, and employ talent on a tight budget. This approach asserts that baseball is a business and that the conventional wisdom of how to create a successful MLB franchise is incorrect for teams without extensive monetary resources. At the time Lewis was writing, of course, the A's were an exceptionally successful team, making the playoffs each year between 2000 and 2003, and again in 2006, with one of the lowest payrolls in MLB. The message of "Moneyball" was clear: the old adage that large market teams would dominate was outmoded--read the New York Yankees as the poster child for large market teams and the Kansas City Royals as the poster child for small market franchises--and the A's broke the mold.

Of course, the "Moneyball" approach of cagey signings, clever trades, and strategic dumping of established stars for handfuls of prospects became the cause célèbre of MLB management in the middle part of the decade just passed. It all seemed so new and remarkable. Indeed, the fact that a number of small market teams won the World Series between 2001 and 2009 suggested this approach might have salience. After all, during that period the small market Diamondbacks (2001), Marlins (2003), and Cardinals (2006) won the World Series. But then so did the Angels (2002), Red Sox (2004 and 2007), White Sox (2005), Phillies (2008), and Yankees (2009), certainly not small market teams.

No question Michael Lewis pinpointed an important trend in the strategic processes of building winning MLB teams. "Moneyball" has received considerable discussion, appropriately so, but was what Lewis describes all that new? Let me suggest that much of what "Moneyball" documented had been pioneered nearly three decades earlier by Charlie Finley, owner of the Oakland A's, who with the rise of free agency in the 1970s sold and traded his star players to restock his farm system with excellent prospects. While the A's won three straight World Series between 1972 and 1974, his team collapsed as he sold off or saw players leave through free agency thereafter. Then by 1980 he was back with a new crop of players just off the farm, the great of them was Rickey Henderson.

Charlie Finley probably deserves some credit for pioneering the "moneyball" approach of small market teams in putting winners on the field in the 1970s. Like the later celebrated A's management, Finley scouted, signed, and developed young talent that can then compete successfully against richer competitors. Using the rules of player compensation established in MLB, he grew young superstars and pay them only modestly until the players' seniority in the system allowed them to depart as free agents. Before their departure, however, he often dealt them for top prospects to restock their farm system. Absent the emphasis on ornate statistical analysis undertaken in the more recent "moneyball" era, Charlie Finley was the godfather of this approach to running his franchise as free agency became the norm. He deserves credit for pioneering this approach.

"Moneyball" is a fascinating book; a benchmark in the study of history of MLB as a business. Enjoy!

This is such a great book. From an Australian's perspective I've always marvelled at the level of statistical detail and analysis that goes into American sport and this is surely the ultimate example. It is incredible how a book largely about stats and a sport I don't really understand can be so incredibly interesting.

Not sure how they'll make a move about it though!

I am not even a baseball fan, but I read this book because it was recommended by Joel Greenblatt, a value investor, in one of his interviews. At first I had no idea why Greenblatt would recommend a book on baseball. What does it have to do with picking stocks? After reading it, I realized that it everything to do with stocks.

Billy Beane, who was a general manager for a baseball team, searched for players the way the best money managers search for stocks. Because he did not depend on scouts, just like great money managers do not depend on analysts, he was able to get players very cheap compared with the traditional methods. In other words, he was able to find inefficiencies in the market for baseball players. Good for him that he did not follow the efficient market theory like many money managers in the investment arena do. He was not only able to win games, but also the team operated with lower expenses because in the end, a baseball team is nothing but a business collecting revenues and incurring expenses. Lewis did a fabulous job writing this book. I loved it.

- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

It's pretty amazing, when you think about it, just how much time and money and energy and brain power have been invested in professional sports over the past hundred years or so, and none more than major-league baseball. Tracking and evaluating individual and team statistics has become an entire industry, and it's an established enough industry that it can support heated debates about methodology and best practices. Moneyball is a fascinating peek into that world. It examines some of the arguments and grudges that have sprung up over the years among analysts and baseball insiders, and it somehow manages to do it in a way that will pique the interest of even non-baseball fans.

In 2002, the Oakland Athletics had the second lowest payroll in baseball, yet they managed to acquire more wins than all but one other team. According to conventional baseball wisdom, this was an impossible feat. So how did they do it? Michael Lewis answers this question by telling the story of A's general manager Billy Beane.

Beane, drawing on very unconventional analysis by a baseball scholar named Bill James, believed that winning games depended far less than commonly believed on things like hitters' batting average and fielders' number of errors and relief pitchers' saves. Instead, the most telling indicators of success were things like a batter's ability to get on base with or without a hit and a pitcher's strikeout percentage. Through the course of the 2002 season, Beane's scrappy team won game after game while acquiring players everyone else thought were worthless and emphasizing strategies most other teams scoffed at. It seemed Beane was being proven right.

Of course, not everyone agreed. The 2002 A's were an anomaly, some argued. But the numbers speak for themselves. Even readers with little or no interest in baseball will be intrigued by Lewis's ability to describe and analyze statistical trends. Billy Bean comes off looking like a heroic David fighting against the Goliath of major-league baseball's institutions. Traditional baseball scouts and others who hold fast to supposedly time-tested "truths" about America's favorite game come across as naïve at best and downright foolish at worst. Through it all, the background stories of players--some whom no one but the most ardent baseball fans have ever heard of--add a delightful element of human interest, and the team's ultimate success gives the book an almost epic hero's-journey feel.

One word of caution: baseball is a dangerous sport to become interested in. With 162 games per season, not including the playoffs, loyally following even one team is a time-consuming enterprise. If you're a baseball fan already, Moneyball will make you watch and think about games differently. If you're not a fan, reading this book just might make you one.

I must be one of the last people to read Moneyball. When it first came out I was not mentally prepared to read a new approach in the game. Not that I'm a tradionalist but it was baseball. It's the long ball. It's turning the double play and hitting the cutoff man.

Now that I've opened my mind to many new things in life my timing was good. I actually felt like I was reading a couple of books in one. The life and times of Billy Beane and the Perfect Storm.

So many have the physical talent but the mind gets in the way. That certainly was the case with Billy Beane. Years ago he would have been given his walking papers if he walked in to the boss and said I don't want to play but I want a job in the office. But timing was perfect for him. Everything was coming together, new owners and Sandy Alderson. So they tried new things and it pissed off the world but had some success.

Now other teams are trying these methods and that shouldn't surprise anyone. Afterall were in a world of data, today's generation doesn't fight it they massage it and tinker with it and find little bits and pieces that just might give them an advantage. What's wrong with that. Baseball for so long was untouchable, it cloned it's managers, coaches, general managers and everybody was happy. Now a new creature appears and there is skepticism and words written in massive quantities about the perilous end to the game.

I don't buy in to everything they say is working, but that can be said about any business that starts to look at things in a new way. Give it time and it will reveal itself. In the meantime it was fun to read and once again as you deal with human nature there is no answer only more questions.

This book explores how statistical analysis of baseball games, called sabermetrics, are revolutionizing the way that professional baseball is played.

Moneyball follows the Oakland Athletics' general manager Billy Beane during the 2002 season, focusing on how they select players to draft and acquire through trades not by traditional methods, but based instead upon an objective statistical analysis using non-traditional statistics, allowing them to remain competitive with teams capable of paying much more money for their players.

Being someone who enjoys math and is interested in how efficiency is achieved, and despite having very little knowledge of baseball (the bulk of my knowledge comes from this book and from asking my dad questions), I found Moneyball to be thoroughly enjoyable.

The modern era of business analytics will be forced to address the harnessing of never-before-seen data storage and processing capabilities. "Moneyball" may focus on applications confined to a kid's game, but the lessons drawn from Billy Beane and company's success can be extended throughout modern business.

This book made me believe in the power of statistical analysis.

Let me start with a disclaimer: I'm not a fan of baseball. I don't even understand all the rules of the game.

This book however, is not only about baseball. Even though it has a few chapters that were, for me, a bit hard to follow because of the technical jargon and game details, it still was an enjoyable and instructive reading experience. If you approach the book simply as a an account of what goes on off the baseball field, such as drafting new players, negotiating contracts, etc... you'd be missing the gist of it. You'd be even missing as well it if you read it just as a historical account of a bunch of players or teams.

I believe the main idea of the book is about the opportunities that are inherently present in an inefficient market for anyone who can can grasp these inefficiencies, and approach them with rationality. It's invariably the most critical, but least explicit, factor in any successful business venture to address some inefficiency in the market, often illustrated in general economic terms as creating supply where there is unsatisfied demand. And this book shows how it turned out to be a critical factor in managing a baseball team as well. In particular, when drafting new skills, looking for undervalued players is the equivalent to looking for undervalued companies in the stock market.

Michael Lewis illustrates in this book how Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, has decided to challenge the traditional approach to drafting in baseball, which is largely based on cursory observations by the team's scouts as they travel the country trying to catch potential players playing one or two games at most, and which inevitably leads to decisions swayed largely by appearances (individual charm, as Lewis puts it), subjective impressions, and, as the books stresses repeatedly, the urge to preserve the image of the individual making the decision among his (apparently, "her" has no role here) peers. The combination of these factors characterizes the irrational decisions that Billy Beane and his assistants challenged. Lewis traces back this line of thought back to 1977 when a guy named Bill James self-published his first Baseball Abstract, effectively giving birth to the discipline of sabermatics, the analysis of baseball through objective statistics. From there, Lewis traces a brief history of how this line of thought developed into a full-fledged science and an industry, and how the Oakland A's made use of these ideas to become one of the most successful teams in the history of baseball, on a fraction of the budget of some of their competitors.

If you're a fan of baseball, this is definitely a book you will find thrilling and enjoyable. If you're not, you will still find it interesting, if you read it with an open mind. It's a well written book overall, and it succeeds in bringing the thrill of the game to the reader.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a 2003 baseball book by Michael Lewis about the Oakland Athletics and general manager Billy Beane. Conventional baseball wisdom is flawed, Lewis says, and many coaches and scouts focus on the wrong statistics. The Oakland A's, because of severe budget restrictions, sought to find objective ways (like sabermetrics) to evaluate players. In doing so, the A's were able to find players who were undervalued in the market, which led to a very successful run with a relatively low payroll in the early 2000's.

Lewis also explores the life and career of Beane, who was a very talented baseball prospect who never panned out as a player because of confidence issues. Lewis also includes lengthy sections on Bill James, the founder of sabermetrics, catcher/first baseman Scott Hatteberg, and pitcher Chad Bradford. Lewis follows, loosely, the A's' 2002 season.

Objectively, on-base percentage is typically considered the most important single statistic. The A's strategy, though, goes beyond finding high-OBP players - they want any player with any quality that the market undervalues (this also explains why they haven't been very good in recent years and why they don't have many good OBP guys).

One of Lewis's themes is how resistant Major League Baseball has been to Beane's ideas - they took several years to catch on, and there are still many who oppose them. Several of Beane's underlings (and other Beane disciples) have become general managers recently, but there is still an appalling ignorance among commentators (which is hardly surprising), coaches, and scouts.

Lewis, as in his other works, tends to ramble from time to time (he also likes to throw in the big word seemingly for its own sake). Many sections are longer than they need to be, and become tedious; others are marginally interesting but have little to do with his topics. But Lewis also does a good job portraying the personalities of his characters, and as such Moneyball is immersive.

Moneyball is important to the history of baseball - it, more than anything else, brought objective statistical analysis of baseball players into the mainstream. Any fan of baseball should find this interesting.

The book begins with the question: "How did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?" At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the N.Y. Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million, while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A's and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of about $40 million each. Yet, for the past several years the A's won more regular season games than any other, except the Atlanta Braves.

The impetus for change came from rapidly escalating player salaries after free-agency, and the increased availability of data and ease of using it.

Side Note: Steinbrenner paid only $10 million for the entire Yankee team in 1973 - far less than many individual players now receive in a single year.

Lewis makes it clear that it's hard to pinpoint when innovative statistical analysis began to change baseball - efforts began decades before the A's innovations, but never really caught on. This was partly due to limited data availability and engrained traditions. The key enabler was Sandy Alderson, an attorney with no baseball background, becoming 1990 general manager of the Athletics. Alderson recognized the lack of hard evidence for most coaching and recruiting ploys - probably via the numerous conflicting strategies. His early conclusions from others' data was that obtaining walks was an important, underused strategy. A second key step was recognizing that Billy Beane, A's scout, had grown tired of traditional recruiting, believing it highly imprecise and was looking for a new approach. (This may partly have been due to how he was aggressively recruited out of high school, but failed to do well.) Thus, he Billy Beane replaced Alderson when he left the A's, and in turn hired Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate with an economics major and a record of innovative baseball analyses.

Side Note 2: Lewis also explained the baseball recruiting and free-agency system. A team that drafts and signs a player holds the rights to his first 7 years in the minors and first 6 in the majors. Exception: The second 3 years of a big-league player could be subject to salary arbitration. The rules also granted first-round draft-picks for each top round player "poached" (outbid) by other teams, and another "compensation" pick at the end of the first round.

Beane's new scouting approach dumped almost all high school players from consideration - college players were much more likely to succeed. Also quickly dumped were those looking for sizable pay. Foot speed, fielding ability, and raw power were found to be dramatically overpriced; the ability to control the strike zone (draw walks, not swing at bad pitches) was found to the greatest indicator of future success.

Excellent insights!

I am not a huge baseball fan, and I didn't expect to love this book. I ended up falling in love with it. Why?

Moneyball isn't about baseball, baseball is merely the setting. It is a business story, in which the protagonists champion an unpopular idea and exploit the inefficient player market. Lewis' financial background is a great boon to the book, the language of finance describes the market for players perfectly.

It also enriched me as a casual fan of the game. Who knew I'd overvalued fast runners, good fielding, and the stolen base? And, like the other teams in the story, I'd never bothered to ask "Why?"

Michael Lewis is a fine writer and Billy Beane is a man of genius. This book puts the lie to Bud Selig's assertion that money alone creates competetiveness, and further describes the new realities of power offense vs. "little ball," and how a relief pitcher can be found to fill holes for one season.

The problem with giving a Michael Lewis book five stars is that there is much better stuff out there. Lewis can be entertaining, and, to give credit, he hits out of the park in his choice of topic here. But he's an arrogant writer, with something of the "brilliant" graduate student after a couple of drinks about him, prone to sermonizing way off topic. He even did this in his first book, Liar's Poker, when he abruptly dropped his fascinating first person account to digress into the history of Salomon in the 1970s. Here - ditto. All the stuff on the A's and Beane is great. However there are way too long digressions into Bill James and the history of stats in baseball, which had me turning pages. Lewis is also fairly repetitive - this book is at least 90pages too long. If you want to read a great, great writer talking sports, try Tom Wolfe's powerhouse short story The Last American Hero, on Junior Johnson and the beginnings of NASCAR, found in his collection The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake. Wolfe is a genuis and can say more in 45pages than Lewis manages here with just under 300.

This is an excellent introduction to the conception and process of applying sabermetrics, the objective cold-hard-facts method of valuing baseball players in terms of their probabilities of generating runs on offense and preventing runs on defense, to the cost efficient management of a baseball team.

This introduction is accomplished through an almost allegorical tale about Billy Beane, first as a baseball player and then as the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. As such, it tends to read a bit like a tribute or hero-worship novel as Billy Beane is touted for his trailblazing approach to using statistical analysis, not baseball "wisdom", to value players and assemble winning teams within a fixed budget. But there is purpose in the telling of "The Billy Beane Story" and it is to use it as a literary device to keep the reader engaged as a rather dry subject (statistical analysis and dispassionate player evaluation) is revealed.

If you think that Derek Jeter is a great fielding shortstop, you will learn about tools that demonstrate rather convincingly that, despite Jeter's Gold Glove awards, he is a rather pathetic fielder for a major league baseball player. You will learn about tools that allow a baseball general manager to recognize the value of rather unimpressive physical specimens (e.g., catcher turned first baseman Scott Hatteberg) as surprising productive players when they are important contributors to team success.

Sabermetrics is not widely respected among most who run the show on major league teams today. But there is a slow yet growing recognition of its value. Billy Beane and the Oakland A's may have bmost recently the first, but such methods are being adopted by more and more teams, including the and the Toronto Blue Jays and the Boston Red Sox. (Is it merely a coincidence that the Red Sox finally won the World Series after an 86 year drought only once its ownership and general management adopted a sabermetric approach to player evaluation?) This book will effectively and entertainingly expose you to subtle yet powerful new approach to team management that is growing within baseball. If you love baseball ... if you think you know how to evaluate baseball players ... this is a very worthwhile read.

The beauty of Moneyball is Michael Lewis' ability to communicate an excellent baseball story that satisfies hard-nosed Sabermetricians, but do in a way that doesn't alienate non-numbers oriented baseball fans. The story of how Billy Beane got to where he is today (as GM of the Oakland As) is quite compelling, and clearly of key importance to the main question Lewis sets out to answer -- how the Oakland As manage to be successful despite their (relative) lack of salary. The politics of Sabermetrics aside, this is a terrific read and a book all baseball enthusiasts should read at least once (if not once a season).

Michael Lewis made his name writing books describing the people behind our financial system -- books that were inevitably described, for some reason, as "funny" or "hilarious." Perhaps these same reviewers were in stitches while reading Javascript technical manuals or the Kyoto Accords. Truly, I saw neither any humor nor any attempts to be funny in these books, which were, sadly, just dull.

How refreshing, then, to have him find a topic better suited to his tone. Yes, money plays a role, but what's described here is the pursuit of excellence, and the courage to flout conventional wisdom in the pursuit of a competitive edge.

A fascinating subject about dedicated professionals. True, these people may come off as a little singleminded, but they have to be (as this book demonstrates) in order to compete against people equally dedicated to finding an edge.

I so love the work of Michael Lewis because this story, and another favorite, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, are essentially about stepping back to consider groupthink. Groupthink is a topic that fascinates me. I haven't read The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, but it's about startups and silicon valley? Hmmmm... it might be about groupthink too. I'll check it out this weekend.

In Moneyball, Lewis examines the effects an outsider can have on the group, in this case, Major League Baseball. That's an extremely high level but, if you're like me, that's about all you need to know. Even if you don't care for baseball, I think you'll enjoy Moneyball. You might even be angry that Congress and the media give so much time to baseball. Since baseball is hard to avoid in America, I think people should try to understand it better. And even the most die hard, stat-loving baseball geek I know learned things from reading Moneyball. So whether you're a total insider to baseball, or a complete outsider to baseball, I think you should read, and that you'll enjoy, Moneyball.

I thought this was going to be a rant about how free agency killed the game of baseball, but it ended up surprising me by pretty much being just the opposite: how free agency has opened the door for innovative leaders who leverage technology and analytics to capitalize on market bias to beat the other teams. It completely changed the way I watch and assess baseball. I only wish there were updates available on what ultimately happened to all the people who played a role in the story. Highly recommended for anyone with an open mind and a love of baseball and/or markets.

You always hear about the vast amounts of money that are spent in the world of baseball, but are teams getting their money's worth? Conventional wisdom would have us believe that teams that spend the most money get the best results. However, in the world of baseball this is not the case. This book focuses on the Oakland Athletics, one of the best performing teams in major league baseball, and also one of the lowest paid teams. How do they do it?

According to this book, this is possible through exploiting inefficiencies in the market. Baseball, through its years of tradition, has built up a way of evaluating players that doesn't really address how they actually perform. This leads to undervaluing talent and skills that actually lead to success. The trick is to be objective and look at things as they really are. There are many things that people take for granted in every field, and this leads to market inefficiencies.

This is more of a baseball book than a business book. It is not presented as a road map to success, but rather as a story of a baseball team fighting against the odds. If you're a fan of baseball, you'll be able to enjoy the story and learn a few things that you might be able to apply to your own business. However, if you don't like baseball, you many not find this to your liking.

I agree with the reviewer who said this is a good baseball book for the casual baseball fan. This book gives the best, least complicated explanation of sabermetrics that I've read. I take this book with me on plane rides, because I find the first two-thirds engaging and relaxing. (The last third fawns over Beane and his team of undervalued players -- the part about how Ken Williams is hesitant to take Billy Beane's phone calls, for fear of what sneaky trade the wily Billy Beane is going to trick Williams into taking -- a bit annoying, especially to a Sox fan, so I never read that part.)

The mathematics of sports...not a very good subject...
Given MLewis talent for writing, his effort on the pro sports world seems a waste ... I'd rather see him write about finance, or computer geniuses....This was the least interesting of his books.

I thought I knew baseball, but it's a new day, baby. Moneyball is actually the biography of one Billy Beane, a former major leaguer and now General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.

The new baseball is a game of numbers where statistics like stolen bases and home runs, don't matter as much as on-base percentage. The title is misleading. Baseball is becoming more of a science than an art.

As a result of Moneyball, nearly every major league baseball team now employs a full-time actuary. The book is an easy read and won't overwhelm you with statistics.

An excellent, well-written book examining the use of statistics and analysis to create a winning, baseball team with the smallest possible salary. Michael Lewis is an anomaly, for he is able to deftly weave personal history and technical insight to create an intellectually and emotionally engrossing read. Any lover of baseball, business analysis, or economics will love this book.

Moneyball made me more interested in baseball. Part of the reason I hadn't appreciated baseball was due to the fact that it always seemed like big market teams can buy championships. While that still remains true to a point, this book sheds light on what it takes to win baseball games, and that the statistics historically used aren't necessarily indicative of the value of a player. There are lots of lessons to be learned, but the book itself is an entertaining read. If you are a fan of business, value, statistics, or baseball, I can't recommend this book enough.

Also, if you are reading this review, you should read Michael's masterpiece, Liars Poker.

In 1989 I saw the movie Field of Dreams and it changed my life forever, making me a baseball fan with its love for the game. Moneyball by Michael Lewis would be the second life changing event in my baseball evolution, teaching me aspects of the game that I never even knew existed. Lewis presents how the Oakland As, with one of the lowest payroles in the game, continually make the playoffs with underrated talent and intelligence.

Lewis introduces such things as Bill James, SABR, on base percentage, and other concepts that have opened a treasure trove of information for making a person a more complete fan. I promise if you read this book you will never look at the game the same way again and for the better.

I basically picked this book up based on reviews I read here about it. Not being an overly interested baseball fan but a stats nut I had to see what the hype was about. I DO NOT REGRET GETTING THIS BOOK. If you have only ever flirted with baseball as a potential point of interest in your life this book will make you think stronger about it. Being a stats nut and aware that baseball is a stat junkies "sport crack" watching a game still caused me to snooze after the first inning. After reading this book this is not the case as it identified how potentially deep you can go with statistics to creating a winning team full of players who are not big money players. To me it was like reading the proof of a theorem. Granted the depth is not there for the true analysis type but the overall picture is (in my opinion.) In the end it will cause me to take time out and actually watch a game or two or more and delve further in to this 2007 season.

Outside of baseball there are some lessons for the buisness manager and company CEO that can be applied as far as picking the right personnel for a company or project. I draw my own conclusions based on what I have read as you will.

In closing, if you are a baseball fan or just want to get in to the game this is an incredible 5 star read. Michael Lewis did an awsome job to the point where I will pick up his other well known book Liar's Poker. Can't go wrong here.

Much has been made of the statistical aspects of player evaluation. This book gives those outside the walls of the baseball establishment an insight into the characters and creativity that one franchise has used to be competitive. It is hard to disagree with the success that the analysis has provided. The book sometimes wanders from the premise trying to give anecdotal stories about some of the colorful personalities within the game. Overall though the book does what it set out to do. It provides the reader with an alternative to the old school ways of player evaluation. In the end it has made me rethink the preconceived notions I had of what the best approach would be for those teams who don't have the luxury of an unlimited checkbook.

If you're fascinated by baseball and can't figure out how underdogs, like the Oakland 'A's and Minnesota Twins, consistently make it into the playoffs... If you're a sales executive trying to figure out why your incentive compensation structure isn't working... If you're in management getting ready to interview another horde of candidates for a job with a revolving door... If you just happen to recognize that human behavior is frequently illogical and wonder if there are any sane people left on the planet... THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU.

I'm not a baseball fan. I'm not a data jockey. But I heard Michael Lewis speak at a business conference, and was hooked. In fact, after reading this book, I went out and bought three copies - one to give to my boss, a copy for his boss' boss, and one for my library.

Great read. Funny. Intriguing. Good stories. A number of slippery insights. No preaching. Do yourself a favor and read it.

This is a dramatic case-study in how information management is changing our world. What is happening in this book is occuring with a vengance in credit and equity markets world-wide. Both baseball and finance are worlds that have been swimming in context-less information for decades. But both were dominated by "personalities" who worked more on prejudice than objective analysis.

But as shown in this book, it is now possible to collect and analyze a vast supply of information, and find relative value in the oddest places. Those that operate in the old way have no idea how completely los they are. Those operating in the new way are only finding worthy competition amongst others like themselves.

So in fact this book is (in my humble opinion) not really about baseball. It is about how information management and statistical analysis are changing business in general, particularly the "money" business, and therefore changing our world.

This book gives provides a great look into the statistical analysis that has seemingly taken over player evaluations in the grueling task that is scouting prospects. A very light, enjoyable read.

Great baseball book for the baseball lover! Heard it was a great book from some friends of mine and decided to get it for gifts for the holiday. Both people who received it were thrilled to get it and more excited to finally read it.

I used to wonder how it was that Billy Beane is such a great manager or coach or whatever he is and now I know why: communications skills. Beane is not only baseball-smart, he's book-smart. And not just "I read a book once" smart either. This is one of the few men in any field smart enough to write a book without the help of a ghost writer.

This is no faint praise. Throughout the book you will learn about such true-life travails and characters as Jeremy Brown, the catcher drafted in the 16th round because the Oakland A's value fatness in their backstops, or Paul DePodesta, who went on after this book was written to get fired by no greater team than the Los Angeles Dodgers (no, not the one with both the Los Angeles and the Anaheim in their name, the ones who actually play in Los Angeles). Beane himself makes an appearance, although it's rather off-putting that he refers to himself in the third person a la Bob Dole or Barry Bonds.

One thing that should be clear though: there is no such thing as "Moneyball", and the sport Beane is actually referring to is baseball, not the lottery. Sadly, he does not give up the secret clues on how to win or even have a better chance at winning the lottery. I do not know these clues either (which is why I originally bought the book) but I did see a software program once so I know they exist.

I have been professionally managing money for 20 years and rate this as one of the "must read" books for wannabee investors. Just substitute all references to baseball players with "stocks". In so many things in life we use the emotional side (which leads us astray) instead of the analytical side of our brains. Moneyball is just one application of looking at facts before making judgements.

I now look at baseball in a different light. A's may not have been in the World Series every year - but every year they are competitive. More than many teams can say.

One of the reasons baseball fans remain so steadfast in their devotion is a sense of tradition. During interminable rain delays and constant pitching changes, broadcasters often wax nostalgic about how little has changed over the years: there have always been nine men on the field; bases are still 90 feet apart; three strikes and you're out. It's this comfort level that makes change so difficult, why people are opposed to innovation such as Astroturf, the designated hitter and inter-league play. "This is the way things have been done and this is how we're going to keep on doing them," seems to be the general mindset of proponents of the old school.

Lewis, in his thought-provoking Moneyball, makes one wonder if school will soon be out.
Unable to spend as freely as their upscale brethren, small market teams like the Athletics must be content to scout the high school and college players other teams might find less desirable or to pick up the detritus of other clubs. In fact, while the A's own veteran scouts drooled over the "potential" (that damnable word) of talented schoolboy (i.e., high school) athletes, Beane preferred to go with the relatively more mature and established college prospects.
The difference between the A's and other fiscally-challenged clubs, however, is their stunning success. Beane and his associates have managed to build pennant contenders seemingly out of straw.
The new manner of assessing personnel could be considered almost a new age philosophy. Rather than looking for the hulking slugger who can bash balls out of sight, Beane and company seek a kinder, gentler athlete, one adept in the art of taking a pitch, making the opposition wear itself down. Why else would Beane aggressively pursue a nobody like Scott Hatteberg, a catcher left unsigned by his former team and whom no one else wanted, and convert him to a first baseman? Because Hatteberg is a master of how to "work the pitcher."
Lewis examines the influence of Bill James and his band of number-crunching "sabrematicians" on Beane's decision-making processes. Instead of batting average and runs batted in, James and his brethren advocated different statistical yardsticks such as on-base percentage and runs created. "The [traditional] statistics were not merely inadequate: they lied," writes Lewis, "And the lies they told led the people who ran major league baseball teams to misjudge their players, and mismanage their games."
The author offers several examples of the A's forward thinking. As a group of batters gather around a video monitor to study pitch-by-pitch sequences, the author notes how "[t]hey're no longer playing a game; they're playing game theory."
The in-depth coverage of the draft process, with its tactics, subterfuges and stomach-churning tension, is a wonderful insight into this annual event. With the help of his laptop-clutching assistant, Beane carefully analyzed players' tendencies rather than raw numbers. Lewis compares the GM and his crew of "computer geeks" to "card counters at a blackjack table" (some might say the draft is actually more of a crap shoot). To carry the non-baseball analogy further: when describing the machinations involved in making Nicholas Swisher their first pick in 2002, it seems as if the author is writing not so much about baseball as about chess.
Lewis tells this revolutionary tale with a mixture of keen insight, thoughtful prose and -- at times -- too much detail, which sometimes detracts from the overall picture. Many of his references are financial in nature, as when he speaks of "derivatives" -- those fragments of the game such as how the next pitch after a 1-1 count can make a huge difference in how a batter performs. Perhaps because of this, however, Lewis comes at the reader with a fresh set of eyes, remarking on issues the average fan fails to notice, both on the field and behind the scenes.

Most serious fans can roll off satistics about their favorite player but few realize that the numbers they cite have little to do with wins and losses. Baseball is a team sport that captures the American Spirit in ways that no other sport has been able to comprehend. Even a solid home run hitter may contribute less to putting his team in the win column than the player who can tease a base hit out of any pitcher and is able to steal his way home game after game. Likewise, a team that makes a lot of errors can still come out ahead in the win/loss talley. In Moneyball, Michael Lewis takes the reader beyond the strike zone to observe a side of baseball that few fans have noticed about this unique game. Like real life, this game is really won or lost by contributions that are not displayed on the scoreboard or written about on the Sports Page. Every member of the team contributes in ways that can only be seen by collection and analysis of statstistics. There is the so-so pitcher who can tease a base hit in every game, or the injured outfieldler who can play third base with an uncanny sense of where the ball is going to track. Lewis blends good story telling with evidence from the actual business case of the LA Angles to make this a book that avid baseball fans and hard-nosed business managers can profit from and enjoy.

If you are a fan, this is a great read. If you are not a fan, but just interested in the game, it is still a great read. What I find most amusing are the baseball "experts" who poo-poo Billy Bean's approach to fielding and running a baseball team. "The proof of the pudding is in the eatin'" and the cognocenti appear to dislike the taste. The Oakland A's have been one of the stellar teams, yet, it appears that success is not what is important. What is important is success based on the recipe that the "experts" write.

This book was my introduction to sabermetrics, and proved to be quite a thrilling introduction. The application of truly smart statistical work the game of baseball in Billy Beane and the Oakland A's had me hooked from page one. Great material.

It did seem to drag on a little, however. The first half of the book was thrilling. The end started to feel like more of the same old same old. But it's still worth finishing.

Moneyball is a fine book, a must-read for any serious baseball fan. What I found most interesting was the organizational conflict between Beane's "Laptoppers" and the computer-phobic scouts, who rely on instinct and experienced judgment to spot talent. It seemed to me that in some ways Beane used his young brainiac computer jockeys to subvert power from the old guard scouts, the traditional power base of a baseball franchise. However, I think the author tends to exaggerate the prowess of Beane's computer-based approach. My sense is that Beane's had his share of missed opportunities, and has similarly erred by picking future duds who looked great on a spreadsheet. Beane's tactic of using smart people with new sophisticated tools to gain and hold power in an organization is not new, but superbly documented in this absorbing and well-written book.

Contrary to what Moneyball impies, drafting future baseball players is like buying IPO stocks--it looks easy in hindsight, but in reality, scouting is like baseball itself--failure is far more common than success.

"Moneyball" is an inside look into the mind and habits of Billy Beane, the general manager of the small market Oakland A's. Faced with the daunting project of building a roster on peanuts, Beane turns to the statistical analysis of Bill James, an outsider to baseball, a fan, a former bean factory employee. James now works for the Boston Red Sox.

This is a book about baseball statistics. But it is not boring because Lewis profiles the players behind the numbers, like Chad Bradford, a terminally shy pitcher with a knuckle-scraping-ground underhand delivery, and Scott Hatteberg, the catcher with a bad arm who thought his playing days were over, only to be resurrected as a first baseman because Beane saw something valuable in Hatteberg's on-base percentage and ability to work the count (Hatteberg's lifetime batting average and power, stats most scouts consider essential, are nothing special).

Jeremy Brown, the pudgy, overweight catcher (5'10'', 210)profiled in "Moneyball," made his major league debut May 9, but has yet to appear in a game.

"Moneyball" is a fun, brisk read. It gives a human faces to the baseball cattle market even as it portends the rise of the Harvard grads with their laptops.

I have been a serious baseball fan for over 25 years. I thought I knew the sport pretty well. Moneyball changed all of that. The book really opened my eyes on the real inner workings of building a MLB team. Like many other baseball buffs I have built many fantasy baseball teams, but the book describes how building a real team is vastly more complex. The chapters that describe the limited use of traditional scouts are fascinating. While I love baseball stats and scouting reports, I now look at them very differently than before. The book proves that baseball truly is a thinking man's sport. Moneyball will go down as one of the most influential baseball books of all time.

If you love stories about an unlikely hero, a guy who succeeds not by calling in favors or taking advantage of wealth, but by Out Thinking his rivals, then you should probably consider reading Moneyball. And if you're a baseball fan to boot, then what are you waiting for?

Moneyball is the well-written and fast-moving story of Billy Beane, a one-time hot baseball prospect who never panned out. But he hits the big time as general manager of the Oakland A's by thinking outside the box, transforming this small-market team with a limited budget into one of baseball's most successful franchises by re-evaluating the way players are measured. The result: he covets players no other team wants, and he wins with them.

Most baseball teams collect players the way an art collector accumulates paintings. Add one or two high-priced and high-visibility objects to an otherwise average group, the thinking goes, and you can start collecting accolades. According to author Michael Lewis, Beane goes about it differently. As a can't-miss prospect who missed, Beane recognizes the psychology of the super star who will not deliver what he promises. But more importantly, Beane also ignores conventional and flashy statistics like batting average and ERA for seemingly mundane alternatives like on-base percentage and ground balls allowed. After all, he'd ask, what does it matter if a player gets to first after driving the first pitch to the warning track or by drawing a walk after fouling pitches off and reaching a full count? The difference is that the second option -- though much less likely to become an ESPN Play of the Day -- is far better because in addition to getting a man on base, it tires out the opposing pitcher.

It's tempting to argue that Moneyball is less about baseball than it is about life. After all, the morals of the story are to disregard convention wisdom, to use your own smarts rather the opinions of others, and to pick a game plan and stick with it. Although these concepts are very valid away from the baseball diamond, that isn't too relevant here: Moneyball is a baseball book, and chances are that if you don't enjoy and understand the sport, then most of the book's lessons will be lost on you.

One thing I can't figure out is why Beane allowed this book to be written.

He obviously has a good thing going in Oakland, and I don't understand why he would reveal his secrets to Mr. Lewis. I guess it's not much of a risk that other teams will emulate this unusual statistics-based approach (At least three other teams say they do -- the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and the Toronto Blue Jays -- but they all have too much money to really need this philosophy. And it's not something you can do to a limited degree, like adding a drop of milk to your coffee. It's all or nothing). But Beane also gives insight into how he manipulates trades to his advantage, and how he knows (and names) certain other general managers who are pushovers. Why would he want this information to be known?

Another thing I'm confused by is why Beane is so unhappy. I suppose his work ethic is a key to his success, and I would also speculate that he holds some resentment toward himself for the way he wasted his baseball talent as a young man. But he doesn't seem to take any real joy from what he's accomplished, which is all the more amazing because he did it going directly against the current. Whether this is a shortcoming of Beane's or of Mr. Lewis's storytelling, I can't say (I suspect the former). But it is noticeable and unfortunate.

Assuming Michael Lewis set out to blend a detailed explanation of modern statistical analysis with revealing accounts of the people driving and being impacted by the revolution, he succeeded masterfully. As the book's protagonist, Oakland A's GM Billy Beane is not infallible (many of his statistically superior 2002 draft picks chronicled in this book have not panned out as expected), but his approach has spawned a gaggle of like-minded young executives who have forced a complex business model into the game's formerly archaic structure. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how Major League Baseball is evolving at the dawn of the 21st century.

The reviews for this book consist largely of high praise, but mixed with occasionally scathing attack. I think that these negative posts are very telling, in the sense that they often underscore everything that Moneyball represents.

For example, the main point of a number of these negative reviews is that it isn't fair praise the Oakland A's teams of the early 21st century without giving due credit to the alternatively achieved successes of the Minnesota Twins over the same period (for the uninitiated, the Twins espoused a theory of baseball contrary to the A's, and also made the playoffs in 2002 and 2003 with a low payroll similar to the A's).

Now here's the problem with that "analysis". It overlooks the fact that even though the Twins made the playoffs in 2002 and 2003 they were a significantly worse team than the A's. In 2002 and 2003, Minnesota scored 56 and 43 runs more than they surrendered, respectively. In 2002 and 2003, Oakland scored 155 and 125 runs more than they surrendered, respectively. This a huge difference. Indeed, in 2003 Minnesota had the 5th best record in the American League and only made the playoffs by nature of their relatively weak division.

This pro-Twins argument put forth by many critics goes right to the heart of the matter of Moneyball - that acceptance of conventional wisdom and commonly held beliefs without reviewing the facts will lead one to terrible misconceptions and false conclusions. In this case, the commonly held belief is that the Twins, by making the playoffs in 2002 and 2003 (just like Oakland) were having success (just like Oakland) despite using a different overall strategy. The reality is that, even though Minnesota enjoyed some modest success over 2002 and 2003, Oakland dramatically outperformed them, which can easily be seen if you ANALYZE THE FACTS. This is the whole message of Moneyball, and it obviously sailed right over the head of many of the reviewers who attack this book.

I highly recommend this book. For those of you that are having second thoughts based on certain negative reviews, in my opinion this book will help you to learn to THINK about how the world around you works. In fact, many of these negative reviews are the result of the type of misguided thinking that Moneyball can help us to avoid.

If you manage a business, you will like this book
If you like math, you will like this book
If you like figuring out how things work, you will like this book.
If you're a financial guru, you'll like this book.
Even though I am Yankee fan (ok, I know a number of people have just said that the review is not helpful and refuse to read further, but)...I loved this book

Michael Lewis, with candor and feeling tells us why Oakland was consistently able to beat the odds - despite the best "talent" in the business not understanding why. He simply solved a different problem. Contrary to taking the heart of the game, he opens your eyes to new levels of enlightenment. (As Spirng training starts, I am looking at the players through a totally different lens).

The writing is solid, the approach, uncluttered. A simply great read - before you go to Opening Day

This is a very fun book to read -- the first 2/3 are awesome for everyone, and the final 1/3 is good for baseball afficianados (though the general population might get a bit bored). I totally recommend!

The main reason I'm giving this book five stars is that I believe it will strongly appeal to a wide range of different types of baseball book readers, including: Those who like "inside the wars" books, amateur statistical analysts, even fans of those How Brilliant Investor X Beat Wall Street type books. The book has a strong streak along those latter lines: it's a profile of someone who figured out inefficiencies in the baseball market, and how to exploit them to compensate for other structural disadvantages his team faced.

The book reads very briskly and engagingly. To the extent that it covers statistical issues, it does it in a way that is accessible to the layperson, and it never disrupts the flow of the narrative.

The author consistently finds an involving story to demonstrate each point he wants to make. For example, there's a chapter on amateur draft day: there's something exciting about such drafts, even if it's in a Rotisserie league or a tabletop league; the fun of determining which players you think are most valuable, and spending your picks as best you can. In another chapter, when the author wants to explain how to value pitchers, he charts the career of the undervalued Chad Bradford.

The essence of the book is really a single story: how an undercapitalized team remained competitive with baseball's strongest powers simply by internalizing many of the lessons learned by an army of amateur statistical analysts over the past 20 years. The focus is especially on the lessons that collide with conventional baseball wisdom: because that's where the good buying and selling opportunities come, when your competition doesn't recognize something that you do.

Among those lessons: the importance of on-base percentage (including the ability to draw walks), the predictive value of minor league and college level batting stats, when it's foolish to run yourself out of innings or to bunt, and how a pitcher's "defense-independent" stats are the best indicator of future performance.

The other side of the coin is the stuff that doesn't matter as much as baseball scouts think it does: raw physical tools, athleticism, speed, strength, etc. Just because you're swift and strong doesn't mean you can reliably read the location of a pitch and can consistently hit a baseball moving 95 mph. Or, as one wag once well put it, "If you want to produce a big canteloupe, the best thing to start with is a small canteloupe, not a collection of big canteloupe parts." In other words, pay attention to what the guy did in the minors.

I myself am loosely part of that stathead community; I've published a few articles and used to have e-mail correspondence relationships with at least three of the people mentioned in the book. So I didn't expect to like this book as much as I did; I expected to feel a bit of a "seen it before" reaction to the statistical insights.

But I didn't; what made the book work for me is that it's not about guys like me, it's about someone on the inside, actually applying that knowledge, and building that knowledge, in the crucible of major league competition. That's exciting and fun to read about.

Just one word of caution: while the author does, I believe, accurately describe some of the analysis that has enabled the A's to prosper despite their small payroll, occasionally the author makes it sound a little more determinative than it all really is. A few cautions I'd sound: the bunt isn't quite as bad as the author makes it seem, because the bunt often increases the probability of scoring one run, even as it significantly decreases the probability of scoring three runs. Not every run in baseball is equally valuable, the first few increase your win probability much more than do the 7th and 8th. Also, while walks are important and do have predictive value, you won't keep walking if you can't hit. You can't really base a major league offense solely on walks, because the other teams won't keep walking you if you don't hit. So some of the players cited in the book with gaudy OBPs have had trouble maintaining even the walk totals that they had before.

I liked the book mainly because it fueled my fantasies of being a baseball GM. Any book that well feeds such pleasant idle ruminations is, for me, a very fun read.

Moneyball is the Moby Dick of baseball, but it takes lots less time to read. When was the last time you read a "sports" book with all star writing equal to the best being done in any genre? When was the last time you learned how a big time business really worked? When was the last time you witnessed dinosaur thinkers exposed and humiliated? When was the last time you saw innovation trump accepted dogma? Michael Lewis does all this, weaving together the different pieces of his narrative into a seamless whole packed with humor, insights, and multiple layers. This is a terrific creation: hats off to the author. It's a great read and a great gift. Even if you think baseball is dull as dishwater or worse, you will love this. P.S. The Afterword alone is worth the price of admission.

I am the biggest Redsox fan and i thought this book was without a dougt the best book i have ever read. I you don't even like sports you will love this book. Clearly the best book ever.

Moneyball is an excellent non-fiction book that weaves the story of SABERMETRICS, Billy Bean's Oakland A's, and the revolution in baseball statistics (driven in part by the internet and personal computer) into an interesting story. This book will appeal to baseball fans, amateur mathematicians, lay economists, and anyone fascinated by finding new ways to look at old things.

Mr. Lewis is a superb storyteller. This book reads extremely quickly and is written in such a way that non-baseball fans can understand and enjoy.

One of the important themes in this book is how do you know what to measure? Mr. Lewis would, perhaps, express it differently. He might ask how one actually calculates the value of something. Conversely, this reader couldn't help but wonder if Billy Bean still didn't get it wrong. Maybe the purpose of a professional baseball team is to make a profit, not to win games. If true, perhaps Mr. Bean is continuing to measure the wrong things.

Another theme in this book is how difficult it is for organizations to take advice from those that are perceived as outsiders. While the geeky people who invented SABERMETRICS, play fantasy baseball, and enjoy calculating volumes of obscure and obtuse statistics are hardly the public image of professional baseball, they are probably its strongest constituency. Despite this, the clubhouse mentality kept baseball isolated from these ideas for quite awhile.

Additionally, this is a story of reason and strategy triumphing over emotion and belief. While this reader hopes that there is still room in the world for the supernatural and non-rational, there is substantially less room in baseball for those things.

For all the reasons above non-baseball fans will enjoy this story. However, this is, and remains, a baseball story. Nor is the reader required to actually calculate any of the statistics. If you've ever wondered how some teams do well without all the high-priced talent, this book will tell you some of those answers.

My only complaint about this book is that it is so focused on baseball that it is difficult find two or three simple rules that could be applied to other forms of operational analysis.

Ultimately, this is a book about baseball that both tells a good story and opens questions about thinking about the larger world.

Don't judge a book by its cover. Ostensibly the title and cover of this book would lead you to conclude that this book is all about baseball. It isn't. When I was handed this book I was expecting a dreary George Will book about the symmetry of motion in baseball or how baseball is the smart man's sport. My expectations were very low. The first few pages quickly put that concern to rest. This is a page-turner that you will not put down.

Have you ever wondered how the Oakland A's with a team that looks so unlike other major league teams can be a consistent winner? The A's General Manager Billy Beane found market inefficiencies and effectively exploited them. He recognized that other teams religiously used subjective measures and the wrong statistical measures in evaluating a player's worth to the team. Billy Beane found the right measures. And, he recognized that the measures being used by every other team inflated player's salaries not because they contributed to the team's bottom line but because they looked the part or their stats looked good on paper. He looked for talent where others were simply not looking and he found it. This allowed him to field a winning team for far less than others.

He developed a strategy to exploit the system by seeking out players not deemed worthy by conventional measures. For instance, short stocky players did not fit the image of a baseball player. Because of their smaller strike zone they walk more frequently, meaning they get on base more often. While other teams were looking at batting average or RBIs, Billy Beane was using statistical measure such as on-base percentage to measure a player's contribution to a winning. He focused on what's important.

Billy Beane recognized that using the traditional measures of a play's worth and the scout's reliance upon subject measures didn't match up with what really matter to winning. He leveraged this market inefficiency to build a winning team year in and year out. The key is in proper valuation as it relates to measuring what directly contributes to your bottom line or, in the case of the A's, winning.

Moneyball is a hard book to put down, even though it's all about statistics. In a real twist, Lewis shows how the best baseball isn't the stuff of Field of Dreams or The Natural or Bull Durham, but of your college intro to statistics class. Lewis provides fascinating stories about how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, has bucked the conventional wisdom and made one of the poorest teams in baseball one of the winningest teams by evaluating players on a myriad or performance data, not on physical appearance, hunches, or traditional scouting measures. This book is sure to please the baseball fan, statistics nerd, or anyone who just likes a good story.

I will NEVER observe a baseball game the same way ever again.It Dispells the Myths that stagnated the game for 100 years. Thee best baseball book I ever read. The proof is in the A's Win Loss Record for the past 5 years and producing 2 MVP's, A Cy Young Award Winner and 2004 Rookie of the Year. How'd they do that??? Find Out How.

Where does one start with the excellence of this book. From the stories of Billy Beane's playing days in the minors with Lenny Dykstra (the dude) to the inside view of a MLB draft and the role of a GM of a team at the deadline in July. This book delivers like no other, with one chapter after another, one subject after another, with no let up in interest or intensity.
Fascinating is the info on Bill James and baseball statistics and the engaging stories about Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteberg, and other Moneyballers.

I would recommend this book to everyone who loves baseball. Actually, you don't even have to be a fan of baseball to enjoy it. If you appreciate logic and reasoning, this book is for you too. The baseball background makes it more entertaining. I honestly could not lay this down till the very end.
Lewis writes about a bizzare baseball franchise, the Oakland Athletics and about it's unorthodox front-office headed by GM Billy Beane. Beane and his Harvard assistants clash with the oldschool ex-ballplayer scouts over the potential draft picks. The former wants to make rational and objective picks based on stats while the latter on what they themselves have seen. Thats where it sort of starts off atleast. The story that follows will have you questioning the importance of pretty much every basbeall stat that you have been led to believe are important (batting average, RBI, stolen bases etc.) It is hard to believe that most of baseball continues to ignore the inefficiency in their methods even in the face of the hard evidence that has been circulating around as early as the 80's.
The eye-opening content coupled with the engaging prose of Michael Lewis provides a truly entertaining and educating read.

With that said, let's go RedSox.

Since I've work for a pro baseball team in my country i've been involved in the bussines, this book was made with two points of view, one could be baseball fans or anyone else who could reach good reading about sports, they could find a biography which could work as a hollywood script film like Jerry Maguire. Other point of view is that you could find as a complentary reading for a sport bussines course. Anyway whatever be the case this is an excellent book to learn more about this.
Daniel Figueroa

This is a great book for baseball fans, or for anyone who loves a good underdog story. If you're the latter, you'll find yourself rooting for the Oakland Athletics as they march towards the playoffs with a $40 million payroll, one of the lowest in the leagues and less than a quarter of what the Yankees spend on their roster. The fascinating thing about this sports book is that most of the action takes place in the GM's office, not on the field. But that doesn't make it any less exciting. Reading the play-by-play of how Billy Beane orchestrates a deal for an undervalued minor league prospect can be just as gripping as a bottom-of-the-ninth playoff situation.

What is really fascinating about this book is the notion that you can analyze the game without ever watching it, that the value of a player can be found in the box scores without ever seeing him play. And there is something truly satisfying, something so American, about the notion that spending lots of money doesn't necessarily guarantee success. In this book the little guy comes out ahead, or at least has a fighting chance.

Moneyball refers to the growing practice in the MLB, spearheaded by Billy Beane and the Oakland A's front office, to exploit market inefficiences which undervalue over-performing players by paying them less than what they're otherwise worth until the market catches up, at which point, those players will be traded and new undervalued players acquired. It is a fascinating subject, partly because it is unbelievable that no baseball insider before the late '90s blew the whistle on the ineffective and expensive manner in which baseball was (is) recruiting players.

Secondarily, the book focuses on the rise of Bill James and other amateur statisticians and the use of their work by Moneyball GMs like Beane. I thought the book was a page turner because these subjects were so interesting. However, the author rolled out his best attempts to make these subjects boring and dense with his overly verbose writing style. Is he writing for meatheads because he hits the reader over the head with a baseball bat (no pun intended) over-explaining every obvious concept. Likewise, even though the reader can predict where the plot is turning, he has to tell you before it turns, just in case you might miss it. Furthermore, the book is disorganized and several grammatical errors led me to believe his editor was out to lunch.

The writer's most notable offense, however, is his repeat babbling explanations of concepts that he had explained ad nauseum in prior pages. At points, I wanted to scream, I GET IT ALREADY! Simply put, it's been a long time since I've read a book where the author does his best to bore you.

One substantive flaw in the book occurs towards the end, when the author essentially concludes that it is the continued thick-headedness of non-moneyball General Managers which allow Moneyball GMs like Beane, Paul DePodesta and Theo Epstein to continue to exploit the market inefficiencies. But the logical corollary to this theory is that if the other GMs "smarten up" and operate in a moneyball fashion, will the lower-budget teams like the A's stop winning as bigger-budget teams more effectively compete for the (previously)undervalued players? It's clear that the author disagrees with Bud Selig's conclusions about the ability of low-budget teams to compete fairly with high-budget teams. But the writer doesn't explain whether Selig will "become" right if big budget teams begin playing moneyball and valuing players in the same fashion as Beane and his cohorts do.

As the Boston Red Sox fan, I found this book to be utterly interesting. The book tells the story of how the money poor Oakland A's managed to fielded a winning team year after year on a budget which is only the third of the many of their rivals. Oakland's General Manager, Billy Beane have developed a new system of accessing talents and getting them cheap. In essence, it all about statistics, theories and possibilities that defied the traditional way for accessing baseball talent.

Of course, as a Red Sox fan, I found this book to be a great interest because the Boston General Manager, Theo Epstein, is the great believer and follower of Billy Beane School of Thought on accessing talents. But unlike Beane, Epstein can applied this concept with a big checkbook and the result I believed was the glorious Red Sox victory of 2004.

I think after reading the book, I believed someone like Epstein can applied the lessons of Beane and make it work more effectively with a big bankroll. Beane on the other hand, have to let go of players he developed as their demand for a larger paychecks continued. Thus lies Beane's great trap in life. He can maintained a winning team but probably never get to the next level because he can't hold on to what he have developed. The next level is, of course the World Series Championship.

A great book for any Red Sox fans out there. It may give us a clue on what Epstein is thinking about when he is giving out contracts, or rejecting a player or getting new player. If not a Red Sox fan, the book is still highly educational in the revolutionary way baseball is changing in front of us.

I'm not a sports book reader generally, but a friend recommended this one and it is truly outstanding. It's more of a business book than a sports book, focusing on the market inefficiency in baseball created by old-timers using intuition about how to draft and trade players.

It follows a great story line about the Oakland A's, who with 1/3 of the budget of the top spenders routinely finish up near the top, by taking a more statistically based approach to selecting players and spending their budget. It reads like a novel though, in part because Lewis is a good writer, and in part because of the material (Billy Beane, Oakland's GM, in particular is a character).

I enjoyed it thoroughly -- it heightened my interest in baseball, and it made me look at markets in general with an eye towards seeking inefficiencies and opportunities in a new light.

Yet again Michael Lewis takes his readers on an amusing adventure in Moneyball, when he sets on the quest to discover why the Oakland Athletics, despite one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, are perennial contenders. The book is filled with interesting personality profiles and insights into the economics of baseball. Moneyball's main focus is Billy Beane, a former can't miss prospect coming out of high school who never lived up to expectations, but has been one of the most successful general managers in the major leagues during the past several years. The book presents an interesting story of how Beane, along with his assistants and scouts, have discarded taditional beliefs about evaluating talent and have turned to technology and unusual statistics to determine who is most likely to have a successful career. I don't know if Beane's methods are the future of baseball, or like Netscape in Lewis' The New New Thing is merely a fad, but it is innovative and worth learning about either way. This is a well written and insightful book and I would recommend it to fans of Lewis and even more to fans of baseball.

One of the best books i've ever read its brilliant.Michael Lewis is a terrific writer.The way he analyzes everything done by smart yet maniacal Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane is excellent. Everything from ripping off other GM's to drafting 15th round prospects in the 1st round is described great.

A great book for the thinking baseball fan. Billy Beane built a contending team on a low budget by going against the grain. It is interesting that he himself was a promising baseball player who failed to pan out. It is rather coincidental that his style is quite similar to the Oakland Raiders football team's method of picking players that are not heralded by other teams. A team of misfits. Unlike many teams, including our Seattle Mariners, Beane does not sell player personalities to the fans. All of his players are movable parts and anyone can be dealt at any time. The one question that I have is why is he giving away all his secrets?

Beane and his disciples have prosecuted their edge in the draft and they have proven that they can win that way. It is new in some ways and channels an earlier time as well. The emphasis on team play is not an exclusively "moneyball" approach. The Rangers use this old approach in 2004 married to a traditional cadre of scouts that Beane would not use. The result for Texas has been winning baseball that is fun to watch. The play in the field (particularly the infield) is sparkling and they also put runs on the board. As of this writing the own 1st place in AL west. They have a higher payroll, but much of it is dead weight with Messrs Park and Nelson out with injuries.
It is interesting to note that at the All Star break 2004, only three of the league leaders in OBP (over weighted in the A's version of OPS) were A's and the highest ranked was 30th. Perhaps this Oakland secret isn't such a great secret after all. The other "moneyball" team, Boston, has 4 of the top 40. In 2002, the time frame in which the book was written, the A's only had 1 player in the top 40. Perhaps this shows they are progressing.
In 2002, Anaheim had a reputation for being "scrappy" at the plate and won the World Series. Between Anaheim and San Fran (the 2002 opponent) they only had 3 of the top 40 OBP. Does this mean that Oakland and Beane are on the wrong track? They are certainly competitive again this year. Perhaps it means that being obsessed with any thing in a liability in a multidimensional game such as baseball.
Pitching is another interesting area that Beane and Co. have attempted to set on its ear. The sabermetric DIPS ratio is what they like to measure their pitching talent with and it seems to be working. They have 2 of the top 20 pitchers rated using DIPS.
I chuckled under my breath when I read Beane said that Barry Bonds had "risen to a level where even talent can't take you". Was he talking about BALCO?

Being a bay area fan of sports I first picked up Moneyball out of sheer curiosity. I wanted to know how baseball is ran, and this book told me everything.
Michael Lewis travels as close to chronologically as he possibly can throght the A's 2002 season (the 20 wins season) from the draft you are captivated by the story and evaluation Billy Bean has put into play seen no where else in baseball. How these men intelligent men, Billy and Paul and other ivy league graduates have broken baseball sucess into numbers makes you review the box score a lot more differently. We learn the feel of a draft room (since we never seen the MLB draft which is done behind doors) the intense phone calls and interaction between everyone in the organization who assisted in evaluating prospects.
Lewis doesn't stop there, he also takes us into the baseball world on the last day of trading. Once again we are like people watching Billy like in a zoo, do his magic on numerous GM in the league.
The story is mostly about Billy Bean and how in hell was he able to get away with that he did to other GMs. Billy is very coercive and able to instigate trades to help himself. What astounds me is how no one caught onto him. In the book were are not only observing a process but also introduced to many characters that are valuable to the A's. From scouts to owners to managers, to the two underdogs of baseball Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford, (whom Lewis devotes whole chapters to)
What I enjoyed most was the brief look into the world of baseball, as a student who was considering a major in sports management this book facinated me every step of the way.

I was skeptical about the book in the beginning, but as I started to read it I was completely hooked. If you are a baseball fan this book is for you. It takes you behind the scenes into the thoughts of the scouts, managers, and players. I like how the book will dive into the story of how a player is picked/ranked among major league teams during the draft. Then go into details of why the A's went against the grain and selected players that had amazing OBA but had some flaw in the eyes of other major league teams. This flaw allowed the A's to pick up numerous players at below market value. The Warren Buffet approach applied to baseball players. After reading this book, it makes you wonder why are all the other teams not paying attention. Just look at the draft on 6/7/04 and the A's seemed to have done it again. I really enjoy the intellectual and statistical side the book presents. Definitely a book to pick up and get immersed in.

Let's get one thing straight: this book is *not* about baseball. Being a baseball fan I suppose it's easy for me to say this and having heard and read this work endlessly discussed by baseball fans and pundits over the last 18 months it would be simple to conclude the opposite. But make no mistake: baseball is incidental here. Mr. Lewis' work concerns itself much more with metaphysics.

For the uninitiated, metaphysics is (generally speaking) the science of existence: what *is* vs. what *is not*. This book is a beautifully written example of how a few men use ideas based on what *is* to consistently triumph over those who ignore and belittle these ideas. Because this book illustrates this dynamic with a popular sport and some colorful personalities--thereby spreading the gospel to an even wider audience--I would give the book six stars if I could.

The chief colorful personality is baseball executive Billy Beane, who runs an obscure and relatively poor (money-wise, thus the ironic title) team known as the Oakland A's (Athletics). To the astonishment--and occasional frustration and envy--of everyone from everyday fans to the commissioner's office, the A's consistently win more games than teams with several *times* their player payroll, reaching the league playoffs several years in a row. Beane accomplishes this extraordinary feat by acquiring players whose qualities other teams ignore. Leaving aside some crushing detail, these qualities are relatively simple: they've been *proven*--rationally, logically, statistically--to help a baseball team win games.

So given Beane's track record why don't more teams follow his lead? Lewis makes the answer plain: baseball doesn't function by reason. Teams routinely sign high school players to huge contracts--though history shows a frighteningly small chance of them ever reaching the majors. Scouts grow emotionally attached to prospects with "great stuff." Managers call certain plays not because they will help the team win, but out of fear, to be seen as "doing something" and not be second-guessed later. And the list goes on. Beane's counterparts display a consistent and vapid ignorance of metaphysics. They don't care what *is*; they play by baseball's century-old mythical and emotional rules. Using a more rational approach, Beane--incidentally a pretty emotional guy who admits to Lewis that he constantly fights being "subjective"--runs circles around them.

Michael Lewis entertains us with this tale so well that he often has to remind us of his central premise. But remind he surely does; probably the best aspect of the book is his relentless emphasis on the creativity and courage shown by Beane and his cohorts. Rather than simply relate the results, Lewis takes us into the A's locker room, giving us player and management interviews under almost every conceivable condition. He even listens in on a player and a few coaches questioning the team's system--thereby showing Beane's approach has hardly stifled debate. Even better, Lewis has done his homework: he shows how Beane relies heavily on an analysis method ungainly known as sabermetrics, initially developed by Bill James in the 1970s and later expanded by Voros McCracken and others. This rational approach to baseball analysis is nearly as historically rich as it is radical.

The only quibble I have with Mr. Lewis is perhaps an insufficient emphasis on the sheer novelty of sabermetrics--especially compared to the downplayed methods employed by baseball's richer teams. In a new afterword added for the paperback edition, Lewis explains how he was genuinely shocked at the reaction to his book among the sport's oligarchy. His response is hilarious--dubbing the baseball establishment "The Women's Auxiliary Club"--but he might have known better. Showing how one team (now up to a few, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, new employer of Beane's ex-right hand man, Paul DePodesta) bucked decades of subjective irrationality to become a resounding success was bound to ruffle some feathers.

'Moneyball' was a pleasure to read on many levels and while I rejoiced in the triumph of its rational premise I'll admit to my own subjectivity. I've been an Oakland A's fan for over thirty years and I can't help feeling positively giddy about my favorite team--poor, undervalued, and scrappy though they are--consistently beating the sport's arrogant royalty (including the clueless commissioner) at their own game. I'm eternally grateful to Mr. Beane for building the team and to Mr. Lewis for showing how it was done. A sincere 'bravo!' to both.

I have been a "roto geek" for a number of years now, so I have understood and appreciated the use of on-base-percentage as an important tool for judging the future production of ball players. Yet, I really had no idea!

That was until I read Moneyball! This book details the organizational structure of the Oakland A's, which is a team that is forced plays on a severely strapped budget. Yet, they continue to win. Basically, Oakland adheres to a philosophy of drafting college players that get on base, via the walk. This shows that the player has a god control of the strike zone and will most likely be able to hit on a professional level. This allows for Oakland to find value, in the market for players, that other teams have ignored.

This philosophy not only incorporates strong statistical analysis of players, it also takes a new way of seeing baseball. That is look not at what a player might be able to do, but look at what they have done! Read this book (which can easily be done in one or two sittings) and you will see baseball in a completely different light, you will be happy you did!

I am almost embarrassed at how much I enjoyed this book. I purposely avoided it for a long time annoyed at how much hype it was getting thinking surely it wasn't a 'real' baseball book for true fans. I gave in recently when the paperback came out and must admit that I am dumbfounded with delight. This is a GREAT book for true fans of the game and even for those who know next to nothing about baseball! Michael Lewis is a remarkably gifted author who can tell a great story, entertain, and inform with amazing ease while writing in excellent prose. His central focus in this book is "Why have the Oakland A's won so many baseball games lately with such a relatively low payroll and so few established stars?" You will quickly find out if you are a fan of "Old School" baseball or the "New Wave" thinking running through Oakland, Toronto, and even the Red Sox. Many will take strong stands along these sides and may even rate their opinion of this book solely upon that. Either way, this book is great entertainment and is very much worthy of a place on your bookshelf for "read it cover-to-cover keepers"!

It goes without saying - for baseball fans, numbers people, entrepeneurs, etc., this book is a must read. But unbeknownst to most, this book is a MUST READ for one demographic in particular: fantasy baseball enthusiasts.

If you are a fantasy baseball owner, please buy this book, because essentially, Billy Beane is running a real-life MLB team no differently than you are running your fantasy squad. Once you read this book, you will be compelled to (1) attempt to outsmart your buddies by drafting and acquiring players that you identify as more valuable than your competitors (assuming you trust your analyses, as Beane does), and (2) outwit your buddies by trading and trading some more, again for players that you identify as more valuable than your competitors

If you are a parent or of an obsessed fantasy baseball child, please buy them this book immediately. This book will capture their attention, thereby providing you way to get your sports/computer junkie child to pick up a book and read it cover to cover.....a task all too difficult all too often.

I just finished "Moneyball" and found it a fascinating read. While I am neither a huge baseball fan nor an expert in statistics, I nevertheless found the blending of the two subjects quite captivating. I also found the style of the writing that author Michael Lewis uses to be very conversational and accessible to the reader.

I can see why this book, and the events it chronicles, caused such an uproar in the baseball world. The crux of the conflict seems to be theory vs. theater. The approach of Billy Beane and others has proved that using certain statistics to choose a team and project where they will go during the season is a valid, successful approach to the game.

However, there is a case to be made for their opposition's claim that such an approach takes the flair and theater out of baseball. I recall that someone once said, "We don't know how the game will turn out. If we did, it wouldn't be worth playing." It's that peppering of random chance that creates the theater of a baseball game. Sometimes the crowd wants to see flashy, dramatic and unexpected plays.

My sense is that ultimately some combination of the statistical and the traditional will come about. That team managers will be able to use both the flash and the stillness to achieve victory.

I definitely recommend this book, whether you're a baseball fan or not. Also, if you are interested in reading about the inside story of the bond markets during the mid and late 80s, Lewis's first book, "Liar's Poker," offers the reader the same accessible style.

This book reads more like an overlong magazine article than a well-written book. Michael Lewis is not a great writer, and his theme -- that baseball teams can be better managed by objectively weighting the contribution of various player attributes, such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage -- is informative but not earth-shattering. As an Oakland A's fan, I gained some insights from this book. But was it worth the $11 I paid for it? Not really.

Being a pretty solid baseball follower is what primarily drew me to the book, and in the end made me enjoy it thoroughly. Not to be discouraged though, all of you non-basesball fans. Even if you do not follow the sport, the story of Billy Beane (a former major league player who built up a losing team using second hand players) creates an interesting behind-the-scenes look at baseball as a business. Also, although it makes references to baseball, it is easy to draw comparisons to the everyday world.
The only parts that I drew away from, or made me lose my attention were those that focused a lot on budget, money, and statistics.
Besides these every-so-often sections, though, I definitely recommend this book to anyone, baseball fan or not.

Michael Lewis writes another deceptively simple book, telling a simple story in a compelling manor and confirming the strategy behind the Oakland A's success. The book is an easy read and never gets as complicated or complex as baseball can get at times. An interesting read from page 1.

This book pretty much turns baseball upside down, exposing the traditions of baseball for what they are, ignorant sheep-like mentality. That is, people doing something because someone else does it. Amazing it has taken this long for the foolishness to be exposed. But that's baseball as they say

I can't imagine the main character in the book Billy Beane is very popular these days. For the most part, he has made his peer set look ridiculous, which is, everybody involved in running a baseball team. But our national pastime has always required a healthy sense of humor, when you consider what the fans are forced to put up with; ticket prices, player strikes, off field antics, owners in the limelight, etc. The list goes on and hopefully Beane has started something that will fundamentally improve, perhaps save the game.

You don't have to know baseball to enjoy this book, but it does help. An understanding of statistics and the value of money are just as important, and if you read this as a business book, MoneyBall is incredibly thought proving and probably applicable to most any business.
md
Michael Duranko
www.bootism.com

Moneyball tells the story of Billy Beane and his radically different (and effective) understanding of baseball as a matter of statistics. The success of the Oakland A's, despite one of baseball's lowest payrolls, attests to the efficacy of the strategy. This book is about much more than Beane or baseball; it describes the uphill battle that truth fights against the safety of conventional wisdom. You do not need to know the difference between a fastball and a fly ball in order to enjoy this book, or find its message relevant.

I did enjoy this book although it wasn't what I expected. It was interesting to see how a club with a small payroll can produce on the field. I was impressed to see that the A's would consider players who consistently produce on the field without much fanfare. Rather than concentrating on the hot player who could suddenly go cold after the contract has been negotiated.

The concern I have is that each player is essentially turned into a statistic. They plug you into their model and a number is spit out. I understand that major league baseball is no longer "America's pasttime," but a business. If your stats don't cut it, you are gone.

The shortfall I see is with the A's is they do not even consider pursuing a great ballplayer just because of the money they rightfully deserve. This may be why they haven't gone all the way.

This book isn't about team camaraderie or a rich tradition. It's a little thick on statistics and about being cheap. I'm eager to follow this team and the others that employ this approach to see how far this experiment can go.

Michael Lewis has written a phenomenal book here. Like all good non-fiction, Moneyball tells a slice-of-life story that has applications and implications for virtually all areas of life. The overarching theme--that what we know may just not be so, and that value in people, even in what some may consider a trivial pursuit, baseball, is not always subject to the "conventional wisdom"--resonates through every page and through every character. Having watched the Oakland-Kansas City game that capped the A's 20-game winning streak in 2002, but having known nothing of what went into that night, I found the story of Scott Hatteburg to be full of life truths. Ditto Jeremy Brown.

Despite its somewhat unfortunate title, Moneyball is not to be missed. You will put it down with a renewed determination to find the things YOU are undervaluing in life because of myths you have been taught. The most likely target of this refreshing approach is YOURSELF.

This is not (as I mistakenly assumed at first) one of those splenetic rants by a so-called baseball traditionalist, bemoaning how the great game has been destroyed by filthy lucre. It is instead a vastly entertaining account of how one extraordinary man (Billy Beane) used his grasp of the imprecision of conventional measures of possible future baseball prowess to overcome his teams comparative lack of cash and assemble an extremely effective bank of young talent (albeit one that has, so far, failed to triumph in the post-season). The best baseball book I've read since Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" nearly 25 years ago.

I picked up this book because it was recommended to me by a professor in a corporate strategy class. It brought issues of corporate strategy to life.
An enlightening book that brings theories to life in an enjoyable manner.

Moneyball is a great book, a no-doubter as a Finalist for Spitball Magazine's CASEY Award. It may not win the CASEY because the competition for Best Baseball Book of the Year is stiff; but anybody who gives this book less than 5 stars should write his own baseball book and show us all how it's done.

In pro-basketball the difference between the richest and the poorest teams (in terms of team payroll) is 1.75:1. In pro-football it's 1.5:1. But, in pro-baseball it's 4:1. The convential "wisdom" says you have to buy success by getting the biggest stars. So what do you do if your team can't afford it?

Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland A's, has turned to sabermetrics (the statistical study of baseball) to find undervalued players. The most important aspects of baseball are not what we've always been told by TV commentators and other baseball-people. The ability to get on base (even by a walk) and generate runs (instead of outs - including sacrifices) is more important than stats like batting averages and RBI's. The most valuable players are also most often the most grossly overlooked. Beane and his staff have been very successfull in exploiting this over the last couple of years.

The book is well-written and often very entertaining. The only times I felt it grew slow was when Mr. Lewis was trying to explain some of the theories and statistics that were really important (then it becomes a 3-star book). But some of the success stories of underdog players were really fun to read. I reccomend it to anyone who has any interest in baseball, and I'll certainly pay more attention to the Oakland A's next year.

You don't have to be a baseball fan to have fun reading MONEYBALL
by Michael Lewis, but if you are one, you'll find this to one of the best
sports books you'll ever come across . . . the subtitle says it all:
THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME.

It tells the story of how the Oakland Athletics compete successfully
with such big market teams as the Yankees and Braves, despite
having the second-lowest payroll in baseball . . . they do so by
paying attention to statistics that nobody had ever really cared
about; e.g., the walk--proving that taking a base on balls can often
be the difference between winning and losing a game.

I loved the wide range of characters, ranging from the team's
general manager (Billy Beane, a flop as a player) to statisticians
(such as Bill James) and including such low-paid athletes as Scott
Hatteberg and Chad Bradford who became stars when nobody
else even knew about them.

The writing was most captivating . . . among the passages that

caught my attention were the following:

* The next year went well enough for him-he was, after all, Billy Beane
and by the summer of 1982 he had been promoted to the Mets'
Double-A team in Jackson, Mississippi. He played left, Strawberry
played right, and the whole team played the field. For a lot of the
players it was their first exposure to the Southern female-the most
flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as the feminism.
Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness! Baseball was a game but chasing
women was a business, in which Billy Beane was designed to succeed
without even trying. Billy had the rap. Billy, said his old teammate
J.P. Ricciardi, "could talk a dog off a meat wagon." Billy was forever
having to explain to another teammate of his, Steve Springer, that
when you'd just met some girl, what you didn't do was tell her you
played pro ball. It wasn't fair to her; you had to give the girl a chance
to turn you down. Billy's way of giving her a chance was to tell her that
what he did for a living was collect roadkill off local highways. Springer
didn't have Billy's awesome God-given ability with women; he thought
he needed the Mets to stand a chance; and this need of his led to one
of those great little moments that make even the most dismal minor
league baseball careers worth remembering. They were leaving one of
the local burger joints when two pretty girls called after them, in their
fetching drawls: "You boys Yankees?" Springer turned around and
said, "No, we're the Mets."

* Fielder is the semi-aptly named Prince Fielder, son of Cecil Fielder,
who in 1990 hit fifty-one home runs for the Detroit Tigers, and who by
the end of his career could hardly waddle around the bases after one
of his mammoth shots into the upper deck, much less maneuver him-
self in front of a ground ball. "Cecil Fielder acknowledges a weight
of 261," Bill James once wrote, "leaving unanswered the question of
what he might weigh if he put his other foot on the scale." Cecil Fielder
could have swallowed Jeremy Brown whole and had room left for
dessert, and the son apparently has an even more troubling weight
problem than his father. Here's an astonishing fact: Prince Fielder is
too fat even for the Oakland A's. Of no other baseball player in the
whole of North America can this be said. Pittaro seems to think that
the Detroit Tigers might take Fielder anyway, for sentimental reasons.
And if the Tigers take him, they trigger a chain reaction that ends with
the Mets getting one of their first six choices.

* Having kept the team close enough to hope, Billy could now go out
and shop for whatever else he needed to get to the play-offs. When
he set off on this shopping spree, he kept in mind five simple rules:

1. "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*ked."

2. "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."

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

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

5. "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."

"Moneyball" is a good read. Author Michael Lewis explains in an interesting and entertaining manner how the Oakland A's overcome the disadvantage of a low payroll by exploiting inefficiencies in the market for baseball players -- inefficiencies perpetuated by the anti-intellectual tendencies of many baseball men. My main complaint is that I wish the book was longer. In interviews Lewis said that he had lots of great conversations with guys like Tim Hudson and J.P. Ricciardi that had to be cut to keep the book short and focused. At only 288 pages, I read the book in a day and a half, and a lot of the text covered the principles of sabermetrics to help explain how the A's succeed on a low payroll. This is good information to popularize, but since I already knew that walks are good and bunting is bad, I was hoping for more inside scoop. Some chapters were excellent -- Oakland's approach to the minor league draft and Chad Bradford's circuitous path to the majors were both very interesting. Finding out that Oakland GM Billy Beane used to be exactly the type of player he now avoids (great body, terrible hitter) was great. Seemingly overlooked was the A's great pitching staff, a tribute to the scouting from past years and the coaches who have helped keep the starters healthy. I was left wanting more information about people in the game who have helped make the A's a surprise success every year. I'm sure that Lewis had a goal of keeping the book short and punchy, which is probably conducive to selling it to the general population, but as a man with a baseball obsession I feel a little shortchanged. Lewis had fly-on-the-wall access to one of the most interesting teams in the league and apparently cut out lots of good stuff. Followup, please!

Moneyball is a worthwhile read. I found the first half of the book to be very interesting (sabermetrics, Bill James, etc.) However, I found the second half of the book to be insulting- esprcially the way manager Art Howe was portrayed. Michael Lewis made this man with 30 years of baseball experience out to be a puppet and yes-man. I wondered if the book was proof read and edited by Billy Beane himself.
I think Tim Hudson's name is mentioned once while Mark Mulder and Barry Zito never were. If not for these three starting pitchers, the A's would have acheived little success and the book would have no basis for being written. Credit the A's winning directly to these three arms moreso than sabermetrics.
Intersting book but don't believe evrything you read.

This type of book, written the wrong way, can wind up only on the shelves of enthusiasts. Instead, Michael Lewis did an amazing job creating a book which will not only be interesting to baseball enthusiasts and statisticians, but also to anyone who even has a remote interest in sports or business. I agree with my local library's classification of this book as a non-fiction work that reads like fiction.

If I find a book that interests me, I read it in about 3 weeks. This one took 5 days. I couldn't put it down. If you are a baseball fan, even mildly so, you need to get this book. It almost made me an Oakland A's fan!

As an avid fan of Bill James in the 1970s and 1980s, I have been constantly dismayed by the lack of respect given to his skilled analysis and observation of the game of baseball in his various writings over the years, including the now highly acclaimed Baseball Abstract. An interesting parallel can be drawn to another book, written on another subject almost 40 years ago, a book called Beat The Dealer by Dr. Edward Thorpe.

Dr. Thorpe, after many years of study and computer analysis, wrote his book in 1966 which factually explained how proper play and the use of card counting could defeat the casinos in the game of blackjack. It demythologized the long-held beliefs that only luck and money systems like the truly stupid Martingale could win at blackjack.

The book, which is completely and totally based in pure mathematical fact, was ignored by the "old men" of the casino business who "knew" that the house always had the edge. It took many years (and many card counters winning lots of money) for the casinos to wise up and start to fight back, often by having their own people finally read Thorpe's (and his later followers) books.

Once again, it is surprising it has taken so long for anyone in baseball to sit up and take notice of what those of us who followed sabremetrics and Bill James' analyses for many years always understood.

I agree with many of the reviews that Billy Beane is not portrayed as a particularly endearing person. However, he seems to clearly understand what the facts are here, and acts on them. This is the sign of a good manager and I expect his approach will win out in the long run. And yes, he is right, just like in blackjack, the math will win in the long run (the full season), but it is hell in the short run. Some reviewers have said that in the short run, you need to ignore what got you there and play a different game. However, my experiences in blackjack suggest the opposite, that you have to accept that the short run involves a lot of luck and hope that over the long run (even in the long run of a series of short run playoffs), that the luck will eventually even out and that playing the solid game you always do will finally bear fruit. But as someone who always played blackjack with a small bankroll, I know the variance sure plays havoc with your mind and can tempt you to go the wrong way.

One more point. Someone said they hoped that every manager in baseball is made to read this book. For the Oakland A's sake, I hope not, but even if they are, I doubt it will make much difference. Thorpe's book was widely available to read by anyone for many years, and even the casino bosses I talked to who read it would simply tell you that it was wrong. I expect that if every "old man" in baseball read this book, most would say it was something to be laughed at. It will take a generation to change this and in the meantime, I hope Oakland (and others) can ride the results to the bank (and the World Series).

This is a very readable, witty book, which on the surface is about baseball, and the application of statistical analysis (sabremetrics) to the evaluating of players and strategies (knowledge of statistics is not necessary; he doesn't get into that: it's all about people and ideas). A basic knowledge of baseball is certainly useful, as Lewis drops the names of many players and mentions certain types of plays (i.e., hit and run, sacrifice bunt, etc.) without pausing to explain them, but also probably not essential. The people, and the lively writing of Lewis, are at the center here.

Lewis nicely weaves together the personal stories of the A's general manager (GM), Billy Beane, other team execs and scouts, and the individual players who were often considered misfits by other teams for a very particular reason (a year or two too old, an odd pitching motion, etc.), but were considered bargains by the As. He gives good detail for anyone who has ever wondered how teams decide who to draft, or how a general manager negotiates player deals with other GMs (and, like Red Auerbach was for the Celtics in the 60s, is so good at picking the pockets of other teams that after a while they are reticent to deal with him). And it's very interesting how Beane, a promising high school player who could be a poster child for the failure of the old, scout-driven school, takes it upon himself to dismantle that establishment with sabremetrics.

At a deeper level, the book is about several other matters:
- how does any organization evaluate and hire people?
- how does a radically new way of approaching a business develop?
- what -- and how long -- does it take for the new method to displace the previous way of doing things, and -- more importantly -- the people who do it that way?

In the case of baseball, the development of sabremetrics -- which developed the new strategic insights based on detailed analyses of baseball's mother lode of stats -- has been ongoing for about 30 years. And the success of the Oakland As -- consistently making the playoffs with a payroll one-third of the Yankees -- is its first major test, and victory. (A few other teams, like the Red Sox, recently say they are heavily influenced by it, although paying huge dollars for 37-year-old veterans like Curt Schilling may not be the best proof.) But at most clubs the old-timers who run the game still prefer to rely on their subjective judgments.

In other fields, such as high tech, the head-in-the-sand approach taken by most baseball people would lead to the death of the company. And perhaps that is why some companies do die. Certainly plenty of studies have shown that most companies make hiring decisions in ways that -- like most baseball teams -- are highly subjective. And what other industry has the historical, objective stats on performance that baseball has to develop the strategies from? Other than, perhaps, investment banking and direct marketing, maybe none. So, few could duplicate the depth of analysis, but many could profit from the style of thinking involved.

In any case, a very enjoyable read -- I read it in a couple days over Thanksgiving -- and highly recommended.

After taking a statistical model development class in graduate school, I was intrigued by the thought of statistical analysis applied to baseball. A classmate recommended this book to me. Michael Lewis does a good job, if only by accident, of uncovering a story that's not just limited to baseball. Here's what I got from the book:

* Changing the culture of an organization takes years to achieve and, for change in behavior to occur, constant enforcement and encouragement of the right behavior has to exist from top to bottom.

* Not everyone is willing or able to adapt to radical change.

* Information is the key to market opportunities. Just as important is the ability to analyze the information and make a decision based on the analysis -- even if the decision is later proven to be wrong. Over the long term, inactivity and maintaining the status quo is much more damaging than making risky decisions.

* Doing something the way that everyone else does it will not necessary lead to success in a crowded marketplace. Different paths from the norm must be taken.

* Make decisions based on data rather than "gut instinct".

* Those that believe in the status quo and tradition are generally the most difficult to persuade even if definitive evidence supporting a different view exists. Outsiders are effective at bringing about change because they value legacy the least.

I would have given this book 5 stars, but I was constantly annoyed by Michael Lewis' implication that only those toting bachelor degrees from Ivy League schools are intelligent enough to accept the use of statistical analysis or that only the smartest go to Ivy League schools. I don't know whether Lewis attended an Ivy League school, but throughout the book he was always quick to point out whether a character went to an Ivy League school.

Mr. Lewis wrote this book for the sole purpose of getting your money. The author could care less about the game of baseball.
Don't waste your money or your time on this poorly written book.

I give Moneyball on the basis that it's reader is either a devout student and fan of the game such as myself, or someone who is big into small-business ownership. Yes, Lewis does add some "filler" to his novel by adding life stories and background to Bradford and Hatteberg, but at the same time this builds the psychological models of what exactly it means to be an "Oakland A" in Beane's model. The only real complaint I have with the novel is wanting more. A must read for any true baseball fan.

In short, if you follow the oakland A's, you will love this book. If you follow baseball closely, you will love this book. A fan of baseball will like it. A casual observer may find parts boring.

Great writer, lousy title, flawed book, but still worth reading if you know what it's about.

Fans of the Oakland A's will enjoy the book for the inside view of the 2002 season - incomplete but insightful where Lewis chooses to look.

Fans of baseball who struggle with the direction of the game can see how the economics of the game are driving a new strategy in managing teams - and see why the Red Sox and Blue Jays are following the Athletics formula for appraising player talent differently than traditional (conventional) methods in the league.

Those looking for how baseball should be restructured should look elsewhere. This book doesn't have all the answers. It could give fantasy baseball managers a few things to mull over. Sabermetricians will find it light on substance (no math and almost no stats in it).

Finally, for fans of Michael Lewis, it's not his best work. I expected more than he fits in here. Good bits, but a bit too much of Michael in the pages, and not enough about the rest of the Athletics players, coaches and executives. It reads like 40-60% of the material Lewis had in mind is missing, however; it introduces the New Baseball Management, and the 2002 A's, but ends just when there should be some sort of payoff.

More time with the team, or more time to put something more together could have made this a great book. Deserves 3.5 stars, and could have been more (sort of like the Athletics postseasons recently)

Tom Wolfe had hippies, Black panthers and astronauts, Michael Lewis had wall street, entrepreneurs and now...baseball. This is a hilarious, almost too wierd to be true dive into modern baseball with a focus on Billy Beane, a new kind of general manager and outrageous character. It's about a lot more than baseball and is for anyone interested in how people think outside the box and revolutionize a sport, or business, or anything. Lewis has improved his stuff since Liars Poker and I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants. Great stuff!

I read a lot; a lot of different books in a lot of different genres. But I put this and Make every girl want you above all others because both make you think about what you've read. Most books I buy just rehash old info, with a little bit of new stuff. These books, however, make you think about everything in there, and make you question everything you've been taught - this book about baseball, that book about dating. Let's start by saying that Billy Beane is the man. It's unbelievable how Beane used statistical analysis to consistently build winning teams out of players with - for example - high on-base percentages. I am now a huge A's fan, and very excited to follow and root for the A's in the pennant chase over these next few weeks. My only question is why Beane wrote this book. Why Beane felt the need to make such an incredible strategy public knowledge, especially since it works so well.

While Mr. Lewis deserves much credit for making 'Moneyball' a page turner, the story itself, which the author professes to have fallen in love with, is irresistable. You may read this book because you like baseball, but the thinking man will savor it for its celebration of innovation, and the triumph of the intellect it depicts. In fact, 'Moneyball' goes even further. It champions the individual, repudiates collectivism, and offers hope to upright men who despair a lack of justice in this world. Folks, Billy Beane (the book's hero) is you modern day, scaled down, none of the frills but all of the appeal, John Galt. Enjoy it.

Michael Lewis was great in getting access to Billy Beane and his staff. He does a great job is weaving a business and baseball story together. I love Billy for his passion and commitment to his method, never wavering in his goal. Ownership of the A's are very lucky to have a Billy Beane navigating the A's in this time of tremendous fiscal turmoil in baseball. Read it for every reason you would read both a baseball and business book.

This was an excellent read. Once again, Lewis delivers an entertaining look at a what would likely be considered a dry subject, even by the standards of many baseball fans. However, in writing this book he has popularized a new way of looking the game, both in how it is measured and played. Can it be long before all teams begin to apply this system of statistical analysis to make their draft, trade and lineup decisions? If an average quality utility infielder can walk one out of every five at bats, hit .260 and earn $10 million a year, does this make ARod and Giambi worth $30 or $40 million a year?

In the end I'm not sure who to be rooting for - the clever general managers and their "savant quants" or the players previously considered too hapless and hopeless even to ride the bench for a big league team, who will soon, undoubtedly, be capable of earning salaries that might make ARod blush. Okay, so maybe that is an exaggeration. But clearly the proliferation of this way of thinking and the mad pursuit of "walkers", "clay pigeons" and club foot pitchers that will surely ensue, will elevate the financial stakes of a crop of players that a few years ago wouldn't have been able to play for Bill Veeck's St. Louis Browns.

So the secret is out. Draft the lame, the blind, even the toe-tagged as long as they can find an endless string of uninteresting ways to get on base. While this efficient approach clearly yields results that can't be disputed, it diminishes certain elements of the game that add excitement and ultimately nostalgia for many fans. The mystique of the underdog emerging triumphant over the Goliaths of the league will only last until the the current Davids, like the A's, become a smarter version of Goliath. Then it will be just as boring and predictable to see these teams win, even if they can do it with a smaller payroll.

The financial fortunes of the game notwithstanding, this book is a great read for anybody who is interested in innovative and unconventional methods of problem solving.

I was surprised at how great this book was. I had put this book near the top of my reading list. Soon after that, I read an excerpt that was from the middle of the book. Little did I know that it was probably one of slowest sections of the book, so I moved it down on my list. When talking with out attorney, he mentioned that the book was really good. The next day I started reading it -- and couldn't put it down. It was really good.

You get to know parts about baseball that are rarely covered. Even a non-baseball reader will come away being very informed and capable of passing it on to friends who might be sports freaks. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed this book. I agree with some of the previous reviewers who noted that various aspects of the narrative style are distracting and not particularly well executed. But the content of the story is compelling and carries the reader through the 300 pages in a breeze. Additionally, I enjoyed thinking about 'market inefficiencies' as they may pertain to other business and consumer aspects of life in America. Aren't there many domains in which the 'experts' have been doing things their way for eons and no one questions them? I can think of several possibilities. And Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta demonstrate for us how dogged questioning (in the face of stern opposition) and scientific inquiry can bring fresh and new perspectives to light. I recommend this book and expect that it will be enjoyed by baseball fans (not just A's fans) as well as those curious about how capitalism works in a relatively closed, old-boy network business environment.

Michael Lewis, by trade a financial journalist, has brought his knowledge and background in financial markets to bear on the subject of baseball. Lewis saw the Oakland A's do as well or better than many teams whose payrolls were far in excess of that of the A's and he realized a parallel to what arbitrageurs and hedge fund managers on Wall St. do: the A's saw inefficiencies in the market in which they participated--the labor of elite athletes (if baseball players can be considered athletes)--and sought to exploit those inefficiencies to their benefit.

A little background is due here. Lewis draws a parallel between the revolution that computing power brought to Wall St.--derivatives, specifically, and the ability to analyze reams of statistical data quickly, generally--and the analysis of baseball statistics. Much like Michael Milken made a killing on trading bonds, or Michael Bloomberg made a killing on developing a computer system through which the Milkens of the world could analyze their data, Lewis insists, quite convincingly, that their are statisitcal analyses much more relevant to and predictive of success on the diamond than the simplistic statistics with which we are all familiar--fewest errors, most home runs, most strikeouts, most steals, etc.

It is on these points that Lewis excels. He brings a clarity of thought to bear on these abstractions that is rare for a journalist. His explanation of the theoretical underpinning of the A's success as of late is excellent and is accessible by a layman (of which I am one).

However, in an effort to evoke the constant tension between those more theoretical practitioners of the game and the more traditionally-minded 'tools' men--those people for whom strikeouts and homeruns and the most predictive measure of success--Lewis allows his narrative to veer from the clarity of his theoretical explanations. All too often I dinf Lewis' depiction of inside banter to be confusing, if not irrelevant. Rather than try to contextualize a lot of banter, Lewis instead throws reference, discussion, terminology, and name atop one another for extended paragraphs--and then brings this discussion back to the tension which originally intrigued him.

What Lewis tries to do, and what I don't find entirely convincing, is evoke through a narrative style the tension between the old and the new. Of course, there is precedent for this: his earlier and more well known book Liar's Poker tried to demonstraste the culture of trading floors in the early and mid-1980s.

I recommend the book with the understanding that its dialogue is burdensome and distracts from the rest of the otherwise excellent introduction to how exploitation of inefficiencies in a market can give a poor organization returns disproportionate to the resources that organization has to devote to the market.

Michael Lewis's story about the Oakland A's contrarian, statistics driven approach to building a baseball team is outstanding. The book provides interesting detail and lessons to be learned in an engaging style that kept me turning the pages until I was finished. The story is about how Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta went about exploiting baseball's player market value inefficiencies to turn one of the lowest payroll teams in the league into a contender. Interesting stuff while a surprisingly light and entertaining read.

I am not a big baseball fan. I bought the book after hearing Mr. Lewis interviewed on the radio where he focused on the observations this book was making about the flaws inherent in subjective "that's how we have always done it" decision making. I thought the book might support my own thoughts on the subject and I was right...focus on process and outcomes usually take care of themselves.

I never really followed the game of baseball very closely, but you can bet that I will follow the second half Oakland's season like a life-long A's nut!

Well written and very informative. If you love baseball and are one of those confused by how players are bought, sold and traded, here is a book for you. Insightful and clever, using today's technology (computers) and an instinct for the nature of the game and what makes some marginal players a better bet than some superstars - its all here. You might not agree, but you will definitely have plenty to think about, and that's what a good book should do.

As a lifelong Oakland Athletics fan, the release of a new nonfiction work focused on the franchise's recent success is exciting. When the book chooses to examine the role played by general manager and resident genius, Billy Beane, Moneyball becomes an instant must-read. Michael Lewis' peak into the inner workings of the Oakland Athletics ventures from biography to economic study to experimental statistical analysis. Overall, Moneyball exposes Billy Beane's philosophy on baseball, and as entertaining and insightful as it may be, it makes this fan cringe as the secrets to the Oakland A's success are revealed to all those who might read this book. Yet, luckily enough, Lewis points out one other thing about professional baseball: new ideas are unwelcome in an institution of tradition, making Beane's unorthodox means safe in a world of conformity, for now.

Early in Moneyball, Lewis reveals the failed career of a young prospect out of San Diego. An athlete so gifted in ability, "Billy flat-out smoked" his competition and earned the title of "the Good Face," a can't-miss prospect that whose talent even showed in his charismatic mug. However, Beane's potential would never be fully realized, leading to a failed big-league career and a life of self-doubt masked in his perfectionism.

As Beane made the transition from player to front-office administrator, the world of statistical analysis forever changed his views on baseball. Lewis spends several chapters exploring the emergence of Bill James, author of a series of books called The Baseball Abstracts. James was intrigued by the statistical nature of baseball, but found flaws in the basic book-keeping of America's pastime. James created his own methods of tracking the events of a typical baseball game, and he concluded that the standard measures of success, batting average, home runs, runs-batted-in, and stolen bases, failed to accurately capture the effectiveness of a specific player. James wrote his books annually, each year expanding the scope of his study, and with each volume, converting more baseball fans to his way of thinking. One of them was Billy Beane.

Lewis touches on several interesting success stories in Beane's unorthodox style. Jeremy Brown, the "fat catcher" drafted in the first round by the A's when no other team even thought of wasting a pick on the kid, who now hits better than most players in the minors. Scott Hatteberg, a damaged and discarded catcher of the Boston Red Sox becomes the first baseman for the A's, somehow replacing the irreplaceable Jason Giambi. Then there is Chad Bradford, the dominant submariner relief pitcher, who found himself plucked from minor league purgatory when the Chicago White Sox failed to see the same talent in person that Beane and Depodesta only saw in a spreadsheet. Each case further supports Beane's notion that the right statistics found on a computer screen can tell much more than gut instincts of a baseball mind.

Yet, there is something unsettling about the new model of baseball that Beane embraces so happily. Beane never watches his team, the perfectionist instead works out during games or drives aimlessly in circles around the Oakland Coliseum parking lot. The manic quest for success is met with unbridled anger when the potential fails to become reality, and every pitch, not game, becomes a potential trigger for a Beane outburst. Along the same lines, Beane seems to believe every player is simply a piece to a never-ending puzzle. Thus, stars such as Giambi, may be replaced by cheaper options such as Hatteberg. In essence, when a player has outgrown the simple confines of Oakland, their replacements are welcomed quickly without missing a beat. It is heartbreaking to realize that Miguel Tejada, MVP shortstop will suffer the same fate as Giambi and not be re-signed after this season. Yet for Beane, its another opportunity to gain two more first round draft picks and grab the unwanted dregs of the amateur talent pool. Another opportunity to prove himself right and everyone else wrong.

Lewis also reveals the nuances involved in one the most basic facets of baseball, trading players. As the trading deadline looms, Oakland's fanatical general manager feeds his urge to upgrade his team. Yet, staying true to form, Beane never sacrifices his own talent pool to pull off these season-altering transactions. The mastermind rolls up his sleeves and begins the psychological warfare worthy of military recognition, simultaneously creating self-doubt and overconfidence in his peers, leading them to make the moves that he wanted while allowing them to believe he is at their mercy. The acquisition of Ricardo Rincon, a quality relief pitcher, is an amusingly vicious experience as Beane manipulates the marketplace to accommodate his needs.

Lewis' exploration into the world of Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics is an interesting ride. As a biography, Lewis never delves deeply enough into Beane's character, only brushing the surface of a self-imposed tragic figure. As a study in the economics of baseball, Lewis barely examines anything beyond the Oakland A's drafting philosophy. And as an analysis of the franchise's success, the book only touches on Billy Beane's role in structuring a team, never getting into the on-field performance of the stars Beane helped groom. Yet, taken as a whole, Moneyball serves to paint a picture of how Beane came to represent such consistent success despite playing a game built for only the richest of owners. Michael Lewis delivers an entertaining read, even if it never gets beyond the surface of the topics he covers. For this at-bat, Moneyball receives a solid double, nothing overwhelming, but a fun ride to hop on nonetheless.

Lewis' account of the Oakland A's during a few years in the late 1990s when Billy Beane was their General Manager is a good look inside the strategy of baseball. How do teams select players, which players will be most effective over their careers, and what player traits lead to victories? These are the questions that Billy Beane has considered and reconsidered since he took over the helm of the low-budget Oakland team and found himself competing against teams like the New York Yankees, who could spend three times as much on player salaries.

Through heresies like reading the number-crunching of Bill James drafting fat ballplayers, and worrying more about On Base Average than fielding skills, Beane both outrages the baseball establishment and builds successful teams that make the playoffs and stay on budget.

This is a good book. You may not agree with Beane's strategy -in fact, that's precisely the point- but the book is well-researched and well-written. Lewis has done his homework. I only wish he'd talked to more people who disagree with Beane's approach. Over and over we read that Beane is an innovative genius with a Midas touch, but we never read any of the arguments against his strategy. A bit more balance would have been nice. But overall, this is good reading for the serious baseball fan.

If you have ever read Bill James or Rob Neyer, this book is definately for you, for everyone else, this book will make you take a second look at the game.
As Michale Lewis takes a look at the Oakland A's organization, we are privy to many different inside the game conversations. The reader quickly learns how it is that the A's have been able to succeed while others say they can't, by looking at the game differently. This different look has grown in recent years and will continue to grow as the Toronto Blue Jays, and the Boston Red Sox now have GM's with a strong SABR based analysis of prospects.
I highly reccomend this book for all baseball lovers.

I grew up in Tucson Arizona during the 60's and 70's watching baseball on TV. We didn't have a local team to support, or criticize daily like most of the country. I learned early on that big league ball was more than home runs, and no-hitters. Billy Beane see's what real baseball players on the field see from a General Manager's point of view. He see's the weakness, the strengths, and their hearts and souls. This book more than anything shows you what goes on in the mind of a man whose job is to win games, and do it with as little money as possible. Not worrying about hurt feelings, not worrying how fans will react, just give them the best chance to win everyday. Baseball has become a business in which we reward mediocrity, with a .300 batting average as the high mark, and pitchers with era's 4.25 getting bonuses. Many are paid more than anyone should before they step on the field. This is the only business that happens in. Until owners and fans agree that no one is a super star until they can consistently play at a top level for 5 years, we will always be waiting for the next one hit wonder. The baseball world needs more Billy Beanes in order to survive the next 25 years; the trick will be getting the owners to believe it. This book salutes the stars that never had a chance because of some stat that didn't matter anyway. It shows us how ruthless the business end of the game can really be. Sometimes "gut" feeling will tell you more than any stat. My gut says this book is for those who really want to see what's coming next.....

As an advid Oakland A's fan I couldn't wait to read this book. The last few years since Billy Beane became General Manager of the A's, I've been wondering how or why he made some of the trades/moves that he did?
This book explains exactly what I and many A's fans have been wondering about the trades and moves Billy has made over the last few seasons.
Michael Lewis explains what makes Billy Beane tick and sometimes explode! He gives us a behind the scenes look at Billy and his low budget A's! Michael Lewis also shows us why baseball is like no other sport where stats are more important in judging players, and how Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta(A's assistant G.M.) use on base percentage stats and other stats to make trades and draft baseball prospects! Michael also gives us a brief background on Bill James and Voros McCracken and their theories.
After reading this book you come to wonder why teams would pay so much money for players that don't produce like the Low budget A's, Now I can't wait to see what Billy's Next move(s) will be!

While this book does seem to put Billy Beane on a much loftier pedastal than his peers in the business, his track record so far as the general manager of one of the most financially constrained teams in baseball cannot be argued. I found it interesting to see what a minor role the manager and the players seem to play in the whole scheme of baseball. The author portrays Beane as a grand (and somewhat imbalanced) puppeteer, pulling all the strings according to his whim. So far he's managed to keep the strings from tangling, but whether this has been attributable more to luck or skill remains to be seen, and ten years from now we'll probably be able to more clearly evaluate his talent as a GM.

In any case, the author does paint a fascinting picture of daily life in the front office for his readers. Wefeel like we're in the same room with Beane and his compatriots, eavesdropping on their unique style of approaching the business. The stress and triumphs of the environment are brought to life, and we definitely feel like we're part of the action.

For all those hours spent cursing at Tony La Russa and his misguided philosophies on hitting, this book is quite the antidote for any Cardinals fan. At last there is a solution!

In all seriousness, it's wrong to criticize Mr. La Russa that much -- he's brought the Cardinals into the playoffs two years in a row and three out of four. But in many ways, he simply is archetypical of a thinking that this book points out to be -- if not wrong -- as substantially incorrect. Michael Lewis, in a taut 288 pages, details Billy Beane's playing career, Sandy Alderson's influence, and the slowly creeping and intelligent theories of Bill James eventually being realized by the Oakland Athletics.

In sum, Lewis deconstructs baseball strategies to a measurable science, to an economic study, really. It's not at all surprising that most of the principals -- James, DePodesta, Cramer -- have backgrounds in economics because that's all they're doing with the national pastime. Yet, this book and this new way, as James astutely points out, is not about statistics. It's about the proper usage of them. Instead of the five tool scheme so adored by scouts, these gentlemen decide to use the tools that their computers develop. And while it is true the A's have no World Series ring to show for it, it's by no fault of the strategy.

It seems rather unfortunate that Lewis chose to focus a large chunk of the book on Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford rather than the Big Three -- Zito, Mulder, and Hudson. Not taking anything away from these role-players -- their stories are woven beautifully into "Moneyball" --they are just not as important to the A's success as the pitchers. It may have been more convenient for Lewis to focus on Hatty and a relief pitcher, but it would have been more satisfying if he would given the pitchers the ink they deserve as well.

That said, this large omission does nothing really to hurt the quality of the study, which is fabulous. A gift to baseball and my Cardinals like no other, if only the men in charge would listen.

As ever, Michael Lewis manages to make obscure financial/sports analysis and management practices accessible and interesting to the lay reader. But his great gift is to make the obsessions and particularities of his subjects compelling. The human process of baseball is at the heart of 'Moneyball,' and baseball and the Oakland A's are the perfect vehicle for Lewis's talents. Beane comes across as a kind of Ahab figure, forever driven to find the next undervalued prospect while nearly unable to watch his current team play. There is a lot of ego to him, which is odd coming from someone with so many regrets about his own life decisions. But that is exactly what makes him so worthwhile to be the subject of 'Moneyball.' Lewis is so talented a writer you come to believe he could make anyone's life a bestseller.

The considerable problem with 'Moneyball' is how it neglects the extent to which the A's Big 3 starters have made the team successful. I recall that a method was devised by which a pitcher's effectiveness could be evaluated by the kinds of balls the opposing hitters put in play. Stunningly, none of this analysis is applied to Mulder, Zito or Hudson. Perhaps they are all so dominant (Mulder's season is fast approaching that of Pedro's 1999 campaign) that the author didn't consider it necessary to mention. However, it would have really added a lot to the reader's understanding of what effective pitching really means. It just struck me as odd that this opportunity was passed over - it would have added a great deal to the book. Nevertheless, 'Moneyball' must be the best of the current batch of new baseball titles.

The story is about how the Oakland A's became one of the best teams in baseball year after year despite spending much less than half as much as their competitors. However, the real story is the triumph of objective reality based on statistics and past performance over player appearance and traditions. This book has universal application in all fields. Lewis does a great job telling this amazing story.

Michael Lewis has done us a great service: he has unleashed upon an unsuspecting public the story of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. It's a story that legitimizes performance analysis, debunks the myth that baseball is to be seen but not studied, and of course, entertains, by way of some rather unlikely characters (Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford). For those of us that have been waiting for the Oakland-led assault on baseball tradition to become a full-fledged revolution, this book is an important step: every baseball fan who reads it and comes away discouraged by their own team's relative lack of sophistication, and we're another small step closer to that revolution.

This book demonstrates that baseball is a game of strategy, off the field as well as on. It is a game where the little guy can still win out - if he has the smarts and can gain the competitive edge. The book restores one's faith in the basic integrity of the game, and it must strike fear into the hearts of the George Steinbrenners of the world. As Michael Lewis so satisfyingly illustrates, baseball really is America's game, the game where the underdog can come out on top. This book, and Bill Lee's revisionist baseball history, The Little Red (Sox) Book have restored my faith in the sanctity of baseball.

A brilliant book. It talks about sport in it's widest application - which to my mind is the only reason we truly love sport. Billy Beane clearly is a maniac, but he just makes the other GM's of Baseball teams appear certifiably insane. How do you justify, as a business person, giving a rookie, who's created no financial return on his effort thus far, millions of dollars? It's a Capitalist oxymoron! It's no wonder Joe(the poison dwarf)Morgan yells foul. He, along with the Women's Auxiliary Club members, want to continue to be overpaid for their old ideas and insist on regurgitated them into the present. 'The Good old times are over, Joe!' Get a real job!

The real hero of this story is Bill James who has the true American spirit to challenge the sacred cows of Baseball. I'm not a follower of Baseball, but this book and the work of Bill James, Paul DePodesta, Voros McCracken, Dick Cramer and others, reinforces the American spirit of innovation that we dearly need in this time of our history. A great thanks to Michael Lewis who had the talent, courage and persistence to see this project through. He's done a great service to the American people by offering a way we can take back our national sport from the hypocrites and bottom feeders. I can't wait until the movie comes out and these worms of incompetence are exposed for the lice that they really are.

I was never a fan of baseball for many reasons. One reason that hit me hard at a young age was the lack of a salary cap. This made me feel like winning could be bought with millions of dollars. Thankfully the teams with the most money also had the most archaic way of interpreting how to build an efficient baseball team. The teams that took a scientific approach to building a winning team while also abandoning the traditional scouting techniques began winning. Voilà, moneyball is created. The best part of this book is not how the teams with less money reinvented the game, it's how the insiders of baseball openly deny fact, science, and the possibility that they could be wrong without even blinking. These people are so afraid of losing their jobs to number-crunching nerds they won't even try to understand this alternative approach because they are getting paid for being ignorant. Therefore If they allowed the approach to become accepted they would be quickly cycled out for people who could pick teams from stats instead of sheer "gut feelings". True underdog story of intellect being able to compete with dumb money. Like usual, Lewis writes this book like a well told story while also documenting endless amounts of facts to strengthen his arguments.

It just goes to show that statistics can help you do anything well and will give you a competitive advantage. A must read for anyone in the finance industry or students interested in the finance industry.

This book argues that the Oakland A's, by hewing to a few simple principles based on statistics, were able to do very well in the early 2000s despite having less money to play with than other teams. Like most reporting, it suffers from a lack of long-term perspective. That is, even though it seems to explain why the A's did well at the time the book was written, it fails to explain why the A's declined in more recent years. I'm sure that if Lewis were writing about the A's today, he would have written a more complex and accurate book (though I have no idea whether his conclusions would have differed).

Indicative of his best-selling ability, Michael Lewis is a wonderful storyteller. Even non-sports fans or non-baseball fans could enjoy the fascinating story about how a MLB underdog finds a way to win. In this case it's the Oakland A's competing, and often beating, the deep-pocketed MLB teams like the NY Yankees. Billy Beane is a strange character who runs the A's team (as General Manager) more like a science experiment than a traditional baseball franchise and the players are his unsuspecting lab rats. Interestingly, the dynamic personality of Billy Beane is set to be played by Brad Pitt in the off-again, on-again movie production of Moneyball.

Money Ball is an excellent evaluation of the use of statistics in persuing baseball players; as well as personalities, writers, critics, etc. of the "game". Being rather a novice in sports, I just enjoyed watching and cheering for teams/players, this book gave me a lot to think about and made watching that much better. This book will give you a more intense look at not only the GAME but also what might constitute prospective players, at all levels.

I have stated here in the past that I am not a big fan of non-fiction. I had received this novel as a gift and felt obligated to give it a try. Once I got into it nobody had to twist my arm to finish it. Moneyball was my first exposure to Michael Lewis but it will not be my last. He brought life to a very dull subject. Baseball stats are boring at best, unless you have a deep interest in them. Maybe it is your favorite player, favorite team, etc., but he created an entire novel on a system nobody really paid attention to. That is part of the reason I was so taken by the whole novel.
Here is part of the blurb from the back cover of the novel:" 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."
I was amazed at how quickly I read this. It was so interesting ,it was hard to put down. I love baseball and always wondered how they drafted players. What was the process, what was going through the scout's minds, what was the war room like on draft day, what factors were there in defining player contracts. All this and more was gone over at length. It is amazing to read how a team like the A's can compete with the deep pocket teams year after year. Just the background on Billy Beane, the general manager of the A's, and what made him think the way he does is interesting in and of itself.
Moneyball for me is just an amazing read. The way Lewis writes and brings to life a subject that could be as boring as an economics textbook is amazing. I would say this would be an excellent gift for Fathers Day even if Dad isn't interested in sports too much, it is that strong a read. Michael Lewis takes the reader deep into the heart of baseball's backrooms and truly enlightens and helps us understand the mindset of the modern baseball executives. There is plenty of humor, great player stories, and plenty of math. I was glad I gave it a try. Believe it or not, this is going too be made into a movie. Then again another of his novels struck it big with The Blind Side.
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[...]

I read a lot, on many subjects. I enjoyed The Big Short (which is good, but not as great as Fool's Gold at explaining its subject), so I thought I'd try Moneyball. This is an excellent book. It explained a complex subject at a level that was perfect for me as a person who just enjoys watching baseball. The book is very engaging and well-written. I'll still enjoy baseball as much as I always have, but I'll look at it a little differently now. I'll appreciate the hitter (if he's on my team) who can wear down a pitcher, and a pitcher (if he's on my team) who can get a hitter to hit ground balls. Even though this book totally dismisses the manager's value in strategy and motivation during the game, I'll still appreciate those qualities.

The book is great for what it is. The information is good. However, it could have used a proofreader. There are several instances of problems with subject/verb agreement. And, for a book that is included as a business book it has some pretty raw language.

However, it is written in a way that tells a great story. It pulls the reader in and keeps them there. The information provided by the book as far as game theory is concerned is missing. It provides a little information but not much.

This week I felt like an inverted Cassandra running around wanting to talk about a book that seemingly every sports fan read years ago. Outside of the Hang Up and Listen podcast I don't ruminate on sportz, and refuse to watch any game when multiple friends aren't present, but I was jonesing for more Michael Lewis and his detailing of Billy Beane, the Oakland A's general manager, and the On Base Percentage revolution had me obsessing over MLB like I hadn't done since the sophomore summer when I had four fantasy teams, or the three months in 1994 when all I thought about were Collector's Choice Silver Signature inserts. It's amazing and will change your life. If there is anybody who can make Moneyball into an awesome movie it's Steven Soderbergh. Yeah I know that first sentence doesn't work at all, "friend that just now saw The Hangover" would have been more legitimate. AUDIOBOOKED

A fascinating, paradigm shifting book for die-hard baseball fans. You cannot argue with the facts this book explains--nor can you argue with the long-term success the Oakland A's have had by defying "conventional wisdom." More importantly, as a fan of a "small market" unsuccessful team, I'm amazed more Major League teams aren't following the model explained by Mr. Lewis in this book. I'm certain the general manager of the Kansas City Royals couldn't do worse if he'd take a look at this book. If you're a serious fan of baseball, you MUST read this book. You may not agree with Lewis' conclusions, but you'll definitely re-think how you evaluate what you're watching on the TV.

It's hard to believe a book about baseball statistics could be so good. Michael Lewis' excellent humor and journalism really goes a long way. Very informative about baseball operations as well. This would probably be appealing to non-baseball enthusiasts even due to the study of the people and the many laughs throughout the book.

I'm what you would consider a business focused person who loves sports. If this describes you, then you will really like this book.

This is a book I just couldn't put down, usually reserved for a good piece of fiction. But Michael Lewis' in-depth account of the paradigm shift coming to baseball in America is a fascinating story of a few individuals challenging conventional wisdom and, in an unorthodox way, building a winning team from castoffs and unlikely heroes. The cast of real-life characters is central to the story itself, from Bill James to Billy Beane. The results are also very real; the Oakland A's prove a low budget operation can consistently produce winning teams. I've since started tracking the A's just to watch the genius revealed.

As a self-professed math geek and a baseball fan, this book is amazing. It will really open your eyes to the way baseball could be run and in some cases is. Lewis is an amazing writer who makes you laugh out loud (which totally startles the sleeping cat!) and keeps you going until the last page. It will make you rethink baseball every time you watch whether you are in a stadium or your living room. It might even make you an Oakland A's fan.

The book is great; it follows the Davids in the MLB. They are continually competing against the Yankees who are trying to buy their best players. Yet year after year they continue to make the playoffs and have a similar amount of wins. It shows how people can take an idea that is highly critized and make it work for them.

"We take fifty guys (in the draft) and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market, you'd go broke." Billy Beane.

Billy Beane was a supremely talented major league prospect who somehow never made it to the big leauges. However, his contribution to baseball is far reaching. The volatile and enigmatic Beane, as GM of the Oakland Athletics, brings analytics and economics into the mainstream operations of running a ball club. This new management approach represented a sea change in baseball philosophy and is the basis of Michael Lewis' dynamic page-turner, Moneyball.

Lewis has a financial analyst background (his latest book, The Big Short, about the free fall of the US economy, was just released) and is able to describe Beane's thought process in economic terms. Specifically, that some player statistics (for example, On Base Percentage) were undervalued relative to other statistics (for instance, Slugging Percentage) and that created market inefficiencies, read buying opportunities, for small-market teams like the Oakland Athletics. The market inefficiencies allowed Oakland to compete across a number of years with the likes of large-market teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox.

The book documents the " religious war" between traditional scouting, which has been goverened mainly by a scout's gut instinct, and a new methodology, based on rigorous statistical analysis. Some of Beane's operational principles cut against the grain of conventional wisdom.

--On Base Percentage is more important than Slugging Percentage in determining a player's worth,
--Drafting college prospects has a demonstrably higher chance of success than drafting high school prospects.
--Sacrifice bunting and stealing bases are, statistically-speaking, poor moves.

After his fledgling playing career came to an end, Beane got his start with Oakland from then current GM Sandy Alderson - an Ivy---League educated, military trained disciple of little known baseball statistical guru Bill James. Alderson told Billy to go out and find undervalued players. However, Alderson's charge needed some intellectual firepower. For that, Beane hired Ivy-league educated Paul DePodesta as his statistical right-hand-man.

The analytical, objective lineage was passed from Bill James (and his ilk) to Alderson to Beane to DePodesta carried on to other teams with the hiring of J.P. Ricciardi by Toronto and Theo Epstein by Boston. The Moneyball philosophy is now embraced by almost all MLB teams.

Moneyball however is more than just a statistics lesson. It is a fascinating personality study of Billy Beane and an inside look at the entire front office operations of the Oakland A's. The book makes readers feel as if they are inside the draft room when decisions are being made. Readers will no longer think about the annual baseball draft or, for that matter, watch a baseball game in quite the same way.

[...] Rating Home Run (a fantastic read, whether you are a baseball fan, a historian, a Sabremetrician, or a MBA student)

The book is an easy and very interesting read. Michael Lewis is a great writer. Although he is writing about a topic I have little interest in (baseball) I was still drawn into the characters of the story and the business lessons the story offered.

MONEYBALL is a great book. Michael Lewis is a writer who knows how to keep the reader moving through the book. There is a lot of detail in this text and it is written with excitement that keeps you flipping the pages. There is a constant sense of, "What is going to happen next?" or "Why did they do that?" and Lewis is able to present already interesting information in an even more interesting format that keeps your eyes glued to the page: "All he saw was that one major league baseball team treated him like a used carpet in a Moroccan garage sale..." When you have language such as this, coupled with information as to how an under-bankrolled baseball team produces winning records, you have one awesome book.

Statistical information proves that numbers are better at determining what is successful than what the eye can see. Purchase this book if you want to learn a few things and, simultaneously, be entertained in the process.

I hate watching baseball. I was so glad when my kids stopped playing. So I was surprised to find this book so riveting. It is a masterpiece of non-fiction writing. Billy Beane would be a great character to play, although the role needs someone like a young George Clooney, rather than Brad Pitt. The fact that Billy Beane claimed to be the best athlete in the A's workout room says it all.

Great book. It's a baseball classic. If you love the game then why wouldn't you love this one. It's a great story. Michael Lewis is a great storyteller. He was there. He knows. I trust him.

Great book for the truly inspired baseball person. If you anything about Billy Beane and the Oakland A's this is the book for you. You really have to want to know what happens behind the scenes and off the field.

Realize I'm about 5 years late with this book but wow, what a great read.

A must read for any sports fan and those interested in the business of baseball.

Highly recommended.

"Moneyball" captures the world of baseball from the inside -- deep inside. But it catches the sport at a critical moment, the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the old rules for picking players were about to give way to the new. In the old days, baseball scouts would watch countless young ballplayers, in high school and in college, trying to get a feel for how well they could perform years later in the big leagues. The scouts tended to rely on pitchers with scorching fast balls, fielders with fast times on the base path, and both with Adonis-like good looks. Rich teams could afford to lure these sports gods onto their overpaid rosters, giving the poorer teams few options but to scrape the bottom of the barrel and pray.

Billy Bean, manager of the Oakland As, was one of those Adonis players that the scouts thought was a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. But his temperament got the best of him, and he could never get used to being less than perfect. Washing out of the big leagues, he became a manager, but a manager with a visceral distrust of the system that had all but ruined him. Bean turned to a newly-formed gaggle of baseball statisticians like Bill James, who began to try to quantify what it was about winning teams that made them win. Interestingly, the number crunchers realized that many talented and useful players were being ignored by the rich teams for not fitting some pre-defined profile. Kevin Youklis, later known as the God of Walks, was a fat third baseman who didn't need to hit to get on base. Walks (!) for crying out loud, when everyone knew that hitting meant winning.

In "Moneyball" Michael Lewis takes us on an insider's look at the way ballplayers are selected, and on the hidden game of poaching good players from other unsuspecting managers. It's a great book that describes the group of sabermetricians (baseball statisticians) who questioned the game's stats and gave a shot to countless great players who would never been picked on looks alone. The chapter trashing batting average and RBI are worthwhile in themselves. Thank these backroom boys and girls for inserting on-base percentage and slugging percentage and other now-common metrics into the day-to-day chatter about America's pastime.

One sad part of then book is that it does not end with the glory of the As winning a World Series, somewhat undercutting the notion that money doesn't matter. Also sad is that now even rich teams have caught onto Billy Bean's little secret. And now that the cat is out of the rosin bag, the old money game goes on. At least, that is, until another Billy Bean can exploit, even for a few years, a loophole in the standard expectations of the big boys.

Great book, even if you are not a big baseball fan.

All the recent reviews state that they are not baseball fans.
The book is well written and has a great mini-story on Bill James.
One problem: The philosophy of Billy Beane hasn't come to fruition.
In fact, in retrospect, it was excellent pitching that made the Oakland As contenders year after year.
During Billy Beane's years as GM, correct me if I'm wrong, but they've won 1 playoff series.

This book is a must-read for baseball fans and non-baseball fans alike. Riveting stuff. An inside look at the sports world that will change the way you look at baseball and sports generally.

A well written book that shows how statistic is revolutionizing the age old game of baseball. I enjoyed reading it, as it suggests other broader changes happening as more and more data becomes easily available.

For baseball fans in particular, they will enjoy reading about this fascinating change in the way the game is strategically played. Less of a baseball fan than a geek about how statistics can be deceiving, I greatly enjoyed this book as well.

What was also very interesting was the manner in which statistics, very hard to argue, was not well received. The struggle for change was against the grain. The same is true of so many things that statistics is changing.

I would mention that if you are neither into statistics or baseball, you may not greatly enjoy this book.

I won a car because I read Moneyball. I'd been playing fantasy baseball for many years with mixed success. While I was already very familiar with the ideas of Bill James and other Sabermetric researchers, somehow it never occurred to me that their discoveries were the blueprint for success for fantasy baseball, just as much as for 'real' baseball. That changed after I read Moneyball. While it didn't contain any major new insights, reading it provided the inspiration I needed. As I read the book, I had one of those 'light bulb' moments...suddenly realizing that I already knew everything I needed to win at fantasy baseball. I happened to be entered in a national fantasy baseball competition with over 40,000 people that had a grand prize of a car. Using my newfound inspiration, I applies the following lessons that Moneyball had driven home for me:
1. Use every edge you can. Work harder and smarter. Consider more factors than other people when rating players, and make more accurate adjustments for each factor.
2. Rather than rely in intuition, rely on calculation. Don't think that a given player is more likely to do well on a given day, KNOW it because you've 'done the math'.
That may not seem like any great insight, but for me it was what I needed to make a breakthrough. I came in first in the contest, and won the grand prize. While the contest unfortunately no longer offers such large prizes, I've continued to use the same lessons to win substantial amounts of money at daily fantasy contests, such as Draftbug ([...]).

For anyone seeking to improve at fantasy sports and/or sports betting, I would suggest becoming intimately familiar with each of the following concepts:

1. Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) and other predictors of future ERA such as FIP, xFIP, and LIPS. All are better than looking at ERA itself.

2. Park Factors - don't assume that the ones provided on mainstream sites like ESPN are accurate. Learn what goes into creating them, and why some are better than others.

3. Platoon Advantages and Match-up History - Learn what research has been done in these areas. Make sure you know to what degree you can use past history as a guide, and how much the data needs to be 'regressed to the mean' to be an effective predictor of the future.

Never been a baseball fan, but picked up "Moneyball" based on the prior and very enjoyable experience of reading Michael Lewis's work - happy to say that the book did not disappoint! The author sets out to answer a simple question: how did the Oakland A's, one of the poorest teams in the league, manage to win so many games against much better funded opponents? Of course, money is not everything, but great talent costs money, so how did they do it?

Turns out, the baseball talent market was inefficient (in a technical sense), meaning that by virtue of history and established practices, often times the scouts would pay for attributes that had little to do with the success of the team. Michael Lewis provides a number of interesting insights into the birth of "sabremetrics" (statistical analysis of baseball), and how it has changed the game within a short span of the past few years.

A fantastic read and an illustrative case study, regardless if you are a baseball fan or not.

I read the whole thing at once!!!!! I could not stop. It is a great real story and great insight into what baseball is all about.

This is a fantastic look of baseball that takes the reader beyond the inside of the managers office, but inside the managers head. It won't give you any secret tips that will put you over the edge, but it'll teach you how to think about the game in a smarter, more concrete way.

Lewis doesn't forget that he's writing a book meant to be enjoyed - either. It is fun to read, giving real stories to players and letting them grow into characters. The individual stories in it are told in their voice, with the author simply pulling the tale along rather than jamming his thoughts into a book.

I breezed through this. It artfully explains the "new" approach used by the Oakland A's to build a playoff caliber team. Serves as a critique on the backwards way most baseball teams are run. Which can be seen as a metaphor for the many corporations who are failing because of their archaic methods.
This is well written, and the author is very good at getting inside the heads of the major characters.

The previous Michael Lewis books I have read were all very well written, Moneyball is too. This is a well told story about an interesting topic. The fact that the actual topic of the story is arcane and normally quite dull makes the fact that the book was entertaining and engaging even more of an accomplishment.

Moneyball is about how the Oakland A's were able to compete as one of the top teams in baseball even though they had a much smaller budget for player salaries then their competitors. Since the best players are the most expensive, that should not have been possible.

The A's were able to do it by having better information then the other teams. They did a better job of evaluating prospective players then other teams. So they were able to find players who would be good, but that were not wanted by other teams.

They were able to find those undervalued players by better use so statistics. Moneyball tells the story of how those statistics were noticed and how they were used. Lewis also tells the story is how the new ideas and information was put into use in the Oakland A's organization, which was not initially receptive to those ideas.

So the story is about data and how it can be used, but it is also about how organizations change. The author tells the story from the perspective of the people involved which makes it an interesting and engaging book.

This book was a good read. I am a sports management major, and I found it very helpful and insightful on how the business work. Billy Beane did wonders for the Oakland Athletics, however is that system actually enough to win a World Series.

Fantastic book on the economics of baseball. Michael Lewis uncovers how a few small market teams with the emphasis on the Oakland A's stay competitive with there larger market counterparts.

Once you start to read this book. You wont want to put it down until the
end. It's a fast and enjoyable read from a first class writer.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Phil
Reading Room Bookshop

I am not much of a reader, but this was truly entertaining. I became a Michael Lewis fan after reading Moneyball.

I must confess - I'm not a huge fan of baseball. Indeed I purchased this book for my father. However, once I began skimming the book - I became hooked. I read it cover to cover in only a couple days. This book showed 21st century statistical methodology as it is brought kicking and screaming into the game of baseball. I find it amazing to believe that any major league operation would not have changed its system of evaluating talent after this book became published, and yet given the entrenchment of old fashion beliefs, its probably still the case. Even if you are not a fan of the game - but have an appreciation for excellence in operational management - this book is an excellent read.

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!

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.

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.

CDs were in great shape. I got them within a few days of ordering.

More than baseball, Moneyball is about questioning assumptions - challenging everything you know to be true about your situation and asking yourself if maybe it "ain't necessarily so." How did Billy Beane and the Oakland A's achieve so many wins with such a limited budget?

1. They questioned assumptions (about the valuation of players).
2. They determined that various time-honored metrics metrics (for determining a player's value or worth) did not hold up under scrutiny.
3. Because no one ELSE did 1 and 2, they were able to invest their limited resources on players who were clearly undervalued.

What happens when you question assumptions? You often arrive at winning solutions! Discussed in detail (along with other great examples) in:Shake That Brain: How to Create Winning Solutions and Have Fun While You're At It

I found this book fascinating. I had read Michael Lewis' earlier book "Liar's Poker", about his dealings on Wall Street. What struck me most was how he brought his free-market capitalism frame of reference to the world of Major League Baseball and found that for a small group avant-garde managers, the same basic rules apply. Buy low, sell high, don't listen to market hype, and never get emotional. This book might be disturbing to people who have a lifetime love of the pure game, but Major League Baseball is also a business and has to be acknowledged as such.

I love sports. I love business, finance, and statistics. I've never been a baseball fan. This book was very well written to appeal to a very broad audience with a wide variety of backgrounds on the topic. The principle observations are delivered through expert story telling around very compelling central figures.

Without flowery language or paragraph after paragraph of adjectives - Lewis recounts experiences and conversations with such clarity that you can almost see, smell, and hear the scenes unfolding.

I won't look at baseball or the exploitation of market inefficiencies the same after having read this book. I'd recommend this book to anyone with intellectual curiosity.

So I'm a big fan of fantasy baseball. And for those that are as well, you know that playing the fantasy game changes the way you look at everything. Moneyball has the same effect. It just revolutionizes your outlook on the game of baseball. The "important" stats like RBIs and runs are replaced with really important ones, like OBP and pitches per at bat. No name guys like Scott Hatteberg become cogs that make teams great.

Michael Lewis crafts a book that is engaging on several levels -- to the baseball fan, the economist, and the statistician.

Ever wonder why we give more credit statistically to a guy that bloops a single just out of a poor fielder's reach vs. the guy that smashes a homerun, but is robbed by an amazing leaping catch? This book answers those sorts of questions. And it does so through the amazingly in depth looks at the mind of Billy Beane, the genius that built the A's, renowned for their ability to find talent that other teams miss.

I would highly recommend this book to any fan of baseball on any level. It's a truly great book, and one that will leave you feeling a bit like you stumbled upon a little known secret. You'll suddenly rush and start analyzing the latest pickups of your favorite team. You'll feel compelled to run out and follow the career of guys you'd never heard of before reading the book (and hint...they don't get on SportsCenter that often...). No regrets after reading this, and I promise it will be staying on my shelf for a long time.

Baseball is a game that nerds can really enjoy, largely because of the availability of abundant and meaningful statistics. Back in the 1970s the basic numbers could be obtained through books that were published every year, but a small group of super-geeks began looking more deeply into the mathematics of the game and developing their own metrics for rating players. These guys were mostly self-taught statisticians and motivated entirely by an obsessive passion for the game. I'm talking about people like Bill James, who a few decades ago was a security guard who began publishing really interesting and well-written analyses of baseball statistics in his famous Bill James Baseball Abstracts.

Of course baseball is also fun to watch, even for those who don't enjoy crunching numbers in their spare time. That's why it's a multibillion dollar business, and that's where the influence of the Jamesians gets really interesting. The thing is that for the sport's first 100 or so years the process of locating and recruiting talented players was based entirely on the gut instinct of the scouts employed by each team. These guys were mostly ex-players who made decisions based on notions that had nothing to do with (and often conflicted completely with) the available evidence. (The fact that the world is run almost entirely by people who think this way makes this book all the more insightful.)

Moneyball highlights the success of General Manager Billy Beane, who was able to run a very successful team for many years on a low budget by adapting the statistical approach. Interestingly, Beane was a player who was highly touted by the old-school scouts who employed the conventional criteria (which apparently amounted to something like imagining how the player would look on a baseball card). Beane's struggled throughout the 1990s to bring baseball into the 20th century, and he has had a substantial impact on the game, although any fan who watches the sport in 2008 will tell you that old habits die hard.

My 15 yr. old son is currently reading it. He can't put it down and he is not an avid reader. He is a baseball nut who not only follows the sport but plays it in high school and hopefully college in a few years. Everyone who catches a glimpse of him reading Moneyball raves about the book themselves. It's an A+ in this mom's book.

The first time I read this book I couldn't put it down from start to finish -- it was the book on the business of baseball that I had been waiting for but it was written in a narrative that draws you in, first to Billy Beane, then to the Oakland A's, then to the plight of baseball today.

In the years since I read this, many have cited Moneyball while building their franchises but have come to realize Beane is some sort of baseball divining rod.

Brilliant book if you are at all interested in a unique way of looking at baseball -- and management -- you won't see either the same way ever again.

For many years, I walked by this book on the shelf of my local library and gave it no notice, as the "Moneyball" title gave me the false impression that it was all about economics. I should have heeded the book-readers creed: Never judge a book by its cover. From the very first chapter, I was hooked by the unique philosophy of the text and fascinated by its divergence from traditional baseball maxims. Essentially, Michael Lewis (essentially a conduit for Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane) discusse