Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 31,221 ratings · 2,564 reviews

Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed...more Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.

Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe

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Paperback, 320 pages

Published March 17th 2004 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 2003)

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Apr 24, 2012 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, sports, non-fiction, bidness

Having the misfortune of being a Kansas City Royals fan, I thought I’d had any interest in baseball beaten out of me by season after season of humiliation. Plus, the endless debate about the unfairness of large market vs. small market baseball had made my eyes glaze over years ago so I didn’t pay much attention to the Moneyball story until the movie came out last year and caught my interest enough to finally check this out.

Despite being a small market team and outspent by tens of millions of dol...more Having the misfortune of being a Kansas City Royals fan, I thought I’d had any interest in baseball beaten out of me by season after season of humiliation. Plus, the endless debate about the unfairness of large market vs. small market baseball had made my eyes glaze over years ago so I didn’t pay much attention to the Moneyball story until the movie came out last year and caught my interest enough to finally check this out.

Despite being a small market team and outspent by tens of millions of dollars by clubs like the Yankees, the Oakland A’s managed to be extremely competitive from 1999 through 2006. They did this when their general manager Billy Beane embraced a new type of baseball statistics called sabermetrics that had been championed by a stat head from Kansas named Bill James.

James had pored over box scores and started seriously questioning the traditional ways of measuring the performance of players with his initially self-published digests that eventually became must reads for hardcore baseball nerdlingers. As the digital age made mountains of baseball stats available on-line, fans with a mathematical frame of mind (And there are a lot of them.) started coming up with ways of looking at the data that called the old ways of evaluating players into question.

Beane had plenty of reason to distrust the old way of scouting since he had once been identified as a can’t-miss prospect who ended up quitting as a player to take a job in the front office after his career flamed out. By coming up with new ways to grade performance and ignoring things that other teams deemed flaws like being overweight or having a peculiar throwing motion, the A’s went after low dollar high-impact players who made them one of the winningest teams with the lowest payroll in baseball.

The sport has always had a weird intersection of nerd and jock, and this story illustrates that dynamic very well as Beane and his staff decided to trust the numbers rather than conventional wisdom. The conflict between the two worlds is a fascinating story, and the brash Beane makes a great focal point.

It’s a great book not just for sports fans, but for anyone who likes stories about people trying to shake up an established way of doing things. And if you’re a math geek or have a thing for hard nosed business deals, there’s a lot to like here. By framing the story in terms of the people involved, Lewis keeps it relatable in human terms and not just a dry recitation of on base percentages.

The movie is also extremely well done and entertaining (Hence the Oscar nomination for Best Picture.),but the Aaron Sorkin screenplay vastly simplifies the story and Hollywoodizes it to an extreme degree. Still, it’s a great flick for anyone who has a soft spot for stories about underdogs. (less)

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Jun 18, 2012 Jason rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: for-kindle, 2012, reviewed

This is a good book, but not as good as I thought it was going to be. Sometimes I find technical writing to be a bit repetitive and this definitely leans more toward technical non-fiction than biography (I was hoping for more of a human interest story here)—because even though Billy Beane takes up a large chunk of the story, it isn’t really a story about Billy Bean per se.

Moneyball was published in 2003, only a year after John Henry bought the Boston Red Sox. Before that time, very few people in...more This is a good book, but not as good as I thought it was going to be. Sometimes I find technical writing to be a bit repetitive and this definitely leans more toward technical non-fiction than biography (I was hoping for more of a human interest story here)—because even though Billy Beane takes up a large chunk of the story, it isn’t really a story about Billy Bean per se.

Moneyball was published in 2003, only a year after John Henry bought the Boston Red Sox. Before that time, very few people in baseball had ever heard the term sabermetrics, never mind tried to implement it into a strategy for drafting and trading players—very few people, that is, besides Billy Beane. What’s fascinating about Beane is how much he had to struggle against the tide in order to apply the statistical approach of sabermetrics to his managing of the Oakland Athletics. Of course, given the payroll of the A’s in the early 2000s one might argue that he had no choice. But still, he was the first general manager in baseball to attempt it, so his story is unique.

But why the struggle? Any baseball fan could tell you how important it is to get on base, that patience at the plate is in fact doubly rewarding as it wears down opposing pitching and draws walks. And walks are huge! They extend an inning by avoiding an out, and they put a man on base which statistically leads to a greater probability of runs scored. The reverse is also true: base stealing attempts and sacrifice bunts are no-no’s in the world of sabermetrics precisely because they have the effect of potentially shortening an inning, leading to a lower probability of runs scored. It is simply not worth the calculated risk to try to advance a base runner. So why were these concepts so difficult for baseball operations managers (besides Beane) to understand? This is essentially what the author investigates here, and the easy answer lies somewhere in the fact that baseball managers are curmudgeons who are used to doing things a certain way and don’t want any smart alec college boy with his pocket protector changin’ the way things ‘er done.

Also, Joe Morgan is a buffoon.

I think this is basically old news, but I was still pleased to have my suspicions confirmed. So the story here is definitely interesting, but like I said, the argument in favor of a more objective approach to baseball decision-making is something that I already subscribe to (Yeah, Science!), so the argument itself does become rather repetitive.

Being a baseball fan, though, there are a few things I did enjoy, specifically Billy Beane trying to steal Kevin Youkilis out from under the noses of the Red Sox brass. At first, even though I obviously knew how things would turn out, I was almost rooting for Beane (who, by the way, was John Henry’s initial choice for managing his new organization), but I quickly checked myself and did a Jersey Shore–style fist pump when Theo Epstein refuses to let himself be outsmarted by that West Coast punk!

And now that I’ve read this book, I think I’ll see the movie.(less)

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Aug 20, 2012 Riku Sayuj rated it 3 of 5 stars

It was a better story before I knew the whole story.

Almost every book on randomness I have read had a reference to Moneyball and I had built up my own version about this story (I had even told a few people that version!) and it imagined everybody doing what Billy Beane was doing, and Billy Beane doing some sort of probability distribution among all players and randomly picking his team, winning emphatically, and thus proving that a truly random pick of players is the equivalent of a true-simula...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Boy did I read Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game at the right time: January.

(The off-season.)

Over the last two years, I've made a real effort to learn about sports. Hockey? Not a problem. The NBA? A gossipy league, but I think it's more popular because of it. The NFL? Short but sweet. No matter how hard I try -- I'll score the game, I'll eat the peanuts, but I draw the line at chew -- I just cannot develop an interest in baseball. I recently talked to a former ESPN writ...more Boy did I read Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game at the right time: January.

(The off-season.)

Over the last two years, I've made a real effort to learn about sports. Hockey? Not a problem. The NBA? A gossipy league, but I think it's more popular because of it. The NFL? Short but sweet. No matter how hard I try -- I'll score the game, I'll eat the peanuts, but I draw the line at chew -- I just cannot develop an interest in baseball. I recently talked to a former ESPN writer, and he told me that football's popularity is often attributed to its TV friendly format. I can see what he means. When I watch a football game, there's a lot of action, the replays are good, and there are only a few games so it's hard to become bored with the season. Baseball strikes me as a radio friendly game, particularly the many sounds we think of when we think of baseball. Unfortunately, radio went out of style decades ago. So even after watching an entire season of baseball games, the first association that comes to mind when I think of baseball is this line from The Simpsons: "And now there's a beach ball on the field. And the ball boys are discussing which one of them is going to go get."

In Moneyball, Michael Lewis mostly ignores the game of baseball. Instead, he looks into why the Oakland Athletics, a team with the second smallest payroll in the league, was for a brief while able to compete with the New York Yankees. It turns out that Billy Beane, the A's general manager, decided to found his strategy on decisions that tend to lead to wins. Runs lead to wins; outs do not. For example, stealing second and sacrifice bunts tend to lead to outs. So don't do those things. Relying on Bill James' analysis, Beane ignores defense and invests in hitters that get on base because a high on-base percentage tends to correlate with a lot of wins. Because Beane has an idea of how to measure players that can lead to wins, he can find players that are undervalued.

The best parts of Moneyball may be when Lewis explains the archaic thinking that is guiding the Major Leagues' managers. For example, a relief pitcher's value increases as he accumulates saves. But how often does the relief pitcher "save" the game? Rarely. Consequently, Beane realizes that he can buy cheap pitchers, plays them until they accumulate a lot of saves, and then sell them at a profit. It's not that the other teams don't have access to the same statistics as Beane. It's just that they don't seem to care. Lewis explains that there are outsiders and insiders, and the insiders want nothing to do with the horn-rimmed glasses wearing, ivy league educated, statistic gathering nerds that point out that teams can win more games paying less if they pay attention to these few undervalued skills that have been tied to wins.

What makes Moneyball work is that its central figure, Billy Beane, is actually an insider. He had the "good face," and he looked good in a baseball uniform. He should have been big. He had a ticket to a free education at Stanford, but he traded that in to become a Met. Beane ended up leaving the game to become an advance scout. Beane seems to have a vendetta against the traditional, "go with your gut" decision making that guides the league and, arguably, ruined his life. Watching him outwit other managers because he is willing to consider non-traditional approaches to the game is real joy, and Lewis does a fantastic job in these sequences.

There are moments that don't work so well. For example, Lewis is happy to praise Beane, which is fine. However, after writing an entire book about how every aspect of baseball can be broken down into statistical likelihoods, he then explains Oakland's failure to make it out of the first round of the playoffs is that the playoffs are a "crapshoot." We could argue that an NFL playoff game is a crapshoot, but baseball teams are eliminated in a series. Although there's little data to gain from a single series, there are many playoff series to study. Lewis and Beane want to embrace moneyball, even though it fails in the playoffs. Why they should accept Beane's claim that "my shit doesn't work in the playoffs?"

Lewis also gives little attention to what happens when other teams do begin to realize the importance of on-base percentage. I've read on Marginal Revolution that the size of a team's payroll is a bigger predictor of success now than it was ten years ago. That may have been inevitable, but it's not irrelevant.

Still, I have to admit that for over 300 pages, Lewis had my interest. I once read that the best non-fiction books transcend their subject, and I think Lewis has produced that caliber of non-fiction here.

It was almost as though baseball itself was interesting. But that may just have been because there it's been a long time since I watched a baseball game. After all, it is January.(less)

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Dec 18, 2007 Patrick rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: baseball fans

If you're a baseball fan, you'll really appreciate this book. It is more or less a primer on the way the emphasis on statistics has come to prominence in many circles around the sport, and provides insight into some of the seemingly more arcane terms around the sport, such as OBP, OPS, VORP, etc. It's really quite valuable in that regard.

It has also come to represent the term for the organizations that embrace this approach to scouting, although that assessment is not entirely accurate. The book...more

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Jan 29, 2012 Angela James rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, nonfiction, 2012, my-faves

So here's the thing: before I started reading, this book had everything going against it for me. Despite my love of sports, I don't like baseball (at all) and I don't watch it. I know the basics of the game but otherwise, really don't know anything about the game and only recognize the names of really famous players. I don't like math or statistics (which are a big part of baseball and in a small way, this book) and I don't generally love nonfiction, though I do read it, it's not more than a cou...more So here's the thing: before I started reading, this book had everything going against it for me. Despite my love of sports, I don't like baseball (at all) and I don't watch it. I know the basics of the game but otherwise, really don't know anything about the game and only recognize the names of really famous players. I don't like math or statistics (which are a big part of baseball and in a small way, this book) and I don't generally love nonfiction, though I do read it, it's not more than a couple books a year.

But several people had talked about this book, and how much they enjoyed it, not just because of the story but the broader business ideas that could be taken from it. Truthfully, I didn't really care a lot about that either (I guess I'm just not big on "bettering" myself :P ) but I downloaded the sample randomly one day, out of curiousity. I didn't open the sample right away but waited until a day when I was looking for something random to read, and opened this one without any conscious reason.

And I was hooked. The author, Michael Lewis, is an excellent and riveting storyteller. He has the amazing talent of taking what should have been a story I had no interest in, and made it compelling. I read this book nonstop for two days (nonstop as in, I didn't read anything else in between, as I generally do when I'm reading nonfiction. A nonfic book usually takes me weeks or months to finish).

Truthfully, while I thought some of the takeaways that could be applied to other business were interesting, I didn't read it for inspiration, nor did I particularly find any. But I did think the history that Michael Lewis was really fascinating, and his ability to make this a story of human interest and draw the reader in is what makes this such a great read.

Also, I have to say, the epilogue (which is obvious was not in the original book but was later added to a new edition) was almost my favorite. It's like the best response to reviewers and people who hated the book without even reading it.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who likes baseball, nonfiction, or is just looking for a great human-interest story that drags you along for the ride. (less)

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Apr 14, 2012 Nancy Cours rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm impressed by how Lewis can clearly explain numbers. While I didn't find Moneyball gripping like some problem-solving-type people, I could at least appreciate how difficult this is to do well. Otherwise, I was only but so entertained.

I have only a basic knowledge of baseball rules and the drafting process, which is truly the only thing required of the reader to be engaged with this book. But, if you know nothing about the game, you shouldn't read it. The fact that I don't recognize the names...more

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Dec 05, 2012 Daniel Garner rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone who loves in baseball and/or math

Shelves: contemporary, economics, non-fiction, sports

Moneyball is a book about mathematics and innovative ideas overcoming more traditional views about baseball, but it's also the story of the Oakland Athletics going against big-market teams to prove itself and its ideas in the course of the 2002 season. Interwoven into its compelling narrative are dozens of relevant baseball statistics that show the significance of the changes going on in baseball management.
Moneyball is one of those books that doesn't ruin the movie for the reader because the b...more

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Jun 12, 2009 Tony Gleeson rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you're a modern baseball fan or a self-described "student of the game," this is a must-read textbook on the recent important "re-think" of how to build and run a major league baseball team in an era of exploding costs. Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane arguably revolutionized the game by introducing a new kind of analysis (I'd suggest following this up with "Building the Monster," a study of how a bigger-market team uses these principles to better advantage). The approach outlined here...more

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Apr 30, 2008 Caroline rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Baseball fans of any level; Joe Morgan

A couple cons:

The writing’s a little heavy-handed in places, which might just be a hazard of writing about baseball. Ex: “The batter’s box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.”

Plus, as a poet, I always feel guilty reading books like this when I could/should be reading Proust or Shakespeare…

But:

Overall, I really enjoyed Moneyball, and I’m glad I read it. Even though it’s focused on the emergence of new baseball-thinking, Moneyball seems much more comprehensive, and much more narrative than...more

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Jul 16, 2008 Shane rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Moneyball is a book that shook the world of professional baseball, but not necessarily in the way it should have. Let me explain...

Moneyball is framed around the story of Billy Beane, a hot prospect who never panned out in the majors, who became general manager of the Oakland A's in 1997. Since that time, the A's, while consistently having one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, have been one of the best teams in the game. How is this possible? The book details how Beane and a few trusted associ...more Moneyball is a book that shook the world of professional baseball, but not necessarily in the way it should have. Let me explain...

Moneyball is framed around the story of Billy Beane, a hot prospect who never panned out in the majors, who became general manager of the Oakland A's in 1997. Since that time, the A's, while consistently having one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, have been one of the best teams in the game. How is this possible? The book details how Beane and a few trusted associates began looking at the game in a different way. Instead of trusting scouting intuition and traditional baseball thinking, the A's began focusing on particular assets of players that were being undervalued by other teams. In this way, they were able to build winning teams using players that were overlooked or discarded by wealthier or less skilled organizations.

While straightforward statistical analysis is interesting enough to me (see my review of Baseball Between The Numbers), where Moneyball shines is it's more detailed investigations into the development of statistical analysis in baseball, and some of the individual players who made up the A's successful 2002 squad. It is these investigations that give the Beane storyline depth and character, and add credence to the statistical analysis strategies the A's employed.

I also appreciated the way Lewis outlines the response FROM the baseball community to the release of Moneyball, which is included in the later paperback edition. This even more firmly establishes the view that most baseball organizations are wasteful and subjective in their approach to analyzing the game they spend hundreds of millions to play. However, Moneyball also explains how teams such as the Toronto Blue Jays and, more impressively due to their two World Series wins in 3 years, Boston Red Sox have hired statistically-minded and data-crunching GM's to run their organizations - showing that the future will perhaps indeed have on base and slugging percantage be our primary focus rather than batting average and RBIs.

Not if Joe Morgan has anything to do with it, though.(less)

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Aug 22, 2007 Anika Palm rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone who thinks baseball statistics interfere with enjoyment of the game.

I've always found baseball fascinating, but have rarely admitted it publicly. That's because the revelation always seemed to be followed by someone trying to engage me in a conversation about the game. And that conversation would always, always end up revolving around statistics I neither cared about nor cared to learn.

Not because Math Is Haaaaaard, but because I always had a niggling suspicion that baseball-nerd numbers really weren't that important. Lewis proved me half right; some of the num...more

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Aug 03, 2007 Keith rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: recentpast

“There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.”

“The point about Lenny, at least to Billy, was clear: Lenny didn’t let his mind screw him up. The physical gifts required to play pro ball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with...more “There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.”

“The point about Lenny, at least to Billy, was clear: Lenny didn’t let his mind screw him up. The physical gifts required to play pro ball were, in some ways, less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. ‘Lenny was perfectly designed, emotionally, to play the game of baseball,’ said Billy. ‘He was able to instantly forget any failure and draw strength from every success. He had no concept of failure. And he had no idea of where he was. And I was the opposite.”

“You didn’t need to know Billy Beane at all—you only needed to read his stats—to sense that he left every on-deck circle in trouble. That he had developed neither discipline nor composure. That he had never learned to lay off a bad pitch. That he was easily fooled. That, fooled so often, he came to expect that he would be fooled. That he hit with fear. That his fear masqueraded as aggression. That the aggression enabled him to exit the batter’s box as quickly as possible.”

“Billy wasn’t one to waste a lot of time worrying about whether he was motivated by a desire to succeed or the pursuit of truth. To his way of thinking the question was academic, since the pursuit of truth was, suddenly, the key to success.”

“There are a certain kind of writer whose motives are ultimately mysterious. The writer born into a family of writers; the writer whose work is an attempt to make sense of some private trauma; the writer who from the age of four is able and willing to stay in his room and make up stories: each of these creatures is a stereotype. What he writes may be good, but why he writes isn’t something you particularly want to hear more about.”

“‘Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,’ he once wrote. ‘Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.’”

“What mattered was James’s ability to light a torch in a dark chamber and throw a new light on a dusty problem. He made you think. There was something bracing about the way he did it—his passion, his humor, his intolerance of stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire—that inspired others to join the cause. That cause was bigger than fielding statistics. The cause was the systematic search for new baseball knowledge.”(less)

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Feb 26, 2009 Nancy rated it 5 of 5 stars

I know next to nothing about baseball, and less than that about statistics, but this book about applying new statistical thinking in baseball to the selection of a winning team (the Oakland A's) was absolutely riveting reading for me. Michael Lewis is just that good.

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Oct 09, 2008 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jason by: Jon Balmer

I fucking hate watching sports.
Hate it.
Then how is it that this book, about applying pertinent statistical analyis to creating baseball teams and playing basesball, so captivated me? It's a testament to a) the skill of the author, Michael Lewis, but also b) the unequivocal appeal of the underlying story: how hard it is to change the status quo (and how one can succeed despite that) and the man Lewis profiles, Billy Beane.
A fantastic narrative for fans of spectator sports or folks like me who'd...more

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Nov 16, 2008 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love how this book opens your eyes to the culture and knowledge of baseball scouting and management. Realizing the inherent flaws in the prevalent approach to the game, you feel that your perspective on baseball players and teams definitely improves after reading this. In this edition, the enjoyable afterword sums up the absurd silliness and insular attitudes of baseball people and their aversion to statistical analysis. I even want the Tigers front office to be knowledgeable about this kind o...more

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Feb 06, 2012 Daniel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As a person who has never played baseball seriously or fallen victim to it's superstitions, this book was not as moving as it could have been. Mr. Lewis illustrates to false economy of baseball drafting and the unwillingness by many organizations to take a second look at how they spend millions of dollars.

I enjoyed the book in the same way that I enjoyed social science books and not much for it's relation to baseball. It amazes me that such a technical book could be turned into a movie that man...more

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May 09, 2013 Austin Finley rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. This book was very good and was very powerful towards the game of baseball. The Book express a lot of things that I look for in a book I like to read.

This book is about a former player that had the choice to either go to the MLB straight from High school or go to college and play ball and may never get the same offer. Billy Bean the main character took up on this action and went to the MLB straight from High school....more I read the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. This book was very good and was very powerful towards the game of baseball. The Book express a lot of things that I look for in a book I like to read.

This book is about a former player that had the choice to either go to the MLB straight from High school or go to college and play ball and may never get the same offer. Billy Bean the main character took up on this action and went to the MLB straight from High school. He played for New York Mets at this young age and having a scout telling him that he will make it big time took its toll. His first start of his Rookie season he did not pan out. Thinking he was going pan out and become the star he was, he didn’t and ending up getting sent down and quitting the game of baseball. After his experience he became a Manager of a team that is very low in cap salary and needs a new face of baseball. With some top players they have on this team he manages, he can’t afford anymore. The Oakland A's the team he manages looses they’re top players and has to make choices that no team every had to make before. They tried to reform the game of baseball with little money and becomes a genius by creating a playoff team with the lowest cap salary and spending the least amount of money in baseball history.

The author’s purpose of this book is to show in a game like baseball that it’s not all about the big names and all the money you have. Billy Bean made a team using little to no money and creating a playoff team and encountering a winning streak that was the longest in baseball history. They had one of the best teams that will go down in history and was made with so little money proving the new face of baseball. Billy Beans goal was to reform the game of baseball and he did.

The theme of this book is it’s not all about the money and the big names of people or things. The story behind this is magnificent and shows this is true. You can’t succeed or get by even better or more if you invest right or keep your priorities straight and set a goal like Billy did in this book.

The book Moneyball is a narrative story because it tells a story of how these events happened and how they reformed the game of baseball and changed the whole view that any team can be a high caliber team and can win as many games as multi millionaire team when only spending a couple hundred thousand.

My opinion on this book was it’s a very good book that expresses any team can be good with the right amount of heart. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves baseball or just sports. This book is good for people who love to read about emotional and good books like this one.
(less)

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Apr 11, 2013 Roy Gutierrez rated it 4 of 5 stars

Money ball is about an ex-professional baseball player named Billy Beane who is now the general manager of the Oakland A's. Billy was an amazing high school baseball player. He was said to be an amazing breakthrough star. When Billy was selected in the first round of the college draft he decided to skip his college years and head straight into the Majors. Billy became the complete opposite of what they thought he would become. Billy’s professional baseball career soon comes to an end putting him...more Money ball is about an ex-professional baseball player named Billy Beane who is now the general manager of the Oakland A's. Billy was an amazing high school baseball player. He was said to be an amazing breakthrough star. When Billy was selected in the first round of the college draft he decided to skip his college years and head straight into the Majors. Billy became the complete opposite of what they thought he would become. Billy’s professional baseball career soon comes to an end putting him behind a desk working for the A’s. Billy is trying to make one of the poorest teams in the MLB the most successful. The Oakland Athletics have the worst team management ever. Billy Beane is so desperate for improvement he takes on the game of baseball in a complete new method. With the help of Paul DePodesta, he finds a new way to find out how much baseball players are really worth. They find a new method of buying players using something called saber metrics. Billy looks at players that are rookies and that are specialized in one skill. Billy didn’t look at HRs or RBIs but instead he looked at who could score in runs and get outs. Billy buys no name players that can be equally as successful as the big names in baseball with a much lower budget. What Billy manages to do with a team with a $35 million dollar team with 100+ win season, the same as the Yankees is amazing. This new method had club managers re-thinking their methods of playing baseball. Billy overcame many doubters and critics that said his method would never work. People said that he couldn’t change the beautiful game. Even though the A’s didn’t win the World Series, Billy is still using his method to try to win the last game of the season. I would recommend this book to any sports fans because if makes you think in a different way. I liked how Michael Lewis included Billy’s baseball background so we could fully understand how much this meant to him. I also liked how even though everybody told him it was a dumb idea; he didn’t give up and kept going with what he believed. I think that’s what the author is trying to show. Even though you have doubters, you have to go with what you believe in and stick with it and don’t let anybody get in your way.(less)

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Mar 09, 2013 Chuck Thomas rated it 4 of 5 stars

I saw the movie first, then read the book, so I did it the wrong way, according to my teachers from when I was a kid. In any case, I thought the book was very good. It obviously goes into more detail than the movie does, especially the background and history of sabermetrics and how people (ex. Bill James) began to analyze baseball statistics differently in the late 1970's and early 80's. I really enjoyed the parts of the book where Oakland GM Billy Beane is wheeling and dealing with other GMs in...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Michael Ortega rated it 4 of 5 stars

Moneyball by Michael Lewis is a non-fiction book about the struggles of being a General Manager for a smaller Major League Baseball franchise. Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, has to find a way to put a successful baseball team together with the little amount of money he has. He is forced to work with 40 million dollars, where the New York Yankees have 120 million dollars. Billy, with the help of his Assistant Paul DePosta use a statistical approach of choosing players...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, baseball

As a person who enjoys baseball a lot, and writes about it, everyone talks to me about Moneyball. So having to say I'd never actually read the book often made me feel a bit sheepish. I recently saw the movie and felt a bit unsatisfied by the explanation it offered, which prompted me to finally read the book and see what was left out.

It turns out quite a lot. People other than Billy Beane are given much more space to breathe in the book version, and all the exposition that people might find borin...more As a person who enjoys baseball a lot, and writes about it, everyone talks to me about Moneyball. So having to say I'd never actually read the book often made me feel a bit sheepish. I recently saw the movie and felt a bit unsatisfied by the explanation it offered, which prompted me to finally read the book and see what was left out.

It turns out quite a lot. People other than Billy Beane are given much more space to breathe in the book version, and all the exposition that people might find boring in a movie is explored in greater depth. What really makes the book interesting is that the author was present for a lot of the conversations and was able to interview people like Beane and Paul DePodesta at different points through the 2002 "Moneyball" season, which is something that sets it apart from the other baseball book I read recently, that being The Extra 2%. It is much better as something the author was able to sort of witness for himself rather having to assemble the strands of interviews later.

The other interesting thing about waiting ten years to read this book is that the Moneyball argument has been pretty much settled. What was once radical is now something that most every team is trying to do, with even the rich teams of the game trying to get more for their money on the margins; even the Yankees appreciate the value of scouting and player development, if only so they can try to trade prospects for more proven talent, or just plug in solid young players. Oakland hung on with solid teams for a few more years and then Beane had to get back to the drawing board - which, of course, happened this past season, Moneyball rising again as the Oakland Athletics stormed ahead of the Texas Rangers in the season's final weekend to take the American League West crown, way ahead of the big free agent spenders the Angels as well. What was once the quixotic pursuit of a maniac is now accepted as the way business as done.

Or at least some things are; the Club, or perhaps the Women's Auxiliary (Lewis' term for dinosaur baseball writers from an afterword) is still stubbornly stuck to things like the sacrifice bunt and stolen bases. The proxy war between bloggers and mainstream reporters is waged, heavier in some places than others. Moneyball won, though, because every team is always seeking that edge, even if some teams seek it better than others, and some manage to win even when they seem to be worse at seeking said edge (seriously, what the heck is up with the San Francisco Giants? Sabey-Sabes, you lucky son of a bitch!) I particularly enjoyed the afterword, which is essentially Lewis asking people how his ass tastes, and it was a well-deserved addition to his original manuscript, which was excellent.

Is Moneyball the complete and total story of why the 2002 Oakland Athletics won 103 games with a tiny payroll? No, it is not, but it does a great job of breaking down rather complex concepts into something that the layman should be able to understand, zooming in on human moments of the season even while keeping focused on the big picture. This is the biggest thing that the movie was missing, I felt - the quirks of Chad Bradford, the chaos of the draft room, the game theory grind of Scott Hatteberg.

Plus, there's a chapter dedicated to the early work of Bill James, and what self-respecting internet baseball writer can't be pleased to see that? James is not at the forward of everything the way he once was - in fact, writers of my generation are as likely to be opposed to him as not - but you can't argue with the notion that he got the ball rolling on what is now a big thing.

Should you read this book if you don't care about baseball? No, probably not, but if the nitty gritty stuff interests you and you've been dragging your feet in reading it, as I had, you definitely owe it to yourself to read this.(less)

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Jan 27, 2013 Chip Lichtenwalner rated it 5 of 5 stars

It's Michael Lewis, do I really need to say much more? He has the tremendous ability to make connections across time and people, which becomes a compelling story. As a baseball fan and a stathead myself, this one was particularly interesting and I really should have read it sooner. Being around the baseball community and listening to commentators and fans, it still is amazing how misunderstood sabermetrics is, and even more so this book and Billy Beane, which became the poster child for it. The...more

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Jan 15, 2013 Charles Allan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: economics

Moneyball is about an unlikely success: how the cash strapped Oakland A's baseball team found ways to win without the ability to afford highly priced skills. One simply must find players with unusual and overlooked talents. One does this by identifying talents that no-one else can see - a tough business in a 100-year old game that few thought held any more secrets.

Those people were wrong. Baseball did have secrets. And these were ferreted out by Bill James, an eccentric and charming former night...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Anthony Martin rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Any sports fan who likes the administration-related aspects of them (especailly baseball)

Recommended to Anthony by: N/A

Well, I must say that I was impressed with this book. The way the author tells the story of what really is just a thought process/business strategy by using a person who championed it (and the team he ran using it) helped make it much more enjoyable. Even more so, the fact that this book eschews normal topics that are discussed on a daily basis in the sports world and focuses on a subject that very rarely, if ever, gets touched, also helped fight off the repetitiveness that can occur in this gen...more

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Jan 06, 2013 matteo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, fives, sports-vaguely

It is pretty inexcusable that it took me so long to get to this book, especially when it sat on the bookshelves in my office for two years in New York. Maybe I did not want to fall too hard for it. Regardless, having taken less than a day to read it, it now strikes me that the people in sports who still don't understand this book, purposely or otherwise, are even more ignorant, close-minded, and conservative than I thought. The book is now almost a decade old, and reading it with hindsight makes...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Drew Patterson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Moneyball is one of my personal favorites because of the true reality of baseball. Billy Beane tries to piece together a winning team based on only statistics, rather than talent. It is a great story of how Billy tries to replace lost talent with statistics. His plan backfires when he realizes that the results of baseball are based on the intangibles, far more than just statistics.

My favorite part of the book, not really a certain part, but a reoccurring even throughout the book. As the GM of th...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Jake rated it 4 of 5 stars

Moneyball by Michael Lewis is one of the best told baseball stories. It shows how the Oakland A’s went from being an average team with two star baseball players, to a world series contender. The main plot tells a story about how Paul DePodesta and Bill Beane use mathematics and data analyzing to find talented players that were undervalued by baseball scouts. The Oakland A’s are also one of the poorest teams in baseball so they must fully adapt to the new way of choosing players so they can surv...more Moneyball by Michael Lewis is one of the best told baseball stories. It shows how the Oakland A’s went from being an average team with two star baseball players, to a world series contender. The main plot tells a story about how Paul DePodesta and Bill Beane use mathematics and data analyzing to find talented players that were undervalued by baseball scouts. The Oakland A’s are also one of the poorest teams in baseball so they must fully adapt to the new way of choosing players so they can survive against teams with twice the budget.
The author traces the life of Billy Beane from his college days to the time when he becomes the manager of Oakland A’s. Billy was one of the most promising baseball players and all of the scouts believed he was the next superstar. Right out of college he got picked up by the New York Mets and began playing center field, but then they ran into a problem. He just couldn’t make it in the major leagues. He didn’t have the mindset to compete in that level of baseball. He wasted many years of his life in the Mets dugout rarely playing.
The book then goes forward to 20 years later when Billy is the General Manager of the Oakland A’s. His team is one of the poorest in all of baseball and they struggle to draft players due to their low budget. Paul DePodesta then comes up with a radical new strategy. He develops a way to find the undervalued players using data analyzing and on base percentages. The 2002 draft comes along and they pick all of the undervalued players that their new strategy suggested. They also pick up a right handed submarine pitcher named Chad Bradford. All of the other scouts didn’t like him because of his unconventional pitching style, but he ends up carrying them into a 20 game winning streak that makes baseball history. Then they go on to break numerous records and Billy Beane makes baseball history.
Moneyball follows a sad mood that shows the frustration of Billy’s major league career, but then it switches to confidence when they team begins to win games. The bad parts of this particular novel is that honestly it is quite slow so to speak from the beginning but then once they enter the season the book is full of excitement. The movie shows Bill Beane’s life and his relationship with his daughter. The book however doesn’t talk about the daughter at all. Don’t be mistaken by the movie this book is more about the team than Billy. I would highly recommend this to baseball loving fans and people who love baseball literature. This was a very well thought out and written novel.
(less)

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Jan 05, 2013 hamptonenglish10 rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Jordan Hawker
Ms. Brooks
Academic English 10
7 January 2013
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, tells the interesting story behind the Major League Baseball (MLB) club Oakland A's 2002 season. The story primarily revolves around the general manager Billy Beane's unprecedented approach to baseball and the affect it had on the club and its record. His peers found his tactics unorthodox, but the results of his team could not be disputed. Michael Lewis was already an accomplished author prior to chronicling t...more

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Dec 26, 2012 Rebecca rated it 3 of 5 stars

Michael Lewis has a wonderful talent for making the reader connect with the character's. They either are so unusual or he uses literary creativity to make them particularly larger then life and peculair.

But I noticed that with this book as well as the previous book of his I read that the information and the characters that illustrate the point or puropose of book are completely disjointed. It is akin to reading two books loosely related that have been cut and spliced together.

At times I wondered...more

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About Michael Lewis

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Michael Lewis attended Princeton University where he received a BA in art history in 1982. He also received a masters degree in economics from the London School of Economics in 1985.

He went on to work with New York art dealer Wildenstein, and then became a bond salesman at...more

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“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.” — 19 people liked it

“Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient," Said Palmer. " The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.” — 15 people liked it

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