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 focuses on Oakland Athletics' General Manager Billy Beane and the way he has been able to field a consistently competitive team despite a lack of resources available to other teams around the league. It just so happens that the approach he used (valuing On-Base Percentage over traditional means of measuring a player's worth, drafting lower ceiling college players as opposed high school players with more upside but also more risk, etc.) was not being employed by other teams. In other words, Beane's approach is to find what is undervalued around the league and exploit that to the benefit of his ballclub. At the time of this book's publishing, that entailed the methods described above. However, these days that is not necessarily the case, yet the specific traits Beane looked for in players at that time has come to be known as the 'Moneyball' approach, whether that is appropriate or not (I lean towards 'not').

Many traditionalists (I'm looking at you Joe Morgan) dismiss the book and Beane's methods, but are erroneous to do so. It's an interesting read and should be required for any true baseball fan, if only to see what all the fuss is about. It's become bigger than it should be--it's no better or worse than some of Lewis's other profile-type books--but is a solid, interesting read.