Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

by Michael Lewis

A few years earlier, professional baseball players had been granted free agency by a court of law, and, after about two seconds of foot-shuffling, baseball owners put prices on players that defied the old commonsensical notions of what a baseball player should be paid.

Inside of four years, the average big league salary had nearly tripled, from about $52,000 to almost $150,000 a year.

“Power is something that can be acquired,” says Billy quickly. “Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don’t become good hitters.”

He doesn’t explain that the important traits in a baseball player were not all equally important. That foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced.

That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone.

Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. Anything that increases the offense’s chances of making an out is bad; anything that decreases it is good.

When we state it that way, it becomes, or should become, crystal clear that the most important isolated (one-dimensional) offensive statistic is the on-base percentage. It measures the probability that the batter will not be another step toward the end of the inning.

“What is an error?” he asked. “It is, without exception, the only major statistic in sports which is a record of what an observer thinks should have been accomplished. It’s a moral judgment, really, in the peculiar quasi-morality of the locker room…. Basketball scorers count mechanical errors, but those are a record of objective facts: team A has the ball, then team B has the ball…. But the fact of a baseball error is that no play has been made but that the scorer thinks it should have. It is, uniquely, a record of opinions.”

RBI had come to be treated by baseball people as an individual achievement—free agents were paid for their reputation as RBI machines when clearly they were not. Big league players routinely swung at pitches they shouldn’t to lard their RBI count. Why did they get so much credit for this? To knock runners in, runners needed to be on base when you came to bat. There was a huge element of luck in even having the opportunity, and what wasn’t luck was, partly, the achievement of others.

“The problem,” wrote James, “is that baseball statistics are not pure accomplishments of men against other men, which is what we are in the habit of seeing them as. They are accomplishments of men in combination with their circumstances.”

No matter what the announcers said, and what the coaches believed, major league baseball players did not perform particularly well—or particularly badly—in critical situations. On the one hand, it made a funny kind of sense: no one who behaved differently under pressure would ever make it to the big leagues. On the other hand, it contradicted the sacred, received wisdom in baseball.

The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

The central insight that led him both to turn minor league nobodies into successful big league closers and to refuse to pay them the many millions a year they demanded once they became free agents was that it was more efficient to create a closer than to buy one.

Established closers were systematically overpriced, in large part because of the statistic by which closers were judged in the marketplace: “saves.”

With two outs and a runner on second base a pitcher makes a great pitch: the batter hits a bloop into left field that would have been caught had the left fielder not been Albert Belle. The shrewd runner at second base, knowing that Albert Belle is slow not just to the ball but also to the plate, beats the throw home. In the record books the batter was credited with having succeeded, the pitcher with having failed, and the left fielder and the runner with having been present on the scene. This was a grotesque failure of justice. The pitcher and runner deserved to have their accounts credited, the batter and left fielder to have theirs debited (the former should have popped out; the latter somehow had avoided committing an “error” and at the same time put runs on the board for the other team).

Life with no money was filled with embarrassing little trade-offs. The trick is to know precisely what trade-offs you were making.

“It’s looking at process rather than outcomes,” Paul says. “Too many people make decisions based on outcomes rather than process.”

“The difference between 1–2 and 2–1 in terms of expected outcomes is just enormous,”

“It’s the largest variance of expected outcomes of any one pitch. On 2–1 most average major league hitters become all-stars, yet on 1–2 they become anemic nine-hole hitters. People talk about first-pitch strikes. But it’s really the first two out of three.”

Players who walked a lot tended actually to walk even more as they got older, and Justice walked a lot.

Miguel Tejada had grown up poor in the Dominican Republic, and in the Dominican Republic they had a saying, “You don’t walk off the island.” The Dominican hitters were notorious hackers because they had been told they had to be to survive.

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.

The effect of Jim Rice on Scott Hatteberg was to convince him that “this is why poor hitters make the best hitting coaches. They don’t try to make you like them, because they sucked.”

A good pitcher, Hatteberg explained, creates a kind of parallel universe. It doesn’t matter how hard he throws, in absolute terms, so long as he is able to distort the perception of the hitters.

“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.”

much. My problem can be simply put: every player is different. Every player must be viewed as a special case. The sample size is always one.

His answer is equally simple: baseball players follow similar patterns, and these patterns are etched in the record books. Of course, every so often some player may fail to embrace his statistical destiny, but on a team of twenty-five players the statistical aberrations will tend to cancel each other out.

Who will describe his job as “a soap box derby. You build the car in the beginning of the year and after that all you do is push it down the hill.”

Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength.

The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind.

Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push th...

Pete Palmer, the sabermetrician and author of The Hidden Game of Baseball, once calculated that the average difference in baseball due to skill is about one run a game, while the average difference due to luck is about four runs a game. Over a long season the luck evens out, and the skill shines through. But in a series of three out of five, or even four out of seven, anything can happen. In a five-game series, the worst team in baseball will beat the best about 15 percent of the time; the Devil Rays have a prayer against the Yankees. Baseball science may still give a team a slight edge, but that edge is overwhelmed by chance.

The baseball season is structured to mock reason.

Give the game a chance to come to you and often enough it will.