Moneyball

Rating:
Summary: So much fun!
Review: This book is full of both theory and anecdotes. I recommend it not just for serious baseball fans but also marginal fans who don't know much about the nitty-gritty of the game. Yet. It is totally entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: Indispensible For Any Serious Baseball Fan
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An iconoclastic riot - and a good lesson for the markets
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: MONEYBALL
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A must read for all baseball enthusiastics!!!!!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Changing the way we look at baseball
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Eyeopening -- wonderful book
Review: I first was exposured to Bill James' logic in the early 80's with his commercially published baseball abstracts. I liked his analysis, but he's only recently getting the recognition he deserves (he's currently a consultant to the Boston Red Sox).

I vaguely remember Billy Beane as a player (he was drafted by the Mets over 20 years ago). His playing career never panned out, but he became a disciple of Bill James, and had a approach to baseball where winning teams don't have to spend a lot of money -- he took rejects from other teams with an outstanding characteristic -- on base percentage.

It seems now Bill James ideas are in vogue among some teams (Paul dePodesta is now the GM of the LA Dodgers, he was Beane's assistant int he book).

I've always rooted for teams which won without the highest payroll in the league -- this book discusses how Beane has been able to do it consistently -- even though he never won a championship yet.

The book traces Beane's career (or lack of it), and he ended up in a GM job, his statistical approach to baseball (which is currently unconventional, but very logical). A good behind the scenes look at an unconventional organization

Rating:
Summary: Michael Lewis is one-of-a-kind
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Numbers never lie
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: Great thought-provoking book for all baseball fans
Review: Moneyball is simply one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It's primarily about baseball, but its lessons transcend sports. Through the examples of Bill James, Dick Cramer, Voros McCracken, and AVM Systems, it shows how Billy Beane has been able to maximize the market of talent with a minimum of spending. It also gives a great insight into Beane, a classic five-tool player in high school who couldn't convert it into a successful major league playing career. Beane took the lessons learned the hard way from his playing days and has applied them as the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. The point of this book is: Think For Yourselves! While most of Beane's philosophy makes sense, I disagree with his disdainment of stolen bases, and his idea of the manager as a figurehead with little independent decision-making ability. Otherwise, as I said, a very fascinating read.