Moneyball

Rating:
Summary: I Wish This Book Had Been Twice as Long
Review: I loved this book and when I finished the last page I was wishing that it had been twice as long. With unparalleled access to the innner workings of the Oakland A's front office, Michael Lewis gives a rare look at a baseball organization which has broken the paradigm of Major League Baseball. Great reading and a totally different type of baseball book. Throughly enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: very enlightening
Review: i know baseball, or so i thught, but to finally see sabremetrics applied by a GM was completely awesome. check this book out.

Rating:
Summary: Great book - Billy Beane is a sorry person
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: drafting versus free-agents approach
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Can't Put It Down
Review: If you are a fan of the statistics of the game, then this is for you. See how Billy Beane and cast completely redevelop how players are scouted and drafted. Without a big payroll, the A's are always contenders. How does he do it ?

Rating:
Summary: The art of unfair winning
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: It doesn't matter if you are a baseball fan
Review: This was a wonderful book and I am truly not a professional sports fan. Instead, just fall in love with the story the way the author, Michael Lewis, did. The Oakland A's were in 2002 at the top of the American League West and yet had the smallest budget (at the bottom of the list? The team with the largest budget, the Texas Rangers.) How they did it involves the story of GM Billy Beane, a Harvard stats wiz, an almanac writer named Bill James, and a rag-tag group of players who other teams had largely overlooked or written off.

Even if you don't follow baseball, you'll be able to follow this book. And if you are an avid fan, you'll find that it's not overly simplified and may even give you some new perspective (base stealing bad, walks good?) Lewis is a great prose writer and writes with such generosity and affection even when discussing the some of the protagonist's flaws that the book is an inspiration to read without ever being corny or maudlin. I loved the stories about reluctant-yet-brilliant first baseman Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford, the earnest kid with the brilliantly deceptive pitch. But it was the story of Jeremy Brown, a chunky young man from the south who was the A's first round draft pick and largely ridiculed in the baseball press, that had me nearly on my feet cheering by the end of the book. Just about perfect all in all.

Rating:
Summary: Great novel, beware of the non-fiction label
Review: This is a very good read and would be interesting to even the non-baseball, non-sports fan but I've given it 3 stars because it's a non-fiction book and I don't think the content quite rings true. The book uses the premise that Billy Beane's total acceptance of sabremetrics is responsible for the success of the Oakland A's. Well, let's see...I don't have the exact figure but I believe that the A's ranked something like 16th or 17th in the league in on-base percentage. And I don't believe that they ranked up there in walks, either. Which means that as a non-fiction book, this fails miserably. Just look at the year-end stats for the players and see if their final figures ring true with the sabremetrics philosophy.

Also, perhaps the Oakland batters in the 9th inning of the division series had at least swung at a pitch instead of taking every one and getting struck out looking, they might have had a chance to win? The key to the Oakland success is pitching but this book barely talks about the A's great starting rotation.

I consider this book a good novel at best, but don't make the mistake of believing that this book has unlocked the key to winning without spending big bucks. The last 2 years of the World Series have been won by low-budget teams but I don't believe that the use of stats was the key.

Take the Marlins for example...Manager Jack McKeon, the type of go-with-your-guts-old-school-baseball-guy that is treated so dismissively in the early chapters of this book brought his low-budget non-sabremetric inclined Florida Marlins the World Series victory over the mighty Yankees. I guess there's still something to be said for good old fashioned baseball instincts.

Rating:
Summary: Not just a book about baseball...offers management insight
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific book even for non-sports-fans like me
Review: 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.