Rating: 
Summary: More than just a baseball book
Review: I avoided this book for a while because I had heard that Billy Bease came off as very arrogant. I had even heard that some general managers in baseball this past year were not going to trade with him because of the way he was presented in Moneyball. I didn't feel that the depiction of Beane was negative. He is a driven guy who has basically changed baseball-for the good of the game. He has proved that a team with lesser financial resources can compete. This book can be used to relate to any area of business or life in general. Be smart, be prudent, and think and you can be successful although the odds seem to be against you. I appreciated the discussion of the postseason failings of the team. Although, I do feel that this will even out eventually. This team (pitching in particular) is too good to not succeed on a grander scale. The story of sabermetricians may have been the best part. Amazing how a bunch of numbers guys can change a sport. An awesome book about an awesome guy. Beane deserves to be in the hall of fame one day.
Rating:
Summary: Intense drama played out on an uneven field
Review: This book is one of twists and turns, full of literary vehicles. I haven't felt this dizzy since I saw Pulp Fiction (to which I would not give 5 stars). It's great to see those that deserve to win in baseball win--especially against Steinbrenner--at least in the regular season, as the Oakland A's have done for the past several years. And this, on a budget that rivals what the Yankees' bullpen alone costs. Given the buzz on the book, I was prepared for Lewis' discussion on how statistical science is changing the game, which he does so without losing the quick tempo he establishes from the leadoff page. However, his greatest achievement was a surprise to me--he gets us close in to meet the obscured, brilliant personalities that have contributed to the Little Paradigm Shift That Could, over the protestations of eight generations of baseball scouts and owners barking up the wrong mathematical trees to preserve traditions without foundation. Most good baseball books are autobiographies, or written by insiders, or written by those obsessed with the game. Lewis is able to write effectively as an outsider, and also closely connect and earn the trust of the insiders. Beyond the math, I hope that baseball insiders will use the truth of Moneyball to make MLB more competitive than it is today, instead of pleading with Congress to preserve a questionable status quo.
Rating:
Summary: Whjy You Should Have Studied Math In School
Review: I am not much of a baseball fan, but after reading a review of this book I was compelled to borrow a copy. The story is set against the backdrop of baseball, but it reads more like the solving of a great scientific mystery. Anyone growing up in America, whether or not they even watch baseball, knows the basic stats that ballplayers are judged by: Batting average, RBIs, ERA and so forth. You can't escape them. And these are the numbers that make or break careers. Want to improve your team? Sell that .280 hitter and bring in a .295 hitter. Get a pitcher with a lower ERA, an so on. This was the received wisdom. To everyone but players of "Rotissiere Baseball", that is. "Rotissiere Baseball" is a paper-and-pencil version of the game popular with thousands of fans who trade players and play games based on the roll of the dice and statistics that they've compiled- statististics very different from the ones commonly reported. The players- many of them mathematicians, actuaries and others with a mind for numbers. These stats- termed "sabermetrics"- were empirically derived and then validated againt actual player performance. And yet they were completely ignored by the people who could most benifit from them- the owners and managers of the major league teams. With one exception: The A's Billy Beane. An ex-player himself, Billy didn't have the math skills of those who compiled the sabermetric model, but he did have an uncommon amount of intelligence, and knew a good thing when he saw it. He used the sabermetric model to identify undervalued and overvalued players, and quickly traded his way to a top performing team with a relatively small budget. Now that wasn't the only reason for the A's success, and Beane's skill went beyond just his utilization of the model, but it's the central issue in this story. The book isn't just about the math, of course; the portraits of Beane and the players he selects are every bit as fascinating. A good read for baseball fans, and a fascinating introduction to an arcane world for the math minded.
Rating: 
Summary: Winning baseball on a shoestring budget
Review: In pro-basketball the difference between the richest and the poorest teams (in terms of team payroll) is 1.75:1. In pro-football it's 1.5:1. But, in pro-baseball it's 4:1. The convential "wisdom" says you have to buy success by getting the biggest stars. So what do you do if your team can't afford it? Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland A's, has turned to sabermetrics (the statistical study of baseball) to find undervalued players. The most important aspects of baseball are not what we've always been told by TV commentators and other baseball-people. The ability to get on base (even by a walk) and generate runs (instead of outs - including sacrifices) is more important than stats like batting averages and RBI's. The most valuable players are also most often the most grossly overlooked. Beane and his staff have been very successfull in exploiting this over the last couple of years. The book is well-written and often very entertaining. The only times I felt it grew slow was when Mr. Lewis was trying to explain some of the theories and statistics that were really important (then it becomes a 3-star book). But some of the success stories of underdog players were really fun to read. I reccomend it to anyone who has any interest in baseball, and I'll certainly pay more attention to the Oakland A's next year.
Rating:
Summary: The Book That Started the Firestorm
Review: It seems that the hardcore baseball fan cannot go anywhere these days without seeing a reference to "The Billy Beane Book". Often, however, it seems as though the people discussing this book have not taken the time to account for the minute detail of actually reading the book before using it in discussion. As a story-teller, author Lewis does a surperb job of piecing together a part of baseball's history that until recently has not been cast under the light that it truly deserves. The history I am refering to is the world of sabermetrics, the exploration of the truly fascinating world of baseball statistics. Even in discussing what to the average fan would surely be a truly boring topic at first glance, Lewis' writing abilities are more than capable of keeping the pages turning at a fervent pace. For this reason alone the book is worth recommending, but for the avid baseball fan looking for a more in depth look at the American Pastime, there is surely another world readily available for discovery located within these pages.
Rating:
Summary: You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this one!
Review: You don't have to be a baseball fan to have fun reading MONEYBALL
by Michael Lewis, but if you are one, you'll find this to one of the best
sports books you'll ever come across . . . the subtitle says it all:
THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME. It tells the story of how the Oakland Athletics compete successfully
with such big market teams as the Yankees and Braves, despite
having the second-lowest payroll in baseball . . . they do so by
paying attention to statistics that nobody had ever really cared
about; e.g., the walk--proving that taking a base on balls can often
be the difference between winning and losing a game. I loved the wide range of characters, ranging from the team's
general manager (Billy Beane, a flop as a player) to statisticians
(such as Bill James) and including such low-paid athletes as Scott
Hatteberg and Chad Bradford who became stars when nobody
else even knew about them. The writing was most captivating . . . among the passages that caught my attention were the following: * The next year went well enough for him-he was, after all, Billy Beane
and by the summer of 1982 he had been promoted to the Mets'
Double-A team in Jackson, Mississippi. He played left, Strawberry
played right, and the whole team played the field. For a lot of the
players it was their first exposure to the Southern female-the most
flagrant cheater in the mutual disarmament pact known as the feminism.
Lipstick! Hairdos! Submissiveness! Baseball was a game but chasing
women was a business, in which Billy Beane was designed to succeed
without even trying. Billy had the rap. Billy, said his old teammate
J.P. Ricciardi, "could talk a dog off a meat wagon." Billy was forever
having to explain to another teammate of his, Steve Springer, that
when you'd just met some girl, what you didn't do was tell her you
played pro ball. It wasn't fair to her; you had to give the girl a chance
to turn you down. Billy's way of giving her a chance was to tell her that
what he did for a living was collect roadkill off local highways. Springer
didn't have Billy's awesome God-given ability with women; he thought
he needed the Mets to stand a chance; and this need of his led to one
of those great little moments that make even the most dismal minor
league baseball careers worth remembering. They were leaving one of
the local burger joints when two pretty girls called after them, in their
fetching drawls: "You boys Yankees?" Springer turned around and
said, "No, we're the Mets." * Fielder is the semi-aptly named Prince Fielder, son of Cecil Fielder,
who in 1990 hit fifty-one home runs for the Detroit Tigers, and who by
the end of his career could hardly waddle around the bases after one
of his mammoth shots into the upper deck, much less maneuver him-
self in front of a ground ball. "Cecil Fielder acknowledges a weight
of 261," Bill James once wrote, "leaving unanswered the question of
what he might weigh if he put his other foot on the scale." Cecil Fielder
could have swallowed Jeremy Brown whole and had room left for
dessert, and the son apparently has an even more troubling weight
problem than his father. Here's an astonishing fact: Prince Fielder is
too fat even for the Oakland A's. Of no other baseball player in the
whole of North America can this be said. Pittaro seems to think that
the Detroit Tigers might take Fielder anyway, for sentimental reasons.
And if the Tigers take him, they trigger a chain reaction that ends with
the Mets getting one of their first six choices. * Having kept the team close enough to hope, Billy could now go out
and shop for whatever else he needed to get to the play-offs. When
he set off on this shopping spree, he kept in mind five simple rules: 1. "No matter how successful you are, change is always good.
There can never be a status quo. When you have no money
you can't afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You
have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you're fu*ked." 2. "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." 3. "Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You
can put a dollar figure on it." 4. "Know exactly who you want and go after him." (Never mind who
they say they want to trade.) 5. "Every deal you do will be publicly scrutinized by subjective
opinion. If I'm (IBM CEO) Lou Gerstner, I'm not worried that
every personnel decision I make is going to wind up on the front
page of the business section. Not everyone believes that they know
everything about the personal computer. But everyone who ever
picked up a bat thinks he knows baseball. To do this well, you have
to ignore the newspapers."
Rating:
Summary: A good overview, but not enough juice
Review: "Moneyball" is a good read. Author Michael Lewis explains in an interesting and entertaining manner how the Oakland A's overcome the disadvantage of a low payroll by exploiting inefficiencies in the market for baseball players -- inefficiencies perpetuated by the anti-intellectual tendencies of many baseball men. My main complaint is that I wish the book was longer. In interviews Lewis said that he had lots of great conversations with guys like Tim Hudson and J.P. Ricciardi that had to be cut to keep the book short and focused. At only 288 pages, I read the book in a day and a half, and a lot of the text covered the principles of sabermetrics to help explain how the A's succeed on a low payroll. This is good information to popularize, but since I already knew that walks are good and bunting is bad, I was hoping for more inside scoop. Some chapters were excellent -- Oakland's approach to the minor league draft and Chad Bradford's circuitous path to the majors were both very interesting. Finding out that Oakland GM Billy Beane used to be exactly the type of player he now avoids (great body, terrible hitter) was great. Seemingly overlooked was the A's great pitching staff, a tribute to the scouting from past years and the coaches who have helped keep the starters healthy. I was left wanting more information about people in the game who have helped make the A's a surprise success every year. I'm sure that Lewis had a goal of keeping the book short and punchy, which is probably conducive to selling it to the general population, but as a man with a baseball obsession I feel a little shortchanged. Lewis had fly-on-the-wall access to one of the most interesting teams in the league and apparently cut out lots of good stuff. Followup, please!
Rating:
Summary: Hudson, Mulder, Zito are the heroes
Review: Moneyball is a worthwhile read. I found the first half of the book to be very interesting (sabermetrics, Bill James, etc.) However, I found the second half of the book to be insulting- esprcially the way manager Art Howe was portrayed. Michael Lewis made this man with 30 years of baseball experience out to be a puppet and yes-man. I wondered if the book was proof read and edited by Billy Beane himself.
I think Tim Hudson's name is mentioned once while Mark Mulder and Barry Zito never were. If not for these three starting pitchers, the A's would have acheived little success and the book would have no basis for being written. Credit the A's winning directly to these three arms moreso than sabermetrics.
Intersting book but don't believe evrything you read.
Rating:
Summary: Review Lewis, not Beane
Review: Before I read this book, I came to Amazon to learn whether people thought Michael Lewis had done a compelling job telling Billy Beane's story. I didn't come to find out what baseball fans think of Beane as a GM (which is the substance of many reviews here). Now that I have read it, I can report to the rest of you that it is very worthwhile, if you want to know how the business of baseball is conducted these days. Whether you agree with Beane's strategy or not, this book will take you inside the life of a GM like nothing else I've read. Lewis's past experience writing about tense business situations clearly helps him set the scene for the MLB amateur draft and all the preparation that comes before it. So leave your fan hat behind, and use your reading glasses instead.
Rating:
Summary: Not just for baseball enthusiats
Review: This type of book, written the wrong way, can wind up only on the shelves of enthusiasts. Instead, Michael Lewis did an amazing job creating a book which will not only be interesting to baseball enthusiasts and statisticians, but also to anyone who even has a remote interest in sports or business. I agree with my local library's classification of this book as a non-fiction work that reads like fiction.
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