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Summary: BASEBALL IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Review: Michael Lewis is a fine writer and Billy Beane is a man of genius. This book puts the lie to Bud Selig's assertion that money alone creates competetiveness, and further describes the new realities of power offense vs. "little ball," and how a relief pitcher can be found to fill holes for one season.
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Summary: Fascinating, if a bit too sure of itself...
Review: Any veteran fan who is not a stat-head, will not agree with everything written in here. However, it is fascinating to consider. Beane is no hero, but certainly a hell of a GM. I'm fascinated to see how DePodesta does in LA with a bigger payroll. The book is at it's best when describes the stories of the players--Scott Hatteberg, Jeremy Brown and the trades (the chapter on Rincon is classic). It slows down when Lewis falls too much into his financial/math background. Still, anything that challenges the prevailing wisdom (I particularly loved the scene where Beane goes nuts on Art Howe for the lefty-Lefty, righty-righty bullpen match ups--it is one my own pet peeves) is worth 5 stars. Guys like Bill James get their just due. Overall, it is a fanastic read. Besides, anything that upsets that blowhard Joe Morgan this much MUST BE GENIUS!
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Summary: a single, not a home run
Review: This book reads more like an overlong magazine article than a well-written book. Michael Lewis is not a great writer, and his theme -- that baseball teams can be better managed by objectively weighting the contribution of various player attributes, such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage -- is informative but not earth-shattering. As an Oakland A's fan, I gained some insights from this book. But was it worth the $11 I paid for it? Not really.
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Summary: best baseball book that I have ever read
Review: Unbelievably compelling story about how the Oakland A's do more with less. Even if you like statistics and strategy and don't like baseball, it's an amazing read. To see how this book has effected MLB, simply look at what the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays have done over the last few years with regard to their rosters.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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