Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Rating:
Summary: So many ways to enjoy this book
Review: Here is a book that can be appreciated from so many different angles. For fans of baseball (which I'm not) the allure is obvious. For fans of statistics, this book offers amazing insight into how numbers can be employed in real life with very pwerful and very real results. For fans of human nature, this story offers a great look at how mistakes can be repeated and then perpetuated until someone with a strong mind and a stronger will comes along to break the cycle. And for fans of character-driven stories, Moneyball, like any Michael Lewis tale, has that in spades too.

If any of that sounds good to you, give this one a try.

Rating:
Summary: Even if you don't like baseball, it's a must-read!
Review: First off, I'll confess I detest the game of baseball. I can't watch it on TV, and if I make it to the seven-inning-stretch of a live game it is due to a combination of free tickets and a good conversationalist in the next seat.

That said, I've enjoyed Michael Lewis' "Liar's Poker," "Next," and "The New New Thing." So I gave it a shot.

Michael Lewis manages to make the economics of baseball interesting entertaining by following Billy Bean's management of the Oakland A's, winning a tough division despite a cripplingly low budget for player's salaries. Economics itself is a difficult subject to make compelling prose of, but Lewis proved he could do that from his first book.

For someone who finds himself disgusted, not so much with the amount of money in professional sports, but the inscrutable way that money is distributed among owners and players, it is exciting to read about a guy doing what EVERYONE in pro sports says is impossible. It's not David and Goliath with some sort of divine intervention or freakish streak of luck: it's David beating Goliath by being willing to look at the problem a different way.

This is an excellent book for anyone who is fascinated with the debunking of conventional wisdom, or who loves seeing someone make the unjustly wealthy look flat-out stupid.

If you're a baseball fan, especially one who roots for an underdog or small-market team, I can only imagine that the book would be that much better.


Rating:
Summary: One of the best baseball books of all time
Review: Lewis has written what is one of the top 5 baseball books of all time.
The book, unlike what some baseball broadcasters have said, is not exclusively about Billy Beane. It focuses on the Oakland A's and their different way of viewing the potential of baseball players by using statistics such as on base percentage and not simply using scouts to provide judgements based upon watching the player play in a few games. The book if it was written a couple years later could have just as easily been written about the Boston Red Sox, which adopted this statistics based approach after Theo Epstein took over as general manager. Lo and behold, the Red Sox after 84 years of futility, won a World Series largely because of this new way of looking at baseball.

The book also provides a wonderful historical background for this approach and isn't written like the reader has a degree in mathmatics. Every theory is well explained for the average person who hated and struggled through high school statistics to understand. A historical background for the theories used by Beane and the Red Sox, and as mentioned briefly in the end of paperback edition, later the Blue Jays and the Red Sox, is provided. One of the main characters in the book, Bill James, is the father of many of these statistics and the way of looking at baseball used by Beane.

The book also isn't just about boring baseball statistics either. Lewis goes into depth about why Beane looks at baseball the way he does. According to Lewis, it's because Beane was a player that, according to the old way of looking at baseball using scouts and data such as 40 yd dash times, was a can't miss prospect. The scouts ignored statistics that would have raised red flags about Beane's major league prospect status. Beane never rose above a major league bench player. This experience, according to Lewis, drives Beane to never make the same mistake that major league general managers made in drafting him so high.

If you're a baseball fan and want to understand how the Oakland A's have won all those games in recent years even after losing players like Miguel Tejada and Jason Giambi, read this book. After reading this book, you'll also come away with some idea of why Beane traded away two of his best pitchers this offseason too.

Rating:
Summary: Really Enjoyable for Sports Fans or Managers
Review: If you ever have to evaluate performance in any field, or if you are ever evaluated yourself (and this includes virtually all of us), then you should find this book fascinating. Lewis gives us an inside look at the evaluation of baseball talent, and shows us the many ways that people are under- and overrated. Just imaging the difficulty of evaluating performance in fields where there are not dozens of objective statistics. How far off are your evaluations of your subordinates, or your supervisors evaluations of you.

Rating:
Summary: An absolute must-read
Review: Any baseball fan must read this book. It's the story of former super-prospect and current super-GM Billy Beane, the low-budget but successful Oakland A's, and one interesting but not transcendent 2002 season, but it's not about the man or the team or the season. It's a basic philosophy that seems intuitive but is practiced too infrequently: a GM must seek out what is undervalued in the baseball market. So this is all about finding out what is valuable in baseball, defining this great game and what makes a good player. Sabermetrician or not, whether or not you agree, this book should be read by every baseball fan.

Rating:
Summary: New way to access talent and win......
Review: As the Boston Red Sox fan, I found this book to be utterly interesting. The book tells the story of how the money poor Oakland A's managed to fielded a winning team year after year on a budget which is only the third of the many of their rivals. Oakland's General Manager, Billy Beane have developed a new system of accessing talents and getting them cheap. In essence, it all about statistics, theories and possibilities that defied the traditional way for accessing baseball talent.

Of course, as a Red Sox fan, I found this book to be a great interest because the Boston General Manager, Theo Epstein, is the great believer and follower of Billy Beane School of Thought on accessing talents. But unlike Beane, Epstein can applied this concept with a big checkbook and the result I believed was the glorious Red Sox victory of 2004.

I think after reading the book, I believed someone like Epstein can applied the lessons of Beane and make it work more effectively with a big bankroll. Beane on the other hand, have to let go of players he developed as their demand for a larger paychecks continued. Thus lies Beane's great trap in life. He can maintained a winning team but probably never get to the next level because he can't hold on to what he have developed. The next level is, of course the World Series Championship.

A great book for any Red Sox fans out there. It may give us a clue on what Epstein is thinking about when he is giving out contracts, or rejecting a player or getting new player. If not a Red Sox fan, the book is still highly educational in the revolutionary way baseball is changing in front of us.