Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Michael Lewis

Mar 2004 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times).

One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century

Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games?

In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.

What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted.

In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Ratings and reviews

Was this a book about baseball? Was it about business? Was it about manipulation of athletes and their temperament? Moneyball is about all of the above and more. Lewis gives us personal concepts that surround the career of one Billy Beane who managed the Oakland Athletics into contention with undervalued players with various qualities, both hidden and obvious, and astonishes the ‘club’ of baseball insiders with his methods, methods that are brought to him by non-insiders and computer nerds arriving on the baseball scene with non-traditional baseball skills that have countered the tradition: the namesake that is baseball. This book is so well written that many ‘insiders’ actually thought that Billy Beane was the author and not Michael Lewis. See Joe Morgan pages 271 – 273 and 293 for proof. The computer delivers statistics for every possible event and outcome that can happen on the field of play; those stats, until Billy Beane put them to work had been the work of one Bill James who started keeping statistics while he watched over the assembly line and storage of Stokely Pork and Beans and their plant’s operations. His first book was a mimeographed document that sold 75 copies. Mr. James is the forerunner of all that Billy Beane and his Harvard graduates hold sacred: all those bloody stats that baseball fans are inundated with and always will be. Statements like, “Every form of strength is also a form of weakness.” And “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty; their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never say.” All the proceeding is from Bill James. Lewis also winds up this documentary with financial theories that he is noted for in his Wall Street work as a Bond Trader for Goldman Sachs prior to becoming a full-time writer as evidenced by yours truly in Liars Poker and shorter pieces that I have read. He writes in this baseball book, “In the early 1980’s, the US financial markets underwent and astonishing transformation. A combination of computing power and intellectual progress led to the creation of whole new markets in financial futures and options. Options and futures were really just fragments of stocks and bonds, but the fragments soon became so arcane and inexplicable that Wall Street created a single word to describe them all: “derivatives.”” (p131) And with gems like, “Relievers are like volatile stocks. They're the one asset you need to watch closely, and then trade for quick profits.” If you’re a player in business and/or sport this is a great read. Gary McDonald 1941 --

As he is apt to do, Michael Lewis has written book that, on its surface, appears to be about a relatively narrow subject -- in this case, Billy Beane's and his minions' unorthodox approach to running the Oakland Athletics. In reality, the book is about much more. Lewis shows us how a small group of persons willing to challenge the traditional ways of thinking in one of America's oldest sports was able to produce outsize results for an organization that possessed little in the way of financial resources. While almost all will find it entertaining, all the "oddballs" out there who enjoy the challenge of finding new and better ways of analyzing and executing will find it to be inspirational as well.

Good read. A behind-the-scenes look at how baseball has transformed from a watch-it and learn type of game to strickly a game of numbers. Focusing in on the Oakland A's system, the author follows Billy Beane's manic self throughout - although never sees him in the weight room during games. A brief history of Bill James's discovery and a focus on particular players gives the book life and brings personalities into the subject while always reminding the reader that it's the stats, not the players (or their salary), that dictate the outcomes of games. Recommended.

About the author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.