Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
by Michael Lewis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael LewisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-04
ISBN: 0393324818
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Book Review: An Opus for Sabermetrics
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading this book twice over, I am surprised that Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane decided to reveal his operations and modus operandi to Michael Lewis. This is especially since the book exposes some unflattering portrayals of other teams, GM Beane's views on how make trades (illuminating how he operationalizes who to trade for, motivations, tactical and strategic intentions, etc.), organizational management style, which will likely encourage future GMs with Billy Beane's ambitions to keep journalists with masters degrees in economics at shoulder length distance.
Lewis's book can be delineated in two parts. One, a semi-historical breakdown of the rise of "moneyball," which is an adaptation of the theories of baseball historian and statistician Bill James. This is an approach, something we baseball stats geeks call `sabermetrics,' that concentrates heavily on the use of objective, quantitative analysis of baseball talent, based on a faith in statistics, and the privileging of certain statistics (like on-base percentage, OPS [on-base percentage plus slugging percentage], strike-out-to-walk ratios [for both hitters and pitchers]), which supposedly gives baseball executives and managers a better way of assessing players' skills. Lewis does an excellent job of chronicling the problems that James' quantitative approach experienced in becoming accepted in the mainstream (something I can attest to, since I was one of those who read James' Baseball Abstracts back in the 1980s and remember my own baseball coaches warning in those days against taking too many pitches), how there still exists an old-boys club amongst baseball's elite against moneyball, and how people like Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane helped in breaking down those barriers and employ James' theories on a small market team.
Basically, the moneyball approach is a euphemism for the way small market teams like the Oakland A's can stay competitive by drafting smart, expending what resources it has on player development, with a strong organizational encouragement for hitters to concentrate on home runs and on-base percentage (and pitchers to record outs). In essence, it is a baseball application of the old market investment strategy of buying low and selling high. You buy low by looking not for the five-tool players all the other teams want. Instead, you look for the player who may be a little slower, but who has excellent plate discipline, a little home run power, and a pitcher that simply gets people out (without focusing solely on the speed of that prospect's fastball). You sell high by trading these commodities you've drafted, developed, and allowed to blossom over to large market teams for new talent, money, extra draft picks, and the kind of other resources you can not depend on when your team ranks near the bottom of the league's payroll.
The second part of the book is a dissection of the day-to-day operations of the Oakland Athletics under GM Beane. This includes numerous stories on Beane's idiosyncrasies (he doesn't like watching the games his team plays in), his borderline egomania, and how he utilizes the moneyball approach in the everyday functions of his team--in how the front office judges talent, the manner in which it attempts to manipulate hitting styles on its minor league teams (with a focus on walks for batters and use of other teams' reclamation projects on its pitching staffs), judging minor league talent before the draft, etc.
In hindsight, Beane's forthrightness was the most refreshing and surprising part of this book. It's not every day that you hear a baseball GM declare that they only attended church on Sundays because they were hedging their bets. The portrayal of the front office of the Mets and Orioles take a hit in this book (with big market teams who constantly trade for overpriced players seen as a cash cow for clubs like Beane's A's). The draft was also an interesting foray into something that is often ignored in Major League Baseball, as opposed to the extravaganzas that the NFL and NBA drafts have become (this is due in part because the MLB draft is conducted during the season).
:Observations:
Overall, this is an excellent book, although I have one reservation, and that is while Lewis does a remarkable job of illustrating the moneyball vs. old boys club split in baseball, in the process he gives short thrift to the old boys club (again, presumably because of his obvious sympathetic portrayal of the A's and those like-minded believers in the moneyball approach). However, there are numerous criticisms of moneyball, even from a quantitative perspective, which deserves credit. For starters, moneyball ignores or does not give much credence to the importance of the fundamentals of the game (such as bunting, base running [since people like GM Beane consider the stolen base to be generally detrimental], and defense [just read the travails of Ron Washington in trying to turn guys like Jeremy Giambi and Scott Hatteberg into a passable fielders]). Lewis defended the A's post-season ineptitude as a statistical aberration, but you can not ignore how fatal this was for them in the 2003 ALDS against the Red Sox (a series the A's could've easily won had several of its players knew how to adequately field the ball and run the bases). This does not mean you have to go back to the 1985 Cardinals and the era of small ball to win in post-season play, but you only have to look at the way Eric Byrnes ran the bases in the 2003 ALDS to understand the cost of not stressing your players being able to take an extra base, or at least run them properly.
Moreover, by ignoring defense and base running, moneyball underestimates the value of running speed. As ex-St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog notes, running speed is one of those few attributes a player can use on both offense and defense. This goes into the other big weakness of the quantitative approach in baseball. While the use of statistics in baseball is pretty effective, albeit not perfect, in measuring offense, it is less than admirable and complete in aptly measuring the value of defense and pitching. Lewis does try to answer some of this by showing how the A's even attempted to quantify the number of runs it was surrendering by giving up centerfielder Johnny Damon (yes, Red Sox fans, yours is not the only team he's ever played for). The problem with fielding and pitching, though, is that it is purely dependent on where the pitcher pitches the ball and where the hitter hits it. Zone Rating may do a good job of measuring the fielder's ability to get to a ball hit in (at least to this point) his fielding zone, but we have yet to solve the problem of who dictates how that baseball arrives there (and how hard or softly that ball is hit in a particular zone, its angle, etc., the kind of information that can possibly skew statistics). Is the game being determined by the pitcher (at which point pitching statistics become more important) or the hitter? Moneyball implicitly sides with the hitter, but only because pitching statistics are still rudimentary and dependent on variables with numerous externalities (and with sample sizes that are sometimes much too small and subject to non-randomized circumstances).
Still, on the whole, Moneyball is a fantastic book in its in depth coverage of the subjects, Lewis's insider access into the daily lives and workings of a baseball team, as well as knowledgeable explanations of the statistical components to the game (and by extension the moneyball approach). Also appreciated is that this book shows the rise of a method that was for over two decades outside of the mainstream, but is now every bit a part of the game of baseball (with the A's, Blue Jays, Red Sox, even the hated Yankees, employing fellow moneyball enthusiasts in its front offices). If anything, one can only wonder about the possible future of moneyball in Oakland, as more teams begin to apply Beane's successful approach, thereby sapping the talent pool of those gems in the rough his organization was so successful at developing over the years.
Summary of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written 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).
With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities?his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission?but 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 geek numbers show?no, 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 has 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.
Billy paid attention to those numbers ?with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.
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?
"One of the best baseball?and management?books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."?Forbes
Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.
Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe
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