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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

"Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. In a narrative full of characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-budget Oakland A's visionary general manager Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge -- sights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money. "The best book of the year, [Moneyball] already feels like the most influential book on sports ever written. If you're a baseball fan, Moneyball is a must." -- People"

Customer Reviews:

• Revolutionizes the way that you think about baseball
  So I'm a big fan of fantasy baseball. And for those that are as well, you know that playing the fantasy game changes the way you look at everything. Moneyball has the same effect. It just revolutionizes your outlook on the game of baseball. The "important" stats like RBIs and runs are replaced with really important ones, like OBP and pitches per at bat. No name guys like Scott Hatteberg become cogs that make teams great.
  
  Michael Lewis crafts a book that is engaging on several levels -- to the baseball fan, the economist, and the statistician.
  
  Ever wonder why we give more credit statistically to a guy that bloops a single just out of a poor fielder's reach vs. the guy that smashes a homerun, but is robbed by an amazing leaping catch? This book answers those sorts of questions. And it does so through the amazingly in depth looks at the mind of Billy Beane, the genius that built the A's, renowned for their ability to find talent that other teams miss.
  
  I would highly recommend this book to any fan of baseball on any level. It's a truly great book, and one that will leave you feeling a bit like you stumbled upon a little known secret. You'll suddenly rush and start analyzing the latest pickups of your favorite team. You'll feel compelled to run out and follow the career of guys you'd never heard of before reading the book (and hint...they don't get on SportsCenter that often...). No regrets after reading this, and I promise it will be staying on my shelf for a long time....more info
• Excellent insight into the real game
  I must confess - I'm not a huge fan of baseball. Indeed I purchased this book for my father. However, once I began skimming the book - I became hooked. I read it cover to cover in only a couple days. This book showed 21st century statistical methodology as it is brought kicking and screaming into the game of baseball. I find it amazing to believe that any major league operation would not have changed its system of evaluating talent after this book became published, and yet given the entrenchment of old fashion beliefs, its probably still the case. Even if you are not a fan of the game - but have an appreciation for excellence in operational management - this book is an excellent read....more info
• Baseball Market
  I found this book fascinating. I had read Michael Lewis' earlier book "Liar's Poker", about his dealings on Wall Street. What struck me most was how he brought his free-market capitalism frame of reference to the world of Major League Baseball and found that for a small group avant-garde managers, the same basic rules apply. Buy low, sell high, don't listen to market hype, and never get emotional. This book might be disturbing to people who have a lifetime love of the pure game, but Major League Baseball is also a business and has to be acknowledged as such....more info
• Sports Fan unfamiliar with Baseball
  I love sports. I love business, finance, and statistics. I've never been a baseball fan. This book was very well written to appeal to a very broad audience with a wide variety of backgrounds on the topic. The principle observations are delivered through expert story telling around very compelling central figures.
  
  Without flowery language or paragraph after paragraph of adjectives - Lewis recounts experiences and conversations with such clarity that you can almost see, smell, and hear the scenes unfolding.
  
  I won't look at baseball or the exploitation of market inefficiencies the same after having read this book. I'd recommend this book to anyone with intellectual curiosity....more info
• The business book for my generation
  The "new era" of business analytics will be forced to address the harnessing of never-before-seen data storage and processing capabilities. "Moneyball" may focus on applications confined to a kid's game, but the lessons drawn from Billy Beane and company's success can be extended throughout modern business. This book made me believe in the power of statistical analytics. ...more info
• Leadership Classic
  Lewis's MONEYBALL is impossible to put down because it is speaks as much to leadership as it does to baseball. The key premise is that instead of worrying about what you do not have, do all you can with the resources you do have.
  
  Worthy of its praise and glowing reviews. A great read. ...more info
• A must read for any fantasy baseball player
  This is a fantastic look of baseball that takes the reader beyond the inside of the managers office, but inside the managers head. It won't give you any secret tips that will put you over the edge, but it'll teach you how to think about the game in a smarter, more concrete way.
  
  Lewis doesn't forget that he's writing a book meant to be enjoyed - either. It is fun to read, giving real stories to players and letting them grow into characters. The individual stories in it are told in their voice, with the author simply pulling the tale along rather than jamming his thoughts into a book....more info
• Very good book, but probably better for baseball fans
  I would disagree with some other reviewers... this is a fantastic baseball book, now a few years old (they discuss the 2002 MLB season in detail) but still very, very pertinent to the current baseball climate, and explains a LOT, not only with the way the game is played on the field, but off as well. It is a good business book as well. without laying it on too thick.
  However, one really needs to have more than a passing interest in baseball. It helps to already know what on-base and slugging stats means from the beginning of the book, for example. There is a lot of discussion of the minor league life, which tends not to appeal to people just looking for a business book and just go to games occasionally. So, this is a terrific book, but one needs to have some interest in the subject matter first....more info
• Non Fiction
  An intelligent sports book, a bit of a rare thing oftentimes.
  
  It takes a look at a team with less money trying to find ways to get the most out of what they have. This involved an executive looking to do things differently and an assistant with some statistical acumen, and willingness to research.
  
  Basically, they find out that drafting young teenagers is silly, drafting grown men with proven skills from college or other leagues makes more sense, and that a lot of drafting is handled in an amateur fashion.
  
  It gives some player examples, but basically he found that defensive ability and speed was overvalued, so went looking for hitting and strikes.
  ...more info
• Excellent
  CDs were in great shape. I got them within a few days of ordering....more info
• Amazing book for every level of baseball fan
  First off, this is not a book by Billy Beane, or anyone in the Oakland Athletics organization. This is a look at the use of Sabermetrics in baseball, originally thought up by Bill James, and how it can be used to help evaluate talent, and give you an edge in an unfair game, as the title states.
  
  Reading this book, whether you are a casual or avid baseball fan, gives you a whole new look at the game of baseball, the way it is played, and the way teams are run. It breaks away from the norm, and shows that it is not the size of the payroll you have on your team, but how you use the money you have. Also, it is set a few years back, and it mentions some of the players that were scouted and drafted by Beane and his staff. It is nice now to read it, and see how these players have panned out.
  
  Again, great book, flows very well, and I would recommend that if you are even a little interested, you pick this book up in a second. ...more info
• A well written myth
  In the mid-1990s, the owners of the Oakland Athletics slashed their payroll. Their past GM, Sandy Alderson, decided that he needed to build talent from within. Four first rank players emerged from this effort, three infielders and one pitcher. In the late 1990s, new GM Billy Beane continued this effort and developed two more first rank pitchers. The "Big Three" pitchers and the three infielders created the nucleus of a team that - despite their low payroll - won a lot of games.
  
  In the mid-2000s, all but one of those six players left the A's because of salary considerations. The effort to build from within hasn't yielded the successes of the 1990s. The team now loses a lot of games.
  
  That's the story of the A's in a nutshell. The moral of this story is that if a team can get lucky it can build from within for a few years and win. But eventually, the team has to pay out the money to players. It's not much of a story unless you're a baseball fan. I am.
  
  Mr. Lewis, who is a good writer, took this basic story and embellished it with a myth. The A's supposedly had a magic formula for success. They found players that others didn't because they used an unusual methodology. The A's GM Billy Beane was elevated to the level of a genius.
  
  The thesis for this book is just plain wrong. It's entertaining to read, but it belies facts.
  
  The book focuses on the annual draft in 2002 when the A's were able to pick 7 out of the first 39 players. Supposedly, the A's unusual methods would have yielded both easy to spot gems and diamonds in the rough. They didn't. The draft eventually produced one second rank pitcher, one second rank outfielder, and one middle-talent infielder, none of whom play for the A's. The A's methods at finding young talent have been, as of late, not particularly good.
  
  It was a good thing that this book came out when the A's were winning. It was the equivalent of writing a story about a craps player with a "method" who has an unusual run of good luck. If all goes well, the story comes out before the luck runs out. That's what happened here. But in hindsight, this book looks just plain silly....more info
• A must-read for any baseball fan.
  How did Billy Beane consistently win 101 games a year with a payroll 1/2 that of the Red Sox and 1/3 that of the Yankees? It couldn't all be luck. According to Moneyball, it wasn't.
  
  While it is a must-read for baseball fans, non-baseball fans will enjoy this well-written David over Goliath tale as well....more info
• A Brilliant Achievement
  Aristotle once argued that there are three main purposes to art and writing: to teach, to delight, and to inspire. Rare is the book that accomplishes all three but Michael Lewis's "Moneyball" does exactly that: it is all at once a readable economics textbook, a classic good guys versus bad guys page-turner, and an edifying epic.
  
  "Moneyball" is the story of three obsessive-compulsives -- Bill James, Billy Beane, and Paul DePodesta -- who re-imagined baseball from a game of stars and heroics into one of numbers and discipline.
  
  An unemployed self-declared baseball critic Bill James understood that baseball statistics weren't just numbers and trivia: they were fundamentally a myth and a morality that sought to explain the game. Consider the statistic "error" which sought to eliminate luck from the game, and is a moral statement on who is at fault. This statistic, like most statistics in baseball, Bill James argued, was pig-headed, wrong, and irrelevant: it neither discounted luck from the game nor properly accounted for why a team won nor helped predict if they would win.
  
  So what does? Here Bill James turned from critic to metaphysic: what really is baseball? It's a game where each team must score as many runs as possible without getting three outs. In other words, while great fielding is beautiful to watch, baseball is fundamentally an offensive game, and Bill James discovered that "on-base percentage" (the times a hitter gets on base divided by the times a hitter goes to bat) and "slugging percentage" (the number of runs a team generates each inning divided by the number of batters a team sends to the plate each inning) were the best indicators of a team's future performance.
  
  Of course it didn't matter if Bill James was right or wrong because he was irrelevant. Baseball was a club that was dominated by those who played the game. Players became coaches and general managers and sports commentators, and they all thought alike and treated baseball as a sacred temple only they could access. Since the mid-eighties fantasy baseball players had taken James and made him into a self-publishing phenomenon, and amateur baseball theorists who counted among them expensively-educated and expensively-paid statisticians were constantly proving and refining James' theories -- but who listened to geeks anyway? The revolution needed to come from within, and it did.
  
  Billy Beane should have been a baseball Hall of Famer -- with his build and athletic prowess he could have been the baseball Hall of Famer. That's what baseball scouts kept on telling him, and while Billy Beane did make the major league his heart really wasn't into baseball, and he was only a little above mediocre. At age 28 -- usually the prime of a baseball player's career -- he did the unthinkable, quit playing, and asked for a scouting job in the Athletic A's organization. And while Billy Beane was a member of baseball's sacred fraternity he had first-hand experience that they could at times be all wrong, and when he became the Oakland A's general manager he began systemically to prove that they were in fact all wrong.
  
  As general manager Billy Beane hired a Harvard number-cruncher Paul DePodesta to implement and refine Bill James' theories. DePodesta made the critical insight that "on-base percentage" was three times as important as "slugging percentage," and used this new knowledge to draft college baseball's most undervalued players. What Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta found was what Bill James had long argued: that the market for baseball players was incredibly inefficient. Players who could get on base and wear out an opposing pitcher -- a team's most important contributors -- were underpriced, and the players who could hit jaw-dropping home-runs after striking out many times and make terrific catches that nevertheless did not alter the inexorable logic of the game were overpriced. By exploiting this market inefficiency Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta created one of baseball's most winning teams on one of baseball's smallest budgets.
  
  And Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta saved some of baseball's best players from obscurity. Take, for example, Chad Bradford, one of baseball's most consistent closers. But why did no teams want him? He threw underhanded. Baseball teams couldn't dispute the facts -- Chad Bradford was a winner -- but in the end they decided aesthetics were more important than facts.
  
  Then there's Scott Hatteberg, one of baseball's smartest players, and definitely the most patient and disciplined: for him baseball was a mental game, and as the game's most consistent hitter he wore down opposing pitchers by raising the ball count, gleaming valuable information in the process. What was his problem? He wasn't man enough -- not aggressive and reckless enough in the batter's box. In other words he didn't strike out enough -- and it was again Billy Beane who saw the absurdity of mainstream baseball's reasoning and snapped up Scott Hatteberg as soon as he could.
  
  In many ways "Moneyball" is even more "Fountainhead" than Ann Rayn's best-selling classic. Like Howard Roark Billy Beane is not a person you'd like to meet. Nevertheless, motivated by his insatiable need to win, he is fighting against the forces of stupidity and unreason, and in so doing making a world a better place. And it is a credit to Michael Lewis's patience and discipline as a writer to just let this great story tell itself.
  
  "Moneyball" is a brilliant achievement. ...more info
• Legendary
  Moneyball changed the face of professional baseball and pro sports in general. It is a very compelling portrait of A's general manager Billy Beane and how he explits market inefficiencies to create a winning baseball team, despite having a small payroll. Highly recommended to all readers....more info
• saberspace
  Baseball is a game that nerds can really enjoy, largely because of the availability of abundant and meaningful statistics. Back in the 1970s the basic numbers could be obtained through books that were published every year, but a small group of super-geeks began looking more deeply into the mathematics of the game and developing their own metrics for rating players. These guys were mostly self-taught statisticians and motivated entirely by an obsessive passion for the game. I'm talking about people like Bill James, who a few decades ago was a security guard who began publishing really interesting and well-written analyses of baseball statistics in his famous Bill James Baseball Abstracts.
  
  Of course baseball is also fun to watch, even for those who don't enjoy crunching numbers in their spare time. That's why it's a multibillion dollar business, and that's where the influence of the Jamesians gets really interesting. The thing is that for the sport's first 100 or so years the process of locating and recruiting talented players was based entirely on the gut instinct of the scouts employed by each team. These guys were mostly ex-players who made decisions based on notions that had nothing to do with (and often conflicted completely with) the available evidence. (The fact that the world is run almost entirely by people who think this way makes this book all the more insightful.)
  
  Moneyball highlights the success of General Manager Billy Beane, who was able to run a very successful team for many years on a low budget by adapting the statistical approach. Interestingly, Beane was a player who was highly touted by the old-school scouts who employed the conventional criteria (which apparently amounted to something like imagining how the player would look on a baseball card). Beane's struggled throughout the 1990s to bring baseball into the 20th century, and he has had a substantial impact on the game, although any fan who watches the sport in 2008 will tell you that old habits die hard....more info
• Baseball management made rational!
  Michael Lewis's "Moneyball" tells the incredible story of how rationality was brought to bear on the management of a Major League Baseball team, the Oakland A's. By rationality I mean that the A's made staffing decisions based not on the gut feelings of their scouts, but on objective evidence that allowed them to predict how much each potential player could be expected to contribute to a winning season. You'd think every team in MLB would be run that way, but there you'd be very wrong.
  
  At it's heart, "Moneyball" is the story of the clash within MLB between the insiders (the coaches, scouts, and managers that use traditional "soft" measures to evaluate players) and the sabermetricians (those who base players' worth solely on hard statistics that correlate with their ability to win baseball games). The A's general manager, Billy Beane, and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, were the first MLB insiders to adopt sabermetrics, a scientific approach to baseball invented by Bill James in the late 1970's. What sets the A's front office apart is that they saw the value of sabermetrics, adopted it as their sole criterion for picking players, and somehow managed to force it on the rest of their organization. Lewis shows how this approach allowed the A's to sign players that all the other teams were uninterested in at incredibly low prices. Yet despite their low payroll, the A's achieved win/loss records comparable to teams spending three or more times as much.
  
  Based on the book's afterward and some of the other reviews I've read here, I think a lot of people have missed the book's main point. It's not that Billy Beane and his assistants invented sabermetrics, that they have found a guaranteed way to win, or even that all the players they picked should be expected to become stars. Rather, "Moneyball" makes a compelling argument that their approach allows them to exploit the inefficiencies of the market to staff a team that has the highest likelihood of winning given the relatively limited dollars available for players' salaries. Baseball is a game of odds. Beane and company have simply found a way to maximize the expected wins-per-dollar ratio.
  
  I'm no baseball fan, but I found "Moneyball" engrossing. I learned a lot from this book -- not only about baseball, but also about the often irrational ways people assign value to things. Perhaps due to his own Wall Street background (see Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street), Lewis draws illuminating analogies between financial markets and the market for baseball players.
  
  This is the book that should have changed Major League Baseball, but instead the baseball establishment reacted with outrage and derision. How irrational.
  ...more info