Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game [Paperback]

If you love the underdog, you will love the story of the Oakland Athletics from the last few years. I enjoyed this book a great deal, racing through it in a couple of days. Lewis has done a great job of showing just why the Oakland Athletics have been competing with the New York Yankees the past few years. The revealing chapters on Oakland's draft strategies and approach to trading show their general manager, Billy Beane, to be a guy who is flying by the seat of his pants, trying to eke out any tiny advantage he can, getting the most from every single dollar he spends on his team.

Although this book will appeal to any disciple of baseball analysts like Bill James and Rob Neyer or the Baseball Prospectus team (all who receive positive mentions in this book), I found the moments where the book dwelled on the statistics and theory to be very dry and boring. Luckily, there was probably on 20 or so pages of this in the entire book, and the rest of the time it concentrates on the more human side, the psychology and the baseball. The chapters devoted to two individual players who became successful despite the odds were particularly enjoyable.

Overall this is an essential book for any baseball fan. Traditionalists may balk at some of the ideas and thoughts contained, but any baseball fan with an open mind will find it a joy.

This is a good book about a fascinating story. In a nutshell it is the story of Billy Beane and how he defied conventional baseball wisdom. Billy Beane was (is) the general manager of the Oakland As, a relatively poor, small market team attempting to complete with the big boys (the New York Yankees) with only a small fraction of the budget.

How could he compete? His approach was to eschew the conventional view of what a good baseball prospect is and to use the statistical methods developed by Bill James et al to help him get good players at a reasonable price. The story is made more poignant because Billy was a 'great' prospect' who only managed a fairly mediocre career - essentially his method means that he is only interested in players who are not like him. For example: he favoured college players over high school players (for one thing they have played for longer so there are more statistics, for another they are statistically more likely to succeed); he believed that on-base percentage was the fundamental baseball percentage and was not something that could be easily taught. Finally he had the nerve to put it into practice.

The style of the book is highly anecdotal, which works well most of the time, particularly in the chapters about the unlikely success of certain players, but it does occasionally grate. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I think that he includes just about the right amount of statistical detail - enough to be interesting; not so much as to become tedious.

In many ways the most interesting thing about the book is the reaction from the Club (as he calls the collection of baseball 'insiders') - who seem to a) not really understand the book and b) hate it because they are the custodians of conventional wisdom.

Highly recommended for baseball enthusiasts and sports fans in general

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 all armchair sports fans think 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 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 everybaseball 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