Customer Reviews

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

5 star:		(35)
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3 star:		(8)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

‘Moneyball’ is the story behind the recent success of the US baseball team the Oakland A’s. For years baseball has been dominated by the richer teams, leading many to conclude that it was possible to simply spend your way to success. However, one team, the A’s, consistently put together winning seasons despite being one of the poorer clubs. Lewis’ book argues that the A’s success was due to precise application of economic thinking to baseball, both to the analysis of plays on the field and the money off it. It contrasts the A’s management approach with the ‘old guard’, who are more prepared to trust their instincts and experience, rather than game theory. The clash is fascinating, and I suspect that it could be applied to any number of sports.
The book begins with a dramatic clash between old and new thinking when it comes to drafting young high school and college players. It goes on to argue that it is lunacy for decisions about assets (players) worth millions of dollars to be in the hands of anyone other than economically minded people. Baseball is a sport that can be broken down into statistical categories more than any other, but Lewis argues that specific categories of stats have been systematically over- and under-valued over the years. New statistical analysis emerged in the late 1970s, but was ignored by the ‘old guard’ until the A’s management adopted it, allowing them to develop a clearer picture of a player’s worth and spot bargains that everybody else overlooked. Subsequently the A’s won as many games as clubs three times richer than themselves.
It is unfortunate, in one sense, that this book is about baseball. I am a fan, but to the other 99.9% of Brits who don’t know anything about the game, I think that the amount of jargon may render the book too obscure. This is a shame, because this is a genuinely fascinating and important sports book that is written for our generation, with the central question: when is a sport a business, and the people that run it businessmen? The answer given in ‘Moneyball’ is ‘all the time’, a conclusion that has generated a storm of controversy in baseball. In addition, Lewis cleverly weaves in the human story behind the new thinking in the shape of Billy Beane, originally a highly touted young player who was highly touted for all the wrong reasons, and subsequently was the first baseball administrator to adopt the new thinking partly, we are told, to avoid the sort of costly mistake that his own career had been.
This could be one of the most important sporting books of the current era, with its underlying questions about sport and business. It is also very well written and the human stories (of Beane and other players) are intertwined well with the theory. If you are a baseball fan then read this. If you are a sports fan feeling brave enough to tackle the baseball jargon then read this. It would be a shame for it to go unread on this side of the atlantic because it is dismissed as a ‘baseball book’, because it is more important than that.

Lewis, who previously wrote some of the best books on Wall Street's go-go '80s (Liar's Poker) and Silicon Valley's go-go '90s (The New New Thing), here turns his attention to professional baseball. Now, I should preface this by saying that I used to love baseball and these days it doesn't interest me much at all. There was a time when I was a total stats geek, I bought all the Bill James abstracts, played tabletop games, etc., but a combination of playing in college and the escalating money completely turned me off to the game. I knew this was supposed to be a good book but had no intention of reading it until Nick Hornby's rave review in his column in The Believer. I figured if one of my favorite British novelists liked the book, there must be something to it. I picked it up and within ten pages I was totally hooked.

The basis for the book is the question of how the Oakland A's, one of baseball's poorest teams as measured by payroll, managed to win so many games in the first few years of the new millennium. Lewis's potentially boring answer revolves around inefficiencies in the market for players, but he weaves this story around the A's General Manager, Billy Beane. Now, if you have some axe to grind with Beane, you might as well not read the book, 'cause Lewis tends to be rather fawning in many places. Still, Beane's own background and mediocre career form the perfect framework upon which to build this story about evaluating baseball talent. Beane was a hugely athletic, "can't miss" prospect, who turned down a joint football/baseball scholarship from Stanford to sign with the New York Mets out of high school. His pro career turned out to be utterly undistinguished, and this disconnect is what drove him to seek new methods of scouting and evaluating baseball talent. It also helped matters that the A's new owners refused to spend any excess money, and demanded that the team be treated as a business. Beane jettisoned conventional scouting wisdom (and to a certain extent, methods), to focus on statistical indicators not widely followed inside baseball. Here, the book takes a detour into the realm of "sabremetrics" (the statistical analysis of baseball), and various attempts to arrive at more meaningful ways to calculating a player's offensive value.

The result of developing a criteria of player valuation that was radically at odds with the prevailing wisdom of the market was that Beane was able to get the players he liked for very cheap. The rest of the book is devoted to detailing this process. Chapter 5 is probably the best, detailing how the A's orchestrated the 2002 amateur draft so that they got an inordinate amount of players they coveted for below market value. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the loss of their three star players after the 2001 season and how managed to compensate for this. To show the Beane methodology in action during the season, the reader is taken inside several trades and roster moves. This includes a chapter on the mid-season trade for relief pitcher Ricardo Rincon, bracketed by chapters detailing Beane's pursuit of certain players who were not considered major-league material (Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford). The book ends on a valedictory note, as the A's set a record by winning 20 games in a row and other teams start to buy in to their methods.

It should be noted that the book is far from perfect. Lewis has an unfortunately tendency for repetition when it comes to important points and themes, hammering them home, again and again. And although he does point out many of Beane's logical inconsistencies and emotional flaws, Lewis does often come across as more of an enamored fan than a strict journalist. Some critics feel that the A's success detailed in the book was based on several star players obtained the old-fashioned way, thus disproving the whole premise. However, it has to be understood that the practices detailed in the book can't really be proven to work one way or another for another decade or so. Still the insights into challenging conventional thinking and searching for alternative data or data patterns will likely appeal to readers of Lewis' other works and are applicable far beyond baseball. And while the jury is still out, several other teams have since hired general managers with the same basic philosophy as Beane. Ultimately, it's an interesting story, and one that Lewis tells very well -- even for non baseball fans.

Moneyball is ostensibly a book about Baseball, superfIcially a book about the Oakland A's (equivalent of Bolton Wanderers under Sam Allardyce) and their General Manager (equivalent of a 'Director of football') Billy Beane in the late 90's/early Noughties and how a club with scarce financial resources consistently out-performed its more wealthy rivals and it is! But it is so much more than that, this book has more layers than an onion.

On one level this is a book about Baseball and a maverick who subverted the consensus view on how the game should be played and understood but on a deeper level this is a case study of an idea. It is behavioural economics as applied to sport.

The book demonstrates how Billy Beane used the insights of a Baseball statistician named Bill James (a cipher for Nobel winning behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman, author of 'Thinking, Fast and Slow'?) and the practical mathematical genius of Paul Podesta (a Harvard graduate with no Baseball experience) to outsmart his competitors.

'Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to Baseball...... Paul wanted to look at stats because the stats offered offered him new ways of understanding.....That was James's most general point: the naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games.'

On one level level this is an old-fashioned David vs Goliath story but on a deeper level it is a book about two competing views of human nature. The view being triumphed in this book is that of 'behavioural economics.' In short, that human beings are inherently irrational. Trusting one's gut, or intuition, is inherently flawed and is subject to systematic biases/limitations/flaws/illusions which can only be rooted out by a sophisticated analysis of relevant statistical data.

The author Michael Lewis is really an economics writer and what he has managed to do is something that many writers (including Daniel Kahneman, whose writings in my opinion tend to be turgid in the extreme) seem unable to do, and that is:- make seemingly complex ideas come alive by embedding them in real-life situations with real people. Moneyball is a great sports book but it is also popular social science writing at its finest too.

It was Michael Lewis that kept me going through this book which, in the hands of many other authors, would have been interminable. Pages of statistical analysis - or that's what it felt like - would be hard going for even many baseball fans, and it's interesting that Lewis doesn't ponder this point in his story of how the numbers, the stats, don't lie whereas baseball folklore often does. It's not that we might argue that our instinct for what constitutes talent on the sporting field wilts against a proper, rigorous, statistical analysis, it's more that we can't be arsed with the boredom of delving deeply into the numbers. Where's the fun in that? If a computer can pick the best baseball team then many fans would think the game wasn't worth playing.
Lewis builds his story methodically, about how a baseball team used a practical, science based system to beat the bigger, richer teams over several seasons. They didn't let anything get in the way of the stats that they felt were important - not their own opinions, gut feels, personal bias or lucky hunches. The numbers were all. In the same way that the best traders in the city could exploit subtle market inefficiencies that the numbers pointed to, baseball afforded the same opportunity. If it could be measured, it could be managed, and baseball stats could be measured. All it took was someone to manage them.
It's Lewis's portrayal of the people behind this story that keeps it going. He is good at drawing pictures of larger than life characters who take risks that lesser mortals would flinch from. It worked in Liar's Poker - let's face it, a story about number crunchers - and it works here. You are kept going because you want to find out what happens to these guys. Or at least I was, because I don't have a clue, and could care less, what a baseball batting average of 0.234 might be.
I suspect that this might be one of those rare occasions where a film is better than the book. I mean, I quite enjoyed this story, but it isn't thrill a minute stuff. A movie might illustrate some of the key points better. But I hope the book leads people to one thing, to look up on Amazon the Warren Buffet of baseball stat analysis, Bill James. That way, they might come across the British crime novelist of the same name who is cruelly undervalued and could do with the success that Michael Lewis deservedly has had as an author too!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It follows the Oakland A's baseball team through the 2002 season, looking at how their innovative ideas have helped a poor club punch above its weight. I am not a baseball aficionado, though I know the basics, but the book was easily followable, in terms of the 'technical' terms used, though it did help to have Wikipedia open.

The lessons of the book can be applied to so many fields, including my own (education).

If you like economics, finance, sport or statistics; this is the book for you.

Expertly written and gripping from the start, Moneyball opens you up to how stats can be effectively used in sport. I knew nothing about baseball but still found the book easy to follow and logical, and the story of the Oakland A's and Billy Beane is both enthralling and fascinating.

Easy to read; and so good I missed my train stop reading it!

Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, takes as its central focus the exploits of the Oakland A's and their svengali general manager Billy Beane. Ignoring conventional baseball wisdom, he and Paul DePodesta have developed a whole new strategy, using the groundbreaking work of the likes of Bill James, for competing in the big leagues on a fraction of the budget of teams like the New York Yankees.

In essence this very readable book can be divided into two distinct styles, the personal and the scientific. When Lewis addresses the history and use of baseball theory, that is to say statistical analysis in the judging of players and games, he creates a sense of an almost academic approach to a national passtime. While this could be utterly confusing to a non baseball fan, to anyone with an interest in the game his discussions come as something of a revelation and can only serve as a starting point to further reading.

But where this book really comes into its own is in the personal stories and psychology of Billy Beane and his team. While it is made abundantly clear that Beane is no ordinary GM, the insight this book provides into the workings of a front office and its relationship with both the playing staff and management is utterly compelling.

All in all, for a baseball fan this is an absolute must read and for everyone else, you are guaranteed to find something of interest.