Moneyball by Michael Lewis

10/10

Simply put, one of the best books ever. I read this in less than a week with rabid obsession. I love baseball about as much as anything, so this book was right up my alley. However, a quote by Nick Hornby of The Believer in the opening page makes a case for the appeal of this book even for those who aren't big into baseball: "I understood about one in four words of Moneyball, and it's still the best and most engrossing sports book I've read for years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode." It is also a business book, and a good one at that. Mark Gerson of The Weekly Standard is quoted on the back cover thusly, "Moneyball is the best business book Lewis has written. It may be the best business book anyone has written."

The book contains some of the coolest, most interesting and unique statistical analysis I've seen. Stuff, even as a baseball fan, that I'd never really thought about. The book focuses on the Oakland Athletics and how they continue to outperform teams who have way more money to spend than the A's do. The A's run their team like a business and look at certain numbers that they have learned are accurate gaugers for players. They worship on-base percentage, walks, not stealing bases, not squandering outs through sacrifice bunts, and don't care about strike outs compared to other outs. Awesome. The upper management runs the show and decides on the strategies the team will implement, not the coaches. They ask, "In what other business do you leave the fate of an organization to a middle manager?"

The book is about the A's obsession with learning "the minute events within the event." And that's why I worshipped it. How much does a batter's batting average drop after a first-pitch strike? What percentage of pitches out of the strike zone do players swing at? How much money per win do teams pay? There's this awesome part where the A's want a certain relief pitcher and want to get rid of one of their own. He finds out which teams want the relief pitcher he wants, so he offers those teams his pitcher for a pretty sweet and alluring deal. They bite and are taken out of the running for his guy who he ends up getting. Not bad. This book is unbelievably entertaining and I could go on about it for some time.

Too many good quotes, here's a few:

Bill James, a sweet baseball stat guru: "Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. It might be that a reporter, seeing every game that the team plays, could sense that difference over the course of the year if no records were kept, but I doubt it. Certainly the average fan, seeing perhaps a tenth of the team's games, could never gauge two performances that accurately - in fact if you see both 15 games a year, there is a 40% chance that the .275 hitter will have more hits than the .300 hitter in the games that you see. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible - it is a matter of record."

"Assembling nobodies into a ruthlessly efficient machine for winning baseball games, and watching them become stars, was one of the pleasures of running a poor baseball team."

"The market for baseball players was so inefficient, and the general grasp of sound baseball strategy so weak, that superior management could still run circles around taller piles of cash."

"It was more efficient to create a closer than to buy one...You could take a slightly above average pitcher and drop him into the closer's role, let him accumulate some gaudy number of saves, and then sell him off. You could, in essence, buy a stock, pump it up with false publicity, and sell it off for much more than you'd paid for it....Jason Isringhausen's departure wasn't a loss to the Oakland A's but a happy consequence of a money machine known as 'Selling the Closer'".

Billy Beane: "Relievers are like volatile stocks. They're the one asset you need to watch closely, and trade for quick profits."

"The difference between 1-2 and 2-1 in terms of expected outcomes is just enormous. It's the largest variance of expected outcomes of any one pitch...People talk about first-pitch strikes. But it's really the first two out of three." This is a quote from an Ivy League dude named Paul who is the main stat guy and a huge part of the A's organization.

Scott Hatteberg: "When you go to the plate, it's about the only thing you do alone in baseball. Here they have turned it into a team thing."

P.S. A movie is coming out with Brad Pitt as Billy Beane. Ha ha, good stuff.