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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (Paperback)
by Michael Lewis
| Category:
Baseball, Sports, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
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¥ 148.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
This engaging saga of the Oakland Athletics by Michael Lewis is about baseball, of course, but also about entrepreneurship and leadership. |
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Author: Michael Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. in: April, 2004
ISBN: 0393324818
Pages: 320
Measurements: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00084
Other information: Reprint edition
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- Awards & Credential -
The #1 National Bestseller in North America ranking #491 in books on Amazon.com as of December 21, 2006. |
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- MSL Picks -
Let's get one thing straight: this book is NOT about baseball. Being a baseball fan I suppose it's easy for me to say this and having heard and read this work endlessly discussed by baseball fans and pundits over the last 18 months it would be simple to conclude the opposite. But make no mistake: baseball is incidental here. Mr. Lewis' work concerns itself much more with metaphysics.
For the uninitiated, metaphysics is (generally speaking) the science of existence: what IS vs. what IS NOT. This book is a beautifully written example of how a few men use ideas based on what IS to consistently triumph over those who ignore and belittle these ideas. Because this book illustrates this dynamic with a popular sport and some colorful personalities - thereby spreading the gospel to an even wider audience - I would give the book six stars if I could.
The chief colorful personality is baseball executive Billy Beane, who runs an obscure and relatively poor (money-wise, thus the ironic title) team known as the Oakland A's (Athletics). To the astonishment - and occasional frustration and envy - of everyone from everyday fans to the commissioner's office, the A's consistently win more games than teams with several times their player payroll, reaching the league playoffs several years in a row. Beane accomplishes this extraordinary feat by acquiring players whose qualities other teams ignore. Leaving aside some crushing detail, these qualities are relatively simple: they've been proven - rationally, logically, statistically - to help a baseball team win games.
So given Beane's track record why don't more teams follow his lead? Lewis makes the answer plain: baseball doesn't function by reason. Teams routinely sign high school players to huge contracts - though history shows a frighteningly small chance of them ever reaching the majors. Scouts grow emotionally attached to prospects with "great stuff." Managers call certain plays not because they will help the team win, but out of fear, to be seen as "doing something" and not be second-guessed later. And the list goes on. Beane's counterparts display a consistent and vapid ignorance of metaphysics. They don't care what IS; they play by baseball's century-old mythical and emotional rules. Using a more rational approach, Beane -incidentally a pretty emotional guy who admits to Lewis that he constantly fights being "subjective" - runs circles around them.
Michael Lewis entertains us with this tale so well that he often has to remind us of his central premise. But remind he surely does; probably the best aspect of the book is his relentless emphasis on the creativity and courage shown by Beane and his cohorts. Rather than simply relate the results, Lewis takes us into the A's locker room, giving us player and management interviews under almost every conceivable condition. He even listens in on a player and a few coaches questioning the team's system -thereby showing Beane's approach has hardly stifled debate. Even better, Lewis has done his homework: he shows how Beane relies heavily on an analysis method ungainly known as sabermetrics, initially developed by Bill James in the 1970s and later expanded by Voros McCracken and others. This rational approach to baseball analysis is nearly as historically rich as it is radical.
The only quibble I have with Mr. Lewis is perhaps an insufficient emphasis on the sheer novelty of sabermetrics - especially compared to the downplayed methods employed by baseball's richer teams. In a new afterword added for the paperback edition, Lewis explains how he was genuinely shocked at the reaction to his book among the sport's oligarchy. His response is hilarious - dubbing the baseball establishment "The Women's Auxiliary Club" - but he might have known better. Showing how one team (now up to a few, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, new employer of Beane's ex-right hand man, Paul DePodesta) bucked decades of subjective irrationality to become a resounding success was bound to ruffle some feathers.
'Moneyball' was a pleasure to read on many levels and while I rejoiced in the triumph of its rational premise I'll admit to my own subjectivity. I've been an Oakland A's fan for over thirty years and I can't help feeling positively giddy about my favorite team - poor, undervalued, and scrappy though they are--consistently beating the sport's arrogant royalty (including the clueless commissioner) at their own game. I'm eternally grateful to Mr. Beane for building the team and to Mr. Lewis for showing how it was done. A sincere 'bravo!' to both.
(From quoting Stephen Johnson, USA)
Target readers:
Baseball fans, people interested in sports economics, executives, managers, and entrepreneurs bent on leadership, innovation and change management, as well as general business readers.
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Michael Lewis is the author of the bestsellers Liar's Poker and The New New Thing. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their two daughters.
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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).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it - before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?
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?
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The first thing they always did was run you. When big league scouts road-tested a group of elite amateur prospects, foot speed is the first item they checked off their lists. The scouts actually carried around the checklists. Tool is what they called the talents they were checking for in a kid. There were five tools: The ability to run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power. A guy who could run had “wheels”; a guy with a strong arm had a “hose”. Scouts spoke the language of auto mechanics. You could be forgiven, if you listened to them, for thinking they were discussing sports cars and not young men.
On this late Spring day in San Diego several big league teams were putting a group of prospects through their paces. If the feeling in the air was a bit more tense than it used to be, that because it was 1980. The risk in drafting baseball players has just risen. A few years earlier, professional baseball players had been granted free agency by a court of law, and, after about two seconds of foot-shuffling, baseball owners put prices on players that defied the old commonsensical notions of what a baseball player should be paid. Inside of four years, the average big league salary had nearly tripled, from about $52,000 to $150,000 a year. The new owner of New York Yankees, George Steinbrenner, had paid $10 million for the entire team in 1973, in 1975, he paid $3.75 million for baseball’s first modern free agent, Catfish Hunter. A few years ago no one thought twice about bad calls on prospects. But what used to be a thousand-dollar mistake was rapidly becoming a million-dollar one.
Anyway, the first thing they always did was run you. Five young men stretch and canter on the outfield cabgrass: Darnell Coles. Cecil Espy. Erick Erickson. Garry Harris. Billy Beane. They’re still boys, really; all of them have had to produce letters from their mothers saying that it is okay for them to be here. No one outside their hometowns would ever have heard of them, but to the scouts they already feel like household names. All five are legitimate first-round picks, among the thirty or so most promising prospects in the country. They’ve been culled from the nation’s richest trove of baseball talent, South California, and invited to the baseball field at San Diego’s Herbert Hoover High to answer a question: who is the best of the best?
As the boys get loose, a few scouts chitchat on the infield grass. In the outfield Pat Gillick, the general manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, stands with a stopwatch in the palm of his hand. Glustered around Gillick are five or six more scouts, each with his own stopwatch. One of them paces off sixty yards and marks the finish line with his foot. The boys line up along the left field foul line. To their left is the outfield wall of which Ted Williams, as a high school player, smacked opposite field doubles. Herbert Hoover High is Ted Williams’s alma mater. The fact means nothing to the boys. They are indifferent to their surroundings. Numb. During the past few months they have been so thoroughly examined by so many older men that they don’t even think about where they are performing, or for whom. They feel more like sport cars being taken out for a spin than they do like young men being tested. Paul Weaver, the Padres scout, is here. He’s struck by the kids’ cool. Weaver has seen new kid panic when they work out for scouts. Mark McLemore, the same Mark McLemore who will one day be a $3-million-a-year outfielder for the Seattle Mariners, will vomit on the field before one of Weaver’s workouts. These kids aren’t like that. They’ve all been too good for too long.
Darnel Coles. Cecil Espy. Erick Erickson. Garry Harris. Billy Beane. One of the scouts turns to another and says: I’ll take the three black kids (Coles, Harris, Espy). They all dust the white kids. And Espy will dust everyone, even Coles. Coles is a sprinter who has already signed a football scholarship to play wide receiver at UCLA. That’s how fast Espy is: the scouts are certain that even Coles can’t keep up with him.
Gillick drops his hand. Five born athletes lift up and push off. They’re at full tilt after just a few steps. It’s all over inside of seven seconds. Billy Beane has made all the others look slow. Espy finished second, three full strides behind him.
And as straightforward as it seems - what ambiguity could there possibly be in a sixty-yard dash? - Gillick is troubled. He hollers at one of the scouts to walk off the track again, and make certain that the distance is exactly sixty yards. Then he tells the five boys to return to the starting line. The boys don’t understand; they run you first but they usually only run you once. They think maybe Gillick wants to test their endurance, but that’s not what’s on Gillick’s mind. Gillick’s job is to believe what he sees and disbelieve what he doesn’t and yet he cannot bring himself to believe what he’s just seen. Just for starters, he doesn’t believe that Billy Beane outran Cecil Espy and Darnel Coles, fair and square. Nor does he believe the time on his stopwatch. It reads 6.4 seconds – you’d expect that from a sprinter, not a big kid like this one.
Not quite understanding why they are being asked to do it, the boys walk back to the starting line, and run their race all over again. Nothing important changes. “Billy just flat-out smoked ‘em all,” says Paul Weaver.
When he was a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything. He was so naturally superior to whomever he happened to be playing against, in whatever sport they happened to be playing, that he appeared to be in a different, easier game. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, Billy was a quarterback on the football team and the high scorer on the basketball team. He found talents in himself almost before his body was ready to exploit them: he could drunk a basketball before his hands were big enough to palm it.
Billy’s father, no athlete himself, had taught his son baseball from manuals. A career naval officer, he had spent nine months on end at sea. When he was home, in family’s naval house, he was intent on teaching his son something. He taught him how to pitch: pitching was something you could study and learn. Whatever the season he’d take his son and his dog-eared baseball books to empty Little League diamonds. These sessions weren’t simple fun. Billy’s father was a perfectionist. He ran their pitching drills with military efficiency and boot camp intensity.
Billy still felt lucky. He knew that he wanted to play catch every day, and that every day, his father would play catch with him.
By the time Billy was fourteen, he was six inches taller than his father and doing things that his father’s books fail to describe. As a freshman in high school he was brought up by his coach, over the angry objections of the older players, to pitch the last varsity game of the season. He threw a shutout with ten strikeouts, and went two for four at the plate. As a fifteen-year-old sophomore, he hit over .500 in one of the toughest high school baseball leagues in the country… |
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Weekly Standard, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
May be the best book ever written on business. |
San Jose Mercury News, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
An extraordinary job of reporting and writing. |
Dan Ross, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
You need not be a baseball fan to appreciate Michael Lewis' MoneyBall. Lewis tracks Oakland A's GM Billy Beane, who built a series of powerhouse ballclubs with a major handicap. Despite having a payroll that was petty cash to teams like the Yankees, Beane's clubs excelled. A series of excellent finishes, culminating with a playoff series that took the Yankees to the limit, solidified Beane's reputation. But how did he do it?
Beane's unconventional methods were the key. Using Bill James (of Baseball Abstract fame) as an inspiration, the A's GM hired the best and brightest statisticians and dispensed with the conventional wisdom of opinionated scouts. So what if a college catcher had a "bad baseball body"? Beane didn't care. He was concerned with metrics like on-base-percentage, which turns out to be much better at predicting major league success than a scout's biased opinion.
Dealing with players as business units, each with measurable ROI (return on investment), Beane bought low and sold high. If a closer cranked out a bunch of saves, Beane figured he could trade the pitcher for higher value than he was really worth. Saves were a misleading statistic: strikeouts, walks, and home-runs-allowed were really the only true ways to measure a pitcher's performance. A "superstar" was simply a stat-generating machine and if the same amount of money could be leveraged on someone else that could yield similar stats, why not make a trade?
In retrospect, like all great ideas, Beane's tenets are remarkably simple. It's just interesting that it took baseball over a century to figure out that stats like ERA and RBI were pretty much meaningless. What mattered were stats that historically proved to be predictors of baseball victories: on-base-average and slugging average for batters, for instance. A quick, fascinating read, MoneyBall is an elegant look at a smart GM and his godfather: Bill James. |
Trevor Seigler, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
In Moneyball, author Michael Lewis sets out to show how you can win as a major-league franchise when your roster looks more like the Bad News Bears than a professional outfit. Whether or not he convinces you the reader of his purpose is up to you (I don't necessarily agree with it), but it makes an interesting and illuminating read.
In many ways, it is an alternative history of baseball in the modern era: in a time when home-run sluggers are prized above all else (nevermind how they got those homers), the Oakland A's of Billy Beane take a different tact. Smallball is king in Beane's view, one that he formed while as a member of the Oakland management team. Beane's own brief career is documented by Lewis, as well as the rise of baseball stats guru Bill James and the cult of numbers he helped inspire (sabremetrics). Beane is one of the few baseball men who not only reads James's theories, but tries to apply them to his team.
The story almost speaks for itself: at the time of writing, the A's had managed to continuously appear in the playoffs. Doubters will scoff that Beane's methods fail in the long run: where are the World Series rings? The fact that a small-market team like the A's can manage a run like they have, with the limited resources they have, seems to be overshadowed by that glaring lack of wins when it counts.
And so, without denying the veracity of James's arguements as they are presented in the book, I personally didn't buy Beane's approach. Too often, it seemed, Beane and his cohorts were reducing the game on the field to a series of continuous data sheets, typing out the player's ability to get on base over their ability to hit home runs or run the bases. While it's good to try and overthrow some of the baseball "traditions" that have actually served to harm the modern game, Moneyball offers a solution that is almost "scorched earth" in its approach: throw out the old rules and concentrate on stats previously ignored.
On some level, Moneyball doesn't necessarily champion Beane's approach, but Lewis plays into the hands of the A's by (inadvertantly by his postscript account) making Beane out to be a wizard at figuring out the game. This is the same Beane who traded Johnny Damon to the Red Sox (readers in the post-Red Sox Series win last year could be forgiven for laughing a little at Beane's short-sightedness). This is the same Beane who traded two of his "big Three" pitchers in the past offseason. This is the same Beane who struggles to manage what little cash he has, and he is prone to mistakes. While Lewis doesn't shy from that side of the equation, he almost never addresses the failures of Beane's system as much as its successes. There is something unique about Beane's approach, that is for sure. But Lewis almost destroys his own arguement by leaving out those details that don't fit with his hypothesis.
Also, for a baseball book Moneyball is totally lacking in terms of giving the reader a "feel" for the team in question. Beane and his hired helpers are (rightly or wrongly) the focus of the tome, to the exclusion of players like Barry Zito or Tim Hudson. In a way, it's misleading to list it as a "sports book"; it would be a more accurate fit on the business list.
All in all, Moneyball is a flawed but necessary read for those wondering what modern sports culture is all about. You come away from it feeling some sympathy for the way Billy Beane has to run his business, but you don't get a feel for the players affected by that business. You never really see the success on the field; you just get Beane and Lewis telling you "it works". That part of the equation keeps me from endorsing this as accurate or solid. But it will challenge your view of our nation's pastime for the better, as you learn what smaller teams have to sacrifice in order to surivive. |
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