Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
Reading Moneyball, now nine years after it was first released, confirms for me that I, a fanatical baseball fan, am an idiot for having spent the last nine years not reading Moneyball. It's the equivalent of a huge physics and astronomy nerd blowing off reading Stephen Hawking for nearly a decade. Of course, I'm a tool on top of being an idiot since I'm part of the "read the book because of the movie" crowd. Fortunately my new Kindle saved me the disgrace of publicly reading the copy with Brad Pitt on the cover.The story you probably know: a statistical revolution in baseball is shunned from the Old Boys' network of baseball executives and scouts, until Billy Beane embraces it and starts competing with the Big Boys using less than half their payroll and a computer nerd named Paul DePodesta. What's his secret? As with champions of Wall Street, he finds inefficiencies in the market of baseball players. He does so using a new way of valuing baseball players -- more specifically, new statistics. Statistics that indicate increased odds of scoring runs and thus, winning games: walks, on-base percentage, pitching strikeouts. An RBI is the caveman in Billy Beane's evolution of stats.It's interesting to read this book in 2012, now that sabermetrics has officially blown the ceiling off the nerdiness in baseball. Goodbye to ERA, batting average, and saves; WAR, VORP, wOBA, xFIP, RC -- these are the new altars before which baseball geeks kneel. And actually, when you sift through the ridiculous math required to arrive at these stats, by God, they make sense! We can now quantify the value of a player over his replacement (VORP) and the amount of runs he created (RC) due to every action he performed at the plate, on the basepaths, and in the field. I find it fascinating, so it's no surprise I found this book to be as well.The main reason I'd been blowing off reading this book is a simple question I'd stubbornly refused to investigate myself: why should I read a book glorifying Billy Beane and the Oakland A's when they never won so much as an AL pennant? No World Series trophies are displayed proudly in Oakland as a result of Beane's genius. The obvious answer: for a stretch, the Oakland A's posted regular season win totals which rivaled and exceeded teams who paid two or three players as much as Oakland paid its entire team. If nothing else, those A's teams are a blueprint for all the whiny Pirates, Royals, Twins and Blue Jays fans braying about the impossibility of competing with the Yankees.There's another reason I find it interesting to read this book in 2012. Billy Beane took over as GM of the A's after the 1997 season. Here's how the team fared from then until the release of this book:1997 65-97, 4th AL West1998 74-88, 4th AL West1999 87-75, 2nd AL West2000 91-70, 1st AL West (lost ALDS)2001 102-60, 2nd AL West (lost ALDS)2002 103-59, 1st AL West (lost ALDS)The book came out. Then,2003 96-66, 1st AL West (lost ALDS)2004 91-71, 2nd AL West2005 88-74, 2nd AL West2006 93-69, 1st AL West (lost ALCS)2007 76-86, 3rd AL West2008 75-86, 3rd AL West2009 75-87, 4th AL West2010 81-81, 2nd AL West2011 74-88, 3rd AL WestBilly Beane is still the GM of the A's. What happened to his strategy? It stopped working, or at least as well as it had. One obvious thought: Moneyball blew Billy Beane's secret. To that I would say yes, and no. His secret started spreading before the book. Beane's pal, JP Licciardi took over the Blue Jays and employed a similar practice. So did Brian Sabean in San Francisco. Though they didn't enjoy much long-view success either (until the Giants' World Series win in 2010), employing a renewed approach toward evaluating baseball talent probably at least put a dent in what Beane was trying to do for his own club. The diamonds in the rough previously known only to Billy Beane started to be seen by others. Then Theo Epstein, a Beane disciple, took over a Red Sox team that actually had money and now has 2 World Series. He just became GM of my beloved Cubs. This is exciting.Reading Moneyball ten years later also meant all the prospects, all the diamonds in the rough Billy Beane was discovering in 2002, were ten years older. His picks are now scrutinizable. And unfortunately for Billy Beane, it reveals the unfortunate truth that making shrewd GM moves at the MLB level is one thing, while applying his theories to prospects is another.The book focused in particular on Jeremy Brown, a fat catcher from Alabama to whom 29 MLB teams paid no attention in the days leading up to the 2002 MLB draft. But Billy Beane did, and picked him with one of his several 1st round picks. Beane saw an on-base machine, a player who would help win games. What does history say? Jeremy Brown was, in fact, exactly a .300 hitter in his MLB career. He went 3-for-10 in 2006, and retired in 2008.Here's a list of players Billy Beane picked in the 1st round of the MLB drafts from 2000 to 2008: Bobby Crosby, Jeremy Bonderman, John Rheinecker, Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, John McCurdy, Ben Fritz, Jeremy Brown, Steve Obenchain, Mark Teahen, Brad Sullivan, Brian Snyder, Lauren Geminder, Landon Powell, Cliff Pennington, Travis Buck, James Simmons, Sean Doolittle, Corey Brown, Jemile Weeks.How many have you even heard of? I follow baseball more than the average bear, including minor league and college prospects, and I've only heard of a handful of them. There's one All Star in the whole bunch, Swisher, and the book makes clear he would've been a 1st round pick regardless.The dirty little secret about Moneyball, unbeknownst to anyone in 2003, is that Billy Beane (or rather, Paul DePodesta's computer) doesn't seem to be very good at identifying future productive MLB players. Part of this certainly is his inability to pay the ransom demanded by the agents of top prospects. But Beane's entire strategy is based on identifying guys who are productive in certain statistical categories. In his early years as GM, that was easy enough: just look at the stats of established MLB and AAA players. To sustain his success, he needed to also predict which prospects would develop into guys who would produce the stats he wanted. Oops. Maybe his secret did irretrievably get out. The 2002 Oakland Athletics had a handful of All-Stars, only one of whom (Barry Zito) was drafted using Beane's thinking. Today's A's teams, more often than not, send an annual guy to the All Star Game thanks to the default "at least one guy from each team" rule. Still, this doesn't take away from the overall discussion in the book about the new statistical approach to baseball, which I really enjoyed. I look forward to keeping it in mind as I continue down the road of hapless baseball fan.
Well, its kind of about baseball. Its more really about Billy Beane and how terrific a GM he is and, as an extra bonus, he is so much like the swell guys on Wall Street who have it all figured out. Well kinda. You see, the Oakland Athletics were/are a "poor" ballclub. They do not have the cash of teams like the Yankees or Red Sox so they can not afford much in the way of scouting and even if they do scout they do not have the money to sign the best players (actually I mean the players the rich team want, so forget the word "best")... free agents or anyone else. So they had to come up with something different.They did. They said they would use "stats" and look at things other teams did not look at... like On Base Percentage... and sign those guys. This did two things. First, it cut the expense of scouting (you do not need to pay so many real people to go see real players), but then they could not afford much of this anyway. Second, they could hire someone to pour over numbers on a PC and "Voila!" they got scouting! And its cheaper!!OK, it worked. Kinda. That is until the rich ballclubs hired stat guys with PCs too. The Red Sox hired the best stat guys around. Guys who are famous in the stat world. Guys the Oakland team could not afford. The rich teams said "If it works for Oakland, we will really throw a ton of money at it and it will work EVEN BETTER for us!!" (It really didn't but that's another story.)See, baseball is a business that works like this: If you have good success with something, then everyone else copies it and your good success isn't good any more on account of now everyone is doing it and the rich clubs do it better than you do on account of they have all the money. They still sign the "best" players because like anyone the "best" players want as much money as possible for being the "best" players. (This is not a new thing either... goes back to 1901 at least).Every so often a poor or losing club will come up with a new idea because they want to win and the old ideas are not working or just cost too much. Owning minor league teams, signing players from the Dominican Republic or some other country, guys who hit tons of homers, guys who stole lots of bases, guys who get lots of walks... these were all new ideas at one time and once a team has good success, it becomes a "Revolutionary Idea!! That Changes The Game!!" because everyone else follows and does it too, figuring that is the quickest road to good success. Then those new ideas just become the way everyone does it and the poor or losing clubs need to come up with another new, revolutionary idea that changes the game.Now, to the book. Its OK, but I think the author does not know much about ballclubs and rather too much about Wall Street. Beane's idea worked for a time but was not all that revolutionary or fantabulous to begin with. The stat stuff has been around for a long time for basic scouting and player contract negotiations.... like since at least 1908, probably even before that but I can not remember right now. That Beane concentrated on OBP (On Base Percentage) ain't a particularly new idea either (may I introduce you to John McGraw and Connie Mack). Using PC's and stats has been around in ballclubs since the 80's. I do not really grasp what this author thought was so great. Its just a guy running a poor ballclub that needs to come up with a new idea. For Bill Veeck it was a midget, the Yankees got Babe Ruth, Whitey Herzog got speedy guys... there's always a new idea. Some work, some work for a while and some don't work at all.An OK read, but no news here. Maybe his Wall Street books are better. This one was not so good.
What do You think about Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game (2004)?
If you're a baseball fan, you'll really appreciate this book. It is more or less a primer on the way the emphasis on statistics has come to prominence in many circles around the sport, and provides insight into some of the seemingly more arcane terms around the sport, such as OBP, OPS, VORP, etc. It's really quite valuable in that regard.It has also come to represent the term for the organizations that embrace this approach to scouting, although that assessment is not entirely accurate. The book focuses on Oakland Athletics' General Manager Billy Beane and the way he has been able to field a consistently competitive team despite a lack of resources available to other teams around the league. It just so happens that the approach he used (valuing On-Base Percentage over traditional means of measuring a player's worth, drafting lower ceiling college players as opposed high school players with more upside but also more risk, etc.) was not being employed by other teams. In other words, Beane's approach is to find what is undervalued around the league and exploit that to the benefit of his ballclub. At the time of this book's publishing, that entailed the methods described above. However, these days that is not necessarily the case, yet the specific traits Beane looked for in players at that time has come to be known as the 'Moneyball' approach, whether that is appropriate or not (I lean towards 'not').Many traditionalists (I'm looking at you Joe Morgan) dismiss the book and Beane's methods, but are erroneous to do so. It's an interesting read and should be required for any true baseball fan, if only to see what all the fuss is about. It's become bigger than it should be--it's no better or worse than some of Lewis's other profile-type books--but is a solid, interesting read.
—Patrick
A couple cons:The writing’s a little heavy-handed in places, which might just be a hazard of writing about baseball. Ex: “The batter’s box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.” Plus, as a poet, I always feel guilty reading books like this when I could/should be reading Proust or Shakespeare…But:Overall, I really enjoyed Moneyball, and I’m glad I read it. Even though it’s focused on the emergence of new baseball-thinking, Moneyball seems much more comprehensive, and much more narrative than I expected. Essentially, Lewis tells the story of a new way of thinking about baseball. Bill James, this smartypants non-athletic geek, challenges the traditional way of thinking about baseball, subverting “the foolishness of many conventional baseball strategies.” With the most pitiful bank account in the AL West, Oakland A’s listen to James, apply his theories, and improve exponentially. “Conventional baseball strategies” includes such nonsense as: discouraging plate discipline, encouraging recklessness, and pooh-poohing walks ( I’m still shocked to know that drawing walks used to be, and sometimes still is, considered a failed at-bat). Anyway, James, The A’s, and now the Red Sox, operate—thrive—by challenging conventional thinking and looking for ways to locate and manipulate inefficiencies in the baseball market. They rely on stuff like logic and math to evaluate performance, rather than the good-ole’ traditional scouting system (drafting/evaluation based on non-quantifiable qualities like hunches, scout observation, the player’s “presence”). Although there’s still some problems about what this actually means and how to implement or manipulate stats, it’s clear to me that math and logic beats out chutzpah. Things about Moneyball I particularly enjoyed, and think you will too: --Anytime Lewis discusses the language of baseball. (BTW, for an awesome book about baseball language and signs, read Dickson’s The Hidden Language of Baseball).--Issues of the value of and tensions between emotional and intellectual intelligence, or lack thereof, in baseball—Lewis tell of scouts ranking a player with “personal problems,” such as psychological issues and jail records on the same plane as a player who’s “too smart”(!). Then he writes: “Physical gifts required to play pro ball were…less extraordinary than the mental ones. Only a psychological freak could approach a 100mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head without total confidence.” (I like thinking about this when I watch games now.)--Even though Billy Beane’s sort of the *star* of the story, I found Bill James’s, Chad Bradford’s and Scott Hatteberg’s stories especially, surprisingly, endearing. --Challenges to unchecked tradition, which basically run through the whole book. This includes questioning insider baseball journalists, talking heads, Bud Selig, Joe Morgan & co. What can I say?—-Selig & Morgan might not actually care about Lewis’s jabs at them...but reading them does kinda fill me with glee.
—Caroline
This is one of the best baseball books I have ever read, and that is saying something. Lewis’ focus is on Billy Bean, the GM of the Oakland Athletics. Because Oakland is a small-market team, Bean must use his brain to tease out the players who can help his team, at a reasonable cost. This makes him a sort of anti-Steinbrenner. Lewis goes into some detail on how Bean manages to field competitive teams almost every year under dire fiscal constraints. Must-read for any true baseball fan, and a source of hope for fans of small-market teams. The film version was a top-notch interpretation of the book, a lovely surprise.
—Will Byrnes
