Moneyball
The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
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4.5 • 39 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be "the most influential book on sports ever written" (People), but "you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it" (Janet Maslin, New York Times).
One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Review Best Book of the 21st Century (So Far)
Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games?
In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers 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). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of 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 numbers 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 had 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. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted.
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?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
To say Michael Lewis’ Moneyball is one of the most significant sports books ever written isn’t hyperbole—it’s fact. Lewis spent the year of 2002 observing how the Oakland A’s and their maverick general manager, Billy Beane, were conducting business—and changing the game of pro baseball forever. A small-market team with limited resources, the A’s used advanced analytics to find low-cost players who often had escaped notice but, when grouped together, would form a highly successful team. Ridiculously controversial when it was first published, this eye-opening book now serves as modern baseball’s origin story. It’s fascinating to read along as Lewis witnesses this revolutionary approach coalesce into the new normal, all in real time. Establishing principles that have since been widely adopted even in industries outside of baseball, Moneyball functions not only as a slice of sports history but as an invaluable template for outside-the-box thinking.
