When was moneyball published

Prior to Mr. Beane's time as General Manager, players were evaluated by scouts and those scouts based their evaluations on classic statistics and what they saw. Billy Beane used new statistical evaluation tools and methods to evaluate players and constructed winning teams repeatedly.

He took advantage of the other teams unwillingness to adapt to his way of evaluating players and was consistently able to sign the players he wanted. The strategy utilized by Beane and his proponents may produce a more efficient style of baseball, about that I am in no position to quibble. However, to repeat, I find the emphasis on this approach to result in a game that is much less fun to watch.

View all comments. Mar 01, Matt rated it really liked it Shelves: journalism , sports. Baseball, as has often been noted, is a game predicated on failure.

A game season presents a tremendous sample size, which should iron out aberrations; and yet year after year, entire seasons come down to a single bad bounce or mistimed swing or hanging curve or missed call. You can spend an entire summer of lazy days drinking beer and cheering for your win team, only to watch them sputter and die in a five-game series in October.

That man is Billy Beane, the general manager of the small market Oakland Athletics. After the season, however, they lost three key free agents, including all-around masher and later-admitted PED user Jason Giambi. Instead of looking simply at the time-honored statistics of batting average, home runs, and RBIs, he turned to more obscure figures like on base percentage OBP. He believed that getting on base more-closely correlated to wins than any other metric.

Getting my almost-two-year-old to fall asleep every night has become an epic battle of wills. If you leave the room before she is sound asleep, she will hop up in her crib and unleash a sound akin to the war cry of the orcs on the Pelennor Fields. Then, once you get her to sleep, she will randomly wake up screaming as though her Daniel Tiger doll has caught on fire. The only way to ease her into unconsciousness is to sit with her. I sit with her in a dark room reading with a headlamp. Moneyball proved to be perfect for this task.

It is fast paced, perceptive, and filled with memorable character sketches. Lewis has an uncanny knack for making his readers feel smart.

He can take complex subjects and boil them down with such ease that you start to feel like you can learn anything. Of course, one of the knocks on Lewis is that he is an over-simplifier. Lewis is a gifted storyteller. As such, he tends to find idiosyncratic characters upon which to hang his story. Beane proves to be a good choice. He ia a former ballplayer, a highly touted 5-tool athlete who became a high draft pick and a major bust.

It is easy to see how his failures as a player made him eager to find a better rubric for evaluating talent. Beane, however, did not create the sabermetric movement. In this area, he stood on the shoulders of giants math nerds. The godfather of advanced statistics is Bill James, founder of the self-published statistical compilation Baseball Abstract.

Lewis rightfully devotes an entire chapter to James and his acolytes, many of whom were hired by various Major League teams. They devised a new model; Beane implemented it.

Moneyball was originally published in , and has since been made into a motion picture. When the book first came out, it angered a lot of people in Major League Baseball. The popularity of Moneyball helped bring the stat geeks into the mainstream.

Today, advanced statistics are the norm, and even casual baseball articles make reference to wins above replacement WAR , weighted on-base average wOBA , and fielding-independent pitching FIP.

Other teams were using advanced stats. Beane just staked a lot more on it. He also had a great promoter in Michael Lewis. In some ways, his tactics were pretty rudimentary. Hatteberg was an on-base machine, so Beane plugged him into first base, despite having no experience playing there. Today, with advanced defensive metrics, such a move would be even more suspect than it was at the time.

As it turned out, Hatteberg ended up playing decent first base. He also undervalued the bullpen, which looks especially wrongheaded in the age of ace middle relievers and closers. Many of the players mentioned in the book as Beane favorites never quite panned out including catcher Jeremy Brown, who plays a large role. Teams like the Red Sox and Cubs that are known for using sabermetrics also happen to have all the money in the world.

Small market winners like the Kansas City Royals use a different kind of moneyball, by utilizing young, cost-controlled players, valuing defense, and utilizing outside the box thinking, such as their stocked bullpen which effectively shortens games to 6 innings.

The Royals and their manager Ned Yost did employ one quintessential Beane tactic: refusing to bunt or steal. Yost, of course, was disparaged throughout two playoff runs, right up until the moment he won the World Series. This is par for the course in baseball. That is the nature of baseball and life. Bartlett Giamatti wrote. View all 8 comments. Nov 03, Jason rated it liked it Shelves: for-kindle , reviewed , This is a good book, but not as good as I thought it was going to be.

Before that time, very few people in This is a good book, but not as good as I thought it was going to be. Before that time, very few people in baseball had ever heard the term sabermetrics , never mind tried to implement it into a strategy for drafting and trading players—very few people, that is, besides Billy Beane. But still, he was the first general manager in baseball to attempt it, so his story is unique. But why the struggle?

Any baseball fan could tell you how important it is to get on base, that patience at the plate is in fact doubly rewarding as it wears down opposing pitching and draws walks. And walks are huge! They extend an inning by avoiding an out, and they put a man on base which statistically leads to a greater probability of runs scored.

It is simply not worth the calculated risk to try to advance a base runner. So why were these concepts so difficult for baseball operations managers besides Beane to understand? Also, Joe Morgan is a buffoon. I think this is basically old news, but I was still pleased to have my suspicions confirmed. So the story here is definitely interesting, but like I said, the argument in favor of a more objective approach to baseball decision-making is something that I already subscribe to Yeah, Science!

Being a baseball fan, though, there are a few things I did enjoy, specifically Billy Beane trying to steal Kevin Youkilis out from under the noses of the Red Sox brass.

View all 38 comments. Oct 25, Riku Sayuj rated it liked it Shelves: pop-journ-type , r-r-rs. It was a better story before I knew the whole story. Almost every book on randomness I have read had a reference to Moneyball and I had built up my own version about this story I had even told a few people that version!

That is the story I wanted to hear. My apologies to anyone to whom I have spouted this story - it is not true. It is still probable though, when the next radical Billy Beane comes along in sports. View all 12 comments. Jul 22, Diane rated it really liked it Shelves: economics , nonfiction , sports , movie-adaptation.

Michael Lewis hit this one out of the park. I love his writing style -- he is able to explain complex and insider ideas to a layperson, and he makes it interesting. That skill is as valuable to a reporter as a baseball player's on-base percentage was to the Oakland Athletics. The story follows the Oakland A's during the baseball season, which was when their general manager, Billy Beane, was following a different set of principles for assembling a team than the majority of the league.

Beane a Michael Lewis hit this one out of the park. Beane and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, were applying sabermetrics, which meant they were looking for players with certain qualities that the rest of the league had undervalued. The stats Beane and DePodesta were most interested in were a player's on-base percentage and slugging percentage.

The A's experiment worked and the team had a historical game winning streak and made it to the playoffs. By now, the A's analytical tactics have widely been adopted by Major League Baseball, but back in , the strategy was mocked by almost everyone inside the league.

In addition to explaining baseball stats, Lewis makes the story more compelling by bringing in sports psychology, game theory and sharing the stories of statistician Bill James, Beane, and a few key players. Beane had himself played in the major leagues, but he lacked the skills to be a consistent hitter. Beane was recruited out of high school and had to decide between a pro-baseball contract or going to Stanford.

Another interesting story was that of A's first baseman Scott Hatteberg. Hatte had been a catcher for the Boston Red Sox, but after suffering nerve damage in his elbow, he could never catch again. Beane and DePodesta saw in him the potential to be a good hitter and trained him to play first base.

One of my favorite chapters in the book was about Hatte and how thoughtful he was about his hitting. In a great scene, he's in the team's video room watching footage of pitcher Jamie Moyer, who Hatte will be facing later that day.

Moyer was a tough pitcher and Hatte was trying to figure out a strategy. Moyer would know that Hatteberg never swung at the first pitch -- except to keep a pitcher honest -- and so Moyer might just throw a first-pitch strike. But Moyer would also know that Hatteberg knew that Moyer knew. Which brought Hatteberg back to square one. He was knee-deep in game theory, and he had only an hour before he had to play the game.

I think readers who like stories about underdogs would also enjoy it, because it shows how a poor team was able to change the institution of baseball. View all 4 comments.

Shelves: nonfiction , psychology , management , audiobook. For the most part, the is a fun book to read about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team.

The first half of the book was very enjoyable. Toward the end, though, it became a bit repetitive. It's not that the author repeats himself--he does not. It's just that the stories about hiring and trading for good baseball players started to sound all the same after a while. Billy Beane was the general manager during the late 's, early 's. His team was one of the poorest in the For the most part, the is a fun book to read about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team.

His team was one of the poorest in the league, so he found it necessary to do things differently than other teams. He could not afford to pay top dollar for new recruits. So, when it came to recruiting and hiring new players, he decided not to strictly follow the advice of his died-in-the-wool scouts. He often ignored their advice, and listened to the advice of his assistant, Paul Depodesta. Paul was an economist, and used sabermetric principles in making up his recommendations.

That is to say, he combined data with statistical approaches, and uncovered many correlations and relationships that gave Billy Beane a better idea of the relative values of players.

Whereas many general managers listened to their scouts' advice, they would often judge a player not by their playing ability, but by a set of factors; speed, hitting, fielding--and even by their body type, appearance and mannerisms. But, to Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta, one really counts is the data-based evidenced that a player could get himself on base, which is highly correlated with the number of runs scored. And, since the team was starved for cash, Billy Beane often resorted to wily negotiations with the general managers of other teams.

He could not express his interest in another team's player too openly, because that would tip off others about the high value he placed on that player. So, this book is not only about the use of statistics in putting together a superior baseball team, it is also about the art of negotiation, and the wily craftiness involved in getting good deals. The book describes some very interesting characters.

And, it is also about the psychology behind coaching players, and hyping up their self-confidence. I didn't read this book; I listened to the audiobook. It is narrated by Scott Brick. While I have listened to many thrillers narrated with great drama by Brick, this book is not a thriller.

Brick's tendency to over-dramatize seems a bit over-the-top for a book of this sort. He should have toned it down some View all 6 comments. Apr 26, Jay Schutt rated it liked it Shelves: owned , baseball. This just didn't wow me like I thought it would. I guess I just like the play on the field better than the behind-the-scenes action. Feb 01, Jokoloyo rated it it was amazing. The major taxing of this book is not the baseball terms, but there are so many people appeared in the book, and the similarities in names are not helping.

For example, the main protagonist is Billy Beane, and there is another important character whose name is Billy James. That's my only concern when reading this book. Some people maybe not comfortable with the writing style in this book, jumping from one subject to another without smooth main story.

I am not a professional baseball fan although I The major taxing of this book is not the baseball terms, but there are so many people appeared in the book, and the similarities in names are not helping.

I am not a professional baseball fan although I enjoy reading some Japanese high school baseball manga. Pardon my approach, I read this book as if I read a fantasy novel where I don't know the setting or magic system of the story.

And there is magic in this story, called sabermetrics. But as in any good fantasy story, the magic system is one aspect, but a good fantasy story still needs a good plot. The plot is: how the second lowest payroll team could become the team with the highest number of win in American League West in If the answer is simple "by using sabermetrics", there won't be necessary to write such a thick book.

No worry, Billy Beane still had a lot of to do although he was supported by sabermetrics mages behind him. I admit the author could delivery the story in interesting way, sometimes I forget this is a non fiction book. When I check other sources for cross reference, some things don't developed as in fairy tales that I imagine after reading this book.

View 1 comment. Apr 30, Caroline rated it really liked it Recommends it for: Baseball fans of any level; Joe Morgan. Essentially, Lewis tells the story of a new way of thinking about baseball. Things about Moneyball I particularly enjoyed, and think you will too: --Anytime Lewis discusses the language of baseball. Only a psychological freak could approach a mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head without total confidence.

What can I say? Smart people who think outside the box are so much fun to read about. I read this book really fast, and it was enjoyable to read the whole way through. I've never read a Michael Lewis book before, but I might consider reading more now.

He has a simple, clean style that is really efficient at getting his story across, and he has an instinct for the best way to use his material.

And he has some great underlying material here. As he notes in the Afterword which is really great, so if you're going t Smart people who think outside the box are so much fun to read about. As he notes in the Afterword which is really great, so if you're going to read this book, make sure you track down a newer copy that has it included , he didn't set out to write a book about the Oakland A's with GM Billy Beane at its center, that's just where the research took him.

That's where the answer to his initial question was centered, which was all about how the monetary inequalities between baseball teams affected economic efficiency. And yet they were! What follows is a book that can basically be summed up, as the author puts it, "when reason collides with baseball". It boggles my mind how stubborn and shortsighted humans can be.

This book only reinforces my view that people who are capable of adaptation and change, of admitting they are wrong instead of blindly adhering to something just because "that's the way it's always been", are extremely valuable in every aspect of life, not just running baseball teams. Highly recommend this one.

View 2 comments. Oct 05, Ashley Marie rated it really liked it Shelves: baseball-sports-etc , audiobook-would-recommend , adaptation-loved-it. Really enjoyed this, partly because reading a baseball book in October when your team is in the playoffs gives you a great high and partly because I was surprisingly and honestly fascinated by the science of sabermetrics.

Science and math have never been my strong points, but like Jurassic Park or The Martian, I was nevertheless intrigued. Coupled with the handful of recognizable players scattered through the book, I had a good time with this one. I also remember seeing the film a few years ago; Really enjoyed this, partly because reading a baseball book in October when your team is in the playoffs gives you a great high and partly because I was surprisingly and honestly fascinated by the science of sabermetrics.

I also remember seeing the film a few years ago; gotta watch it again. It's not nearly as accurate to the book as it should be, but that's an adaptation for you. October Baseball Book Club group read Apr 22, Shane rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction. Moneyball is a book that shook the world of professional baseball, but not necessarily in the way it should have. Let me explain Moneyball is framed around the story of Billy Beane, a hot prospect who never panned out in the majors, who became general manager of the Oakland A's in Since that time, the A's, while consistently having one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, have been one of the best teams in the game.

How is this possible? The book details how Beane and a few trusted associ Moneyball is a book that shook the world of professional baseball, but not necessarily in the way it should have. The book details how Beane and a few trusted associates began looking at the game in a different way.

Instead of trusting scouting intuition and traditional baseball thinking, the A's began focusing on particular assets of players that were being undervalued by other teams. In this way, they were able to build winning teams using players that were overlooked or discarded by wealthier or less skilled organizations.

While straightforward statistical analysis is interesting enough to me see my review of Baseball Between The Numbers , where Moneyball shines is it's more detailed investigations into the development of statistical analysis in baseball, and some of the individual players who made up the A's successful squad.

Stated another way, for the first time, the difference between the best teams in baseball and the worst teams was narrower than it had ever been. The Minnesota Twins, despite their modest budget, had two fine seasons , and the New York Mets performed poorly despite spending big. Lewis — and all those baseball executives whining about how much they had to pay the players — were correct about the widening gaps between the richest and poorest market teams if they meant the difference in payroll.

The Yankees, by comparison, won five pennants and three World Series over that span. Three of those Oakland pennants and World Series titles — , 73 and 74 — came during the reign of their irascible owner Charles O Finley. But Oakland had yet another three-year dynasty from to , in which they dominated the Yankees and every other American League team, winning three pennants and going to the World Series three straight seasons. Having the most money has never been a guarantee of winning in baseball.

But not only has baseball over the last half-century been competitive, it has been, contrary to Lewis, far more competitive — not less — than other major sports. The team thrived primarily because of superb pitching. All were high draft picks who had been well scouted and at no time were regarded as sleepers.

Except for a few paragraphs, all three are absent from the pages of Moneyball.