52 Books in 52 Weeks: Book 13: "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis

Several months ago, I was watching 60 Minutes and saw Steve Kroft interview Michael Lewis about his new book "The Big Short".  I knew Lewis was a popular writer, but I'd never read any of his books.  Kroft called Lewis, "one of the country's preeminent non-fiction writers with a knack for turning complicated, mind-numbing material into fascinating yarns".  This piqued my interest and I went and looked up the books that he has written.  Among them are "Moneyball", "The Blind Side", "Liar's Poker", and "Panic".  

I am very interested in finance and I'm also a big baseball fan.  Almost everything Lewis has written covers those two areas.  I wondered why on earth I've never read anything this man has written before, and I immediately set out to remedy that situation.

In "Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game", Lewis follows Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, as he uses a radical and unpopular strategy to put together a successful low-budget baseball team.  Bean's strategy is to use statistics beyond the basic Batting Average/Home Runs/RBIs for hitters and the ERA/Wins/Losses for pitchers.  Bean used those statistics to evaluate the players he chose in the draft & he would look for players that were rated highly by his system, but that no one else was that interested in.  Those players did not demand high salaries, and in that way, he was able to put together a low-budget team.  And, as it turned out, it worked.  These low-budget teams that he put together have been able to consistently succeed.

Beane was able to select talented players that no one else was interested in because he was using a very different system than the rest of baseball.  Traditionally, players are chosen based on the reports of scouts - people (often former players) who travel around the country, attend college and high school games, and evaluate young players.  Their evaluations are generally based on subjectivecriteria - how a player looks to the scout.  Does he have the physical appearance of a strong player?  Is he fast?  Do his pitching mechanics (the way he winds up & throws the ball) look good?  They put great stock in a player's "potential" for future success. Beane looked at a player's past performance (through stats) and assumed that past performance would predict future performance.  He was right.   

This answers the question of why so many players who come up as "top prospects" end up going nowhere with their careers.  Beane had the painful experience of being one of those players, and that is what drove his quest to find a better way to evaluate potential.  Throughout the book Lewis alternates chapers between telling Beane's personal story and tracing the history of baseball's scouting efforts.  

This book came out in 2003 & it revolutionized and divided the baseball world.  It is responsible for the now numerous websites devoted to baseball statistics and evaluating every aspect of baseball.  Several other teams, most notably, the Boston Red Sox have begun using this method to build their teams.  This is a worthwhile and fascinating read for any baseball fan.

"The Blind Side" is next on my list to review, and I am also going to be reading "The Big Short", and probably "Liar's Poker".  Look for those reviews...when I get around to it :-)

Sojourner