Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Michael Lewis

Mar 2004 · W. W. Norton & Company

About this ebook

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

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?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?

Ratings and reviews

This was a very interesting book on the economics of baseball. It is certainly a method of building a team to consider when you don't have the money to buy superstars. Taking a more closer look at the players and looking at them in ways others aren't can help to identify "hidden gems." It was a real eye opener for me, and now I might have to spend more time watching baseball.

Good read. A behind-the-scenes look at how baseball has transformed from a watch-it and learn type of game to strickly a game of numbers. Focusing in on the Oakland A's system, the author follows Billy Beane's manic self throughout - although never sees him in the weight room during games. A brief history of Bill James's discovery and a focus on particular players gives the book life and brings personalities into the subject while always reminding the reader that it's the stats, not the players (or their salary), that dictate the outcomes of games. Recommended.

As he is apt to do, Michael Lewis has written book that, on its surface, appears to be about a relatively narrow subject -- in this case, Billy Beane's and his minions' unorthodox approach to running the Oakland Athletics. In reality, the book is about much more. Lewis shows us how a small group of persons willing to challenge the traditional ways of thinking in one of America's oldest sports was able to produce outsize results for an organization that possessed little in the way of financial resources. While almost all will find it entertaining, all the "oddballs" out there who enjoy the challenge of finding new and better ways of analyzing and executing will find it to be inspirational as well.

About the author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.