Will I love Moneyball?

I loved Moneyball and most of Michael Lewis’ books as great storytelling.

It's the story of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team, led by general manager Billy Beane, challenged traditional scouting wisdom in the early 2000s by using data and statistical analysis to build a competitive team on a very small budget.

The message is all about challenging conventional wisdom and orthodoxy, and thinking originally. It was inspirational to me at a time in my business life when I was buoyed by the message and theme.

This hits every high note for me. It’s both aspirational and accessible. The “Moneyball Generation” has had a profound impact on every element of sports—from how games are managed, how they’re covered, who is valued, and who makes decisions. That’s because of Lewis, whose writing I love because it is so breezy and conversational, especially when explaining complicated concepts.

My passion is telling stories that explain what’s happening behind the scenes and how they impact sports fans. Lewis does this better than anyone in this book.  

As someone who plays fantasy baseball and advises others on how to win, I was fascinated by Lewis’ real-world adventure covering the Oakland Athletics.

I had dabbled in trying to uncover underutilized statistics to evaluate talent in my own writings, but Billy Beane showed how someone in the pros was able to leverage undervalued skills to stay ahead of the competition. I found it a fascinating ride, and the book has become a classic (and a movie).

This is the book that made sports analytics mainstream. Although there were plenty of pieces in sports analytics before and after this book, none of them led to a movie starring Brad Pitt.

The book changes the way you’ll think about baseball and how the game is played. And, the analytics movement that was popularized with this book has led to a slew of rule changes in Major League Baseball. All those dynamics run through this book and its impact.

If we really want to understand games and how they work, we cannot forget about the lessons we can learn… show more.

Lewis has a great reporter’s gift for seeking out great real-life stories you maybe didn’t know existed.

Moneyball takes us through a year at the Oakland A’s baseball team, and its manager’s experiment in applying statistical analysis to assess player value. I’m currently writing a book about sport and modernity, so for me this is always the book to start with.

There’s nothing narrow, though, about Lewis’s focus, and his message about the world’s drift toward quantification is even more relevant today. To say this is just ‘a book about baseball’ is like saying The Odyssey is just a book… show more.

Even though this one has been out for 20 years, it’s still a must-read for baseball fans who want to understand how the game got from where it was in the 20th century to where it is in the 21st century.

I have a particular affinity for this book because I was covering the A’s for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in 2002, when Lewis was following the team around to write the book. Yes, he does leave out a lot of what made that team good—like Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, Miguel Tejada, and Eric Chavez—but it’s nonetheless… show more.

Anyone who saw the movie of the same name starring Brad Pitt knows the story here. So yes, this is a book about the advent of analytics into the game of baseball and how it has changed the way players are evaluated and teams assembled. But more than this the book tells the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane as it touches on themes of fairness (or lack thereof), humanity, fortitude, and the cruel realities of a game that is really just a bottom-line business.