I found this book fascinating. I had read Michael Lewis' earlier book "Liar's Poker", about his dealings on Wall Street. What struck me most was how he brought his free-market capitalism frame of reference to the world of Major League Baseball and found that for a small group avant-garde managers, the same basic rules apply. Buy low, sell high, don't listen to market hype, and never get emotional. This book might be disturbing to people who have a lifetime love of the pure game, but Major League Baseball is also a business and has to be acknowledged as such.

I love sports. I love business, finance, and statistics. I've never been a baseball fan. This book was very well written to appeal to a very broad audience with a wide variety of backgrounds on the topic. The principle observations are delivered through expert story telling around very compelling central figures.

Without flowery language or paragraph after paragraph of adjectives - Lewis recounts experiences and conversations with such clarity that you can almost see, smell, and hear the scenes unfolding.

I won't look at baseball or the exploitation of market inefficiencies the same after having read this book. I'd recommend this book to anyone with intellectual curiosity.

Baseball is a game that nerds can really enjoy, largely because of the availability of abundant and meaningful statistics. Back in the 1970s the basic numbers could be obtained through books that were published every year, but a small group of super-geeks began looking more deeply into the mathematics of the game and developing their own metrics for rating players. These guys were mostly self-taught statisticians and motivated entirely by an obsessive passion for the game. I'm talking about people like Bill James, who a few decades ago was a security guard who began publishing really interesting and well-written analyses of baseball statistics in his famous Bill James Baseball Abstracts.

Of course baseball is also fun to watch, even for those who don't enjoy crunching numbers in their spare time. That's why it's a multibillion dollar business, and that's where the influence of the Jamesians gets really interesting. The thing is that for the sport's first 100 or so years the process of locating and recruiting talented players was based entirely on the gut instinct of the scouts employed by each team. These guys were mostly ex-players who made decisions based on notions that had nothing to do with (and often conflicted completely with) the available evidence. (The fact that the world is run almost entirely by people who think this way makes this book all the more insightful.)

Moneyball highlights the success of General Manager Billy Beane, who was able to run a very successful team for many years on a low budget by adapting the statistical approach. Interestingly, Beane was a player who was highly touted by the old-school scouts who employed the conventional criteria (which apparently amounted to something like imagining how the player would look on a baseball card). Beane's struggled throughout the 1990s to bring baseball into the 20th century, and he has had a substantial impact on the game, although any fan who watches the sport in 2008 will tell you that old habits die hard.

So I'm a big fan of fantasy baseball. And for those that are as well, you know that playing the fantasy game changes the way you look at everything. Moneyball has the same effect. It just revolutionizes your outlook on the game of baseball. The "important" stats like RBIs and runs are replaced with really important ones, like OBP and pitches per at bat. No name guys like Scott Hatteberg become cogs that make teams great.

Michael Lewis crafts a book that is engaging on several levels -- to the baseball fan, the economist, and the statistician.

Ever wonder why we give more credit statistically to a guy that bloops a single just out of a poor fielder's reach vs. the guy that smashes a homerun, but is robbed by an amazing leaping catch? This book answers those sorts of questions. And it does so through the amazingly in depth looks at the mind of Billy Beane, the genius that built the A's, renowned for their ability to find talent that other teams miss.

I would highly recommend this book to any fan of baseball on any level. It's a truly great book, and one that will leave you feeling a bit like you stumbled upon a little known secret. You'll suddenly rush and start analyzing the latest pickups of your favorite team. You'll feel compelled to run out and follow the career of guys you'd never heard of before reading the book (and hint...they don't get on SportsCenter that often...). No regrets after reading this, and I promise it will be staying on my shelf for a long time.

My 15 yr. old son is currently reading it. He can't put it down and he is not an avid reader. He is a baseball nut who not only follows the sport but plays it in high school and hopefully college in a few years. Everyone who catches a glimpse of him reading Moneyball raves about the book themselves. It's an A+ in this mom's book.

The first time I read this book I couldn't put it down from start to finish -- it was the book on the business of baseball that I had been waiting for but it was written in a narrative that draws you in, first to Billy Beane, then to the Oakland A's, then to the plight of baseball today.

In the years since I read this, many have cited Moneyball while building their franchises but have come to realize Beane is some sort of baseball divining rod.

Brilliant book if you are at all interested in a unique way of looking at baseball -- and management -- you won't see either the same way ever again.

The problem with giving a Michael Lewis book five stars is that there is much better stuff out there. Lewis can be entertaining, and, to give credit, he hits out of the park in his choice of topic here. But he's an arrogant writer, with something of the "brilliant" graduate student after a couple of drinks about him, prone to sermonizing way off topic. He even did this in his first book, Liar's Poker, when he abruptly dropped his fascinating first person account to digress into the history of Salomon in the 1970s. Here - ditto. All the stuff on the A's and Beane is great. However there are way too long digressions into Bill James and the history of stats in baseball, which had me turning pages. Lewis is also fairly repetitive - this book is at least 90pages too long. If you want to read a great, great writer talking sports, try Tom Wolfe's powerhouse short story The Last American Hero, on Junior Johnson and the beginnings of NASCAR, found in his collection The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake. Wolfe is a genuis and can say more in 45pages than Lewis manages here with just under 300.

This is an excellent introduction to the conception and process of applying sabermetrics, the objective cold-hard-facts method of valuing baseball players in terms of their probabilities of generating runs on offense and preventing runs on defense, to the cost efficient management of a baseball team.

This introduction is accomplished through an almost allegorical tale about Billy Beane, first as a baseball player and then as the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. As such, it tends to read a bit like a tribute or hero-worship novel as Billy Beane is touted for his trailblazing approach to using statistical analysis, not baseball "wisdom", to value players and assemble winning teams within a fixed budget. But there is purpose in the telling of "The Billy Beane Story" and it is to use it as a literary device to keep the reader engaged as a rather dry subject (statistical analysis and dispassionate player evaluation) is revealed.

If you think that Derek Jeter is a great fielding shortstop, you will learn about tools that demonstrate rather convincingly that, despite Jeter's Gold Glove awards, he is a rather pathetic fielder for a major league baseball player. You will learn about tools that allow a baseball general manager to recognize the value of rather unimpressive physical specimens (e.g., catcher turned first baseman Scott Hatteberg) as surprising productive players when they are important contributors to team success.

Sabermetrics is not widely respected among most who run the show on major league teams today. But there is a slow yet growing recognition of its value. Billy Beane and the Oakland A's may have bmost recently the first, but such methods are being adopted by more and more teams, including the and the Toronto Blue Jays and the Boston Red Sox. (Is it merely a coincidence that the Red Sox finally won the World Series after an 86 year drought only once its ownership and general management adopted a sabermetric approach to player evaluation?) This book will effectively and entertainingly expose you to subtle yet powerful new approach to team management that is growing within baseball. If you love baseball ... if you think you know how to evaluate baseball players ... this is a very worthwhile read.

The beauty of Moneyball is Michael Lewis' ability to communicate an excellent baseball story that satisfies hard-nosed Sabermetricians, but do in a way that doesn't alienate non-numbers oriented baseball fans. The story of how Billy Beane got to where he is today (as GM of the Oakland As) is quite compelling, and clearly of key importance to the main question Lewis sets out to answer -- how the Oakland As manage to be successful despite their (relative) lack of salary. The politics of Sabermetrics aside, this is a terrific read and a book all baseball enthusiasts should read at least once (if not once a season).

For many years, I walked by this book on the shelf of my local library and gave it no notice, as the "Moneyball" title gave me the false impression that it was all about economics. I should have heeded the book-readers creed: Never judge a book by its cover. From the very first chapter, I was hooked by the unique philosophy of the text and fascinated by its divergence from traditional baseball maxims. Essentially, Michael Lewis (essentially a conduit for Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane) discusses two subjects:

First, there is the radically different method, started by Bill James, of evaluating players. Instead of the traditional home runs and RBI stats, James (and later Beane) determined that on-base and slugging percentages were the best predictors of successful performance. Instead of looking at factors beyond the batters control (like RBI), one must look at how the batter controls each plate appearance. I could go on and on about the theories developed in this book, but suffice it to say that they are (or at least were in 2001) a complete digression from traditional baseball wisdom, thus are generally scoffed at by "real" baseball people.

The second portion of the books discusses how Billy Beane uses those new scouting methods to keep his small-market A's viable in the baseball market. Though fans moaned when Beane traded away such stars as Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, and Jason Giambi, Beane contends in this book that those trades were necessary in order to reduce payroll, plus he was able to find comparable (if not better) players through his new "sabermetric" scouting method. Being a fan of the small-market Minnesota Twins, I was most fascinated with this portion of the book, trying to determine if the Twins were following a Beane model of business.

Overall, I have absolutely no answers (being neither a baseball insider nor a statistician) as to whether or not James and Beane's theories have merit. However, they do make a very convincing argument filled with valid examples to prove their points. Plus, no baseball fan can argue with the results, as the small-market A's always seem to be in contention.

If you are a die-hard baseball lifer like myself, this is a must-read book. Even if you scoff at every single idea (though I don't think you will) it is worth being exposed to.

Michael Lewis' Moneyball, is a great introduction to the increasing role statistics play creating a winning baseball team. Lewis profiles the A's owner, Billy Beane, and shows how Beane has managed to create a winning team despite a small budget. It begins to put to rest the use of worthless stats, such as RBI, which is really only a measure of how good the batters are in front of you.

As a former baseball coach, I was interested in the chapter on how Beane selects players from the amateur draft. He creates a strong case for players attending college before entering the draft, especially if one's life long dream is to play for the A's.

If you enjoy Moneyball, I would suggest reading other similar books such as Baseball Between the Numbers, The Fielding Bible, Mind Games, and The Baseball Economist. In general, anything by the Baseball Prospectus people is a great choice.

It's simple: If you are a fan of baseball-meaning you go to more than 2-3 games a year, or watch a lot of games on TV-then you need to read Moneyball.

Moneyball tells the story of how the Oakland A's, with a limited budget, manage to out smart almost every other team in baseball. Basically, in a nutshell-they use science instead of old baseball adages, and apply statistics to better analyze a players ability to get on base and avoid making an out-the key to winning games in the long-run.

Great book, well written. Highly recommended to all baseball fans.

Michael Lewis made his name writing books describing the people behind our financial system -- books that were inevitably described, for some reason, as "funny" or "hilarious." Perhaps these same reviewers were in stitches while reading Javascript technical manuals or the Kyoto Accords. Truly, I saw neither any humor nor any attempts to be funny in these books, which were, sadly, just dull.

How refreshing, then, to have him find a topic better suited to his tone. Yes, money plays a role, but what's described here is the pursuit of excellence, and the courage to flout conventional wisdom in the pursuit of a competitive edge.

A fascinating subject about dedicated professionals. True, these people may come off as a little singleminded, but they have to be (as this book demonstrates) in order to compete against people equally dedicated to finding an edge.

I so love the work of Michael Lewis because this story, and another favorite, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, are essentially about stepping back to consider groupthink. Groupthink is a topic that fascinates me. I haven't read The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, but it's about startups and silicon valley? Hmmmm... it might be about groupthink too. I'll check it out this weekend.

In Moneyball, Lewis examines the effects an outsider can have on the group, in this case, Major League Baseball. That's an extremely high level but, if you're like me, that's about all you need to know. Even if you don't care for baseball, I think you'll enjoy Moneyball. You might even be angry that Congress and the media give so much time to baseball. Since baseball is hard to avoid in America, I think people should try to understand it better. And even the most die hard, stat-loving baseball geek I know learned things from reading Moneyball. So whether you're a total insider to baseball, or a complete outsider to baseball, I think you should read, and that you'll enjoy, Moneyball.

This book has become the cliche for the transformation of the way that baseball is approached over the last decade or so. This book explains in a detailed but highly readable manner how baseball went from simply a business to a quantitatively analyzed (and analyzable) science. Given the large amounts of money in baseball over the past 20 years or so, it isn't surprising that baseball has undergone a transformation so that the computer nerds have taken over. I'm a fairly big baseball fan, and was turned off from reading this book for so long because it has become a `cliche' and I believed that it would be shallow and trite. It is anything but. This book is an absolute must read for anyone who wants to understand how `professionals` view the game today. It is easy to read, but packed with details about the new way of looking at baseball. There are also detailed character studies of some of the players (like Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford) and front office people (primarily Billy Beane and John DePodesta of the As).

The central theme of this book is why the As were able to remain competitive year after year even though they had a total team salary that was 1/3 or 1/4 of the big players like the Yankees and Red Sox. Judging from the reviews I've read on the Amazon sights, many of the reviewers still don't fully appreciate the arguments in this book. The goal of Beane and his cohorts was to bring a mathematical approach to the game and find out which aspects of the game were overvalued (from a mathematical and financial perspective) and which were undervalued. Beane wanted to quantitatively determine which traits were most important (and not rely simply on scouts judgment), but also determine how these traits were compensated in the market. Many have said that Beane and company look at OBP, slugging, OPS, etc., and disregard batting average and defense. This is true, but the key point here is that these traits were also undervalued by the market (at least when Beane got started). It is this point that allowed the As to remain competitive. They could trade players who were overvalued (like closers) and pick up inexpensive, undervalued, but highly productive, players in return.

The first part of the this book details the development of Bill James and his mathematical approach to baseball. There was apparently a small community of baseball fanatics who had, in the 70s and 80s, analyzed the mathematical details of baseball and determined that things like OBP were key factors, and not BA or defense. It took the major league clubs another decade or more to realized (or accept) this. Subsequent chapters deal with Beane's maneuvering to get players that fit into his philosophy, detailed accounts of some of the players Beane acquired (like Scott Hatteberg and Chad Bradford), and lots of inside details about the messy business of the day to day workings of a baseball front office.

One of the thing that is stress over and over again in this book is that Beane and his cohorts stress process over outcome. They don't care if, in any individual case, their decision works out. They are confident however that over the long haul they will be right. They are playing the averages, and this is what is keeping them competitive with the big-payroll clubs (it is also why they really can't compete in the playoffs with the big payroll clubs - they are beating the `league average' in the long run, but the teams in the playoffs are far from `league average'). Beane and his cohorts have often been wrong (one obvious example taken from the book is Scott Kazmir - they wanted nothing to do with him in the draft as he was a high school picture and their process said that the risk on high school pitchers was too high - I wonder if they would like to have a do-over on that pick?), but because they are playing the averages, their system keeps them in contention year after year.

This is a MUST READ for any baseball fan, whether you agree with the conclusions or not. It is well written, contains lots of detail (and will keep the nerdiest computer geek happy), but is also highly readable and doesn't get bogged down in minutiae. There is so much fascinating info in this book, I couldn't put it down (read through it in a day).

I thought this was going to be a rant about how free agency killed the game of baseball, but it ended up surprising me by pretty much being just the opposite: how free agency has opened the door for innovative leaders who leverage technology and analytics to capitalize on market bias to beat the other teams. It completely changed the way I watch and assess baseball. I only wish there were updates available on what ultimately happened to all the people who played a role in the story. Highly recommended for anyone with an open mind and a love of baseball and/or markets.

You always hear about the vast amounts of money that are spent in the world of baseball, but are teams getting their money's worth? Conventional wisdom would have us believe that teams that spend the most money get the best results. However, in the world of baseball this is not the case. This book focuses on the Oakland Athletics, one of the best performing teams in major league baseball, and also one of the lowest paid teams. How do they do it?

According to this book, this is possible through exploiting inefficiencies in the market. Baseball, through its years of tradition, has built up a way of evaluating players that doesn't really address how they actually perform. This leads to undervaluing talent and skills that actually lead to success. The trick is to be objective and look at things as they really are. There are many things that people take for granted in every field, and this leads to market inefficiencies.

This is more of a baseball book than a business book. It is not presented as a road map to success, but rather as a story of a baseball team fighting against the odds. If you're a fan of baseball, you'll be able to enjoy the story and learn a few things that you might be able to apply to your own business. However, if you don't like baseball, you many not find this to your liking.

I've never followed baseball much, but have always been fascinated by the obsession with statistics in the game. The curious disconnect, which Lewis addresses in fascinating detail, is how it's taken so long for those managing the teams to put all of this raw data to use.

So much of the spirit of baseball is romance, intuition and emotion. But these days the stakes are too high with many millions invested in a team to compete without every edge available at your disposal. Billy Beane and the A's have forever changed the game of baseball, and it's great to read about when and how the revolution started.

A true investigator, Lewis also recognizes the weaknesses of Beane's breakthrough approach to baseball and how, even though it may greatly increase the odds for a winning season, the strategy comes somewhat unraveled at playoff time.

Lewis somehow manages to make a book about statistics and payrolls interesting by turning it into a character piece. Makes me wish Billy Beane was the GM of my favorite team. My only criticism is that the book applauds the Oakland A's for signing players who overperform, but in hindsight, we know half the Bay Area was juicing during the period the book was written.

I agree with the reviewer who said this is a good baseball book for the casual baseball fan. This book gives the best, least complicated explanation of sabermetrics that I've read. I take this book with me on plane rides, because I find the first two-thirds engaging and relaxing. (The last third fawns over Beane and his team of undervalued players -- the part about how Ken Williams is hesitant to take Billy Beane's phone calls, for fear of what sneaky trade the wily Billy Beane is going to trick Williams into taking -- a bit annoying, especially to a Sox fan, so I never read that part.)

This was just a terrific book, putting an incredibly human face on a game and a financial analysis of success.

As a lifelong A's fan, I felt obligated to read Moneyball. Many critics have mistakenly gotten the impression that Billy Beane and Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball together. Actually, Beane himself has registered skepticism with Moneyball's simplistic conclusions and its portrayal of him as some sort of boy genius. Joe Morgan, the hall of famer and announcer has been one of the more outspoken opponents of a book he freely admits he hasn't read and he has incorrectly attributed authorship to Beane. In other words, Morgan freely admits he doesn't know what he's talking about and doesn't care to but feels perfectly comfortable registering an "informed" opinion based on his career in the 70's and 80's. Good luck with that, Joe.

The book describes how Beane and his employees on the Oakland A's have spent over a decade (1997-present) trying to apply statistical analysis to talent scouting and, thus, uncover low cost talented players ignored by traditional talent scouts. In other words, they do the math and they pay attention to the small stuff. This statistical reasoning is an attempt to take the guesswork out of scouting. Because this is a talent scouting method, the stats are derived almost exclusively from college and minor league playing. Major League baseball is a different, more sophisticated and much harder game than college or minor leagues. Consequently, stats are not directly applicable but can be used only as fair indicators of success at the highest level. There is no such thing as a statistical crystal ball.

Alas, human beings are unpredictable and talent eventually costs money anyway. Many of the A's "finds" are now using their considerable talent on other, wealthier, teams (Zito, Mulder, Hudson, Giambi, Tejada & Jeremy Bonderman). A team cannot win playoff games without proven talent and proven talent costs money. The A's had a nice little run where they overplayed themselves into the playoffs five times in the last eight years, including two 100+ win seasons. They were bounced out in the first round four straight years. (slide, Jeremey, slide!)

Several of the finds have been slowed by injury (Harden, Crosby) or the simple fact that they never became the top level players they were predicted to become (Chavez, Jeremy Brown, Jeremy Giambi). Even if the numbers tell you a player has a great future on paper, they can't tell you if he will get hurt, if he has mental toughness, if he cares about the game, if he has integrity, if he can hit/pitch at the major league level and other unknowables/intangibles. At the end of the day, there is still a subjective evaluation of whether the player has the mental/emotional ability to succeed at the highest level. There is no way to know how a player will perform at the Major Leagues until he actual does. Quite often, there is at least the possibility that a can't-miss-kid was overvalued and is just simply not that good.

The A's do not have enough money to succeed at the highest level over a sustained period of time. It is just that simple. Money counts and as long as the A's cannot afford more than 1/4 the payroll of the wealthier teams the A's will be little more than a discovery/development center for talented players who go on to play against the team that discovered and developed them in the first place. Life is unfair. Go A's!

This book is an awesome story of how the Oakland A's produced great teams on little money. Take baseball out of the story and you will learn some solid business principals! In the midst of telling the story of how a team can compete with or without much money is the story of some great men fighting to become the best they can be. Michael Lewis did a incredible job of telling the story of life in business and how sometimes unpopular decisions bring the best results. Great book for any baseball fan or any business man trying to compete with giants. Great Book

I had high hopes of this book. Would it be another winner's story or would it be about statistics and plain baseball?

Actually, the result is kind of both. The book tells us about taking a different approach at scouting while the club is money-strapped. It makes you look beyond the obvious and I must say I had some great results in the Yahoo Hockey League online. But is this the result you go for?

Moneyball is full of statistics and tells us a nice but not compelling story. You kind of read your way through it and say: "Well, ok, that's nice to know."

If you got any spare time and like baseball or scouting go ahead and read the book. Just don't expect too much as I did.

The mathematics of sports...not a very good subject...
Given MLewis talent for writing, his effort on the pro sports world seems a waste ... I'd rather see him write about finance, or computer geniuses....This was the least interesting of his books.

My father-in-law gave me Moneyball for Chirstmas. I took it to White Sox spring training in Tucson, Arizona in March 2008. What a great way to spend a week. Solid baseball, great baseball reading and no snow.

Others have gone into great detail, so I will make my review short. I have a new found respect for the A's, Billy Beane & Paul DePodesta. They have taken baseball to a new level and built some great teams. The White Sox now have Beane favorite Nick Swisher, but in return Beane extracted solid pitching prospects from the Sox organization.

If you love baseball read this book. You won't regret it.

Finally, as I have suspected for a long time, ESPN analyst & baseball hall of famer Joe Morgan is truly nothing but a gas bag. Good player, but a worthless analyst.

For a former baseball player Billy Beane is a rare bird as a baseball GM. He used real baseball statistics, the kind the sabermetricians use to make great trade and bring a strong team back to Oakland. He had a great advantage over other GMs because he took advantage of their ignorance and tendencies to rely on the somewhat biased eyes of basebll scouts. What Michael Lewis did with this book was to show the world of baseball how Billy Beane did it and now I am sure that other GMs like Brian Cashman at New York and Theo Epstein in Boston are catching on. I don't know how much Steve Phillips put into action when he was the Mets GM. His lack of great success there indicates that he [robably didn't follow it enough. But now as an ESPN commentator he definitely mentions it. This book si so good that the term moneyball now means the strategy that Billy Beane used. So the title of this book became a baseball term! This book is a must for managers, general managers and owners of professional baseball teams. It is also great for the fans and the fantasy baseball enthusiasts.

Along with Mike Schell's books and the ones like "Curve Ball" written by Albert and Bennett this is one of the most thoughtful and scientific books on the game of baseball, how to win at it and how to build a successful team. The other books I mentioned were written by professional statisticians. It is the great success of the statistical science of sports, sabermetrics that we are now witnessing a scientific and statistical approach to baseball and other sports that had been lacking for many years. What Beane proved with regard to money was that a small market team like Oakland without the big money of a Steinbrenner could build a great team through smart trades and drafts based on looking at the right statistics on the players, the statistics that determine value in terms of run production for offense and run prevention for pitchers and defense.

The amazon reviews of this book are almost unanymous in their praise of Lewis' book. Read it and enjoy it. If I haven't convinced you, read some of the other fine reviews here.

First, Moneyball was not written by Billy Beane, as many people who have not yet read it (myself included) often describe it in a convenient but incorrect form of shorthand.

Second, Moneyball isn't about Billy Beane, although he is a prominent character who certainly deserves a full-length biography or could write his own fascinating memoir.

Third, Moneyball isn't about Bill James and sabremetrics, although the new genre of statistics-based baseball writing and thinking created single-handedly (almost; Lewis cites a few other sources) in the last 30 years is covered here.

Moneyball is about "The art of winning an unfair game", as its subtitle (not on the cover of this paperback edition, interestingly enough) succinctly describes it. It is about a small-payroll baseball team that wants to compete, and about how failed major-leaguer Billy Beane was perfectly-placed and given free rein by the Oakland A's owner to figure out a better way to evaluate and valuate baseball players both current and prospective.

This is where James' statistics came into play, as Beane and his Harvard educated assistant Paul Depodesta developed and then applied this rational approach to player selection, overcoming years of baseball "intuition" and scouting, to turn the Oakland As into the most efficient winning organization in MLB over the last seven years. For a 4 year period the A's won more games than any other team except the Yankees, at a "cost per win" typically a quarter to a third of the irrational-spending Yankees.

Moneyball is justly famous (and infamous) inside the social club that is MLB. Lewis theorizes that this reaction by the social club (as well as those of a number of players) is driven by a fear of public humiliation. If members of the Club stick together, and continue to manage the organization by the "book", they can't be publicly blamed and humiliated for failure; they just move to a new branch of the Club and keep on repeating the failures of the past.

Despite resistance from within the club, the market for rational thinking is growing. The Toronto Blue jays were the second team to understand and want to apply the tactics, hiring away the A's third in line (when Beane and Depodesta wouldn't leave Oakland) to begin winning efficiently (it takes one year to get cheap, it takes two years to get better, according to this GM, and the trend line of Toronto's recent seasons confirms this. Look for Toronto to compete for a playoff spot in the AL east in 2008). The grandchild of the experiment is the Boston Red Sox, who had a verbal agreement from Beane to take their GM job but were left to hire Theo Epstein (a young Ivy-Leaguer with no baseball background) instead when Beane backed out of the contract that would have increased his salary many times over.

And in an action that inspires hope for the future, the Pittsburgh Pirates new GM just made a move described by Beane as "Selling the Closer", based on the theory that the save is an overvalued statistics that does not accurately predict the success of a relief pitcher. In this model, a team either sells its closer for an inflated price, or lets the closer go as a free agent, garnering two compensatory draft picks. With the money or picks, the team selects a young undervalued pitcher based on statistics that do predict success (keeping runners off base and limiting pitches per at-bat) to turn into the next "Sell the Closer" candidate, PLUS an other prospect who together add more value to the team (statistically-significant contributions to winning baseball games) than the closer just sold. Lets hope the Pirates trade was made with rational forethought and not dumb luck.

In fact, one side benefit of the Moneyball theory is that it provides rational components for evaluating the contributions of pitchers and hitters (not so much fielding, as Lewis explains) to winning baseball games in such a way that their relative worth can be compared and evaluated against each other. No wonder the Club is so upset; this is light years ahead of the old "book".

While baseball is the nominal subject of this book, it really isn't a "baseball" book. It is more a book about applied rational thinking and statistics, and has been justly and highly praised by critics, as by this one, who rates Moneyball as a classic (just like Les Miserables which he just read and reviewed). Never judge a book by its subject.

Les Miserables (Penguin Classics)

Mr. Lewis observes that the persistence of Sacred Cows and inaccurate thinking in a market as lucrative as MLB has sobering implications. The reader is encouraged to reflect on the likely discrepancy between his own perceived and actual value in the workplace.
Billy Beane's story of redemption adds to the evidence that Baseball is indeed the manliest and most heartbreaking of games. A good read, especially for a fan.

Think you know baseball? Think again. This book follows the 2002 season of the Oakland A's, the team with the second lowest payroll in baseball, but one which managed to win more games than any other team in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Moneyball is a fascinating study in how baseball's Old Order, its Established Way of Doing Things, clashed with a new, more rational, data-driven method of making decisions. It's full of the colorful personalities and gripping roller coaster you'll find in any great baseball book. But Moneyball takes you deeper. It takes you "into the numbers" to show how advanced statistics, game theory, and the laws of probability are harnessed by really smart people to make better baseball decisions.

You don't have to be a long-suffering small market fan (like me) to enjoy this book. It's a universal story of how change happens in a change-resistant institution. A great read not only for baseball fans, but for those who are interested in the dynamics of change in many different kinds of organizations.

I thought I knew baseball, but it's a new day, baby. Moneyball is actually the biography of one Billy Beane, a former major leaguer and now General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.

The new baseball is a game of numbers where statistics like stolen bases and home runs, don't matter as much as on-base percentage. The title is misleading. Baseball is becoming more of a science than an art.

As a result of Moneyball, nearly every major league baseball team now employs a full-time actuary. The book is an easy read and won't overwhelm you with statistics.

As a long time baseball fan, I have been a keen follower of how the Oakland A's have consistently been so good despite having an incredibly small payroll while big-spending teams like the Texas Rangers and Baltimore Orioles consistently flounder. This book helped me understand why.

The use of statistics to predict future behavior is not a new practice. Hedge fund models use these statistics every day. Moneyball shows how statistics can be used in the most unusual places.

One thing that befuddled me throughout the entire book was how a sport so in love with statistics did not use statistics to judge and select players for teams. I know Lewis "fell in love" with the story, but the story is still a good one. How could so many teams consistently spend so much money for such poor results while the A's won on a comparative shoestring budget? The sports world is the greatest example of imitation in the world, but no one seemed to bother benchmarking how the A's won so efficiently.

As for the story, it moves very quickly. Lewis does a good job of explaining the history of sabermetrics and showing how Billy Beane learned from the writings of Bill James. The interplay between the A's "old-school" scouts and the "quant jocks" like Beane and Paul DePodesta shows how hard it was for the quants to gain acceptance.

Baseball is the ultimate endurance test, and 162 games usually shows the true nature of teams and systems. If you are a sports fan with an understanding of business, you'll be able to understand how the use of statistics in baseball can be applied to other business settings. If you know business but have a passing interest in sports, you'll wonder why more teams didn't try the A's approach. If you are a fan of both sports and business, you'll make the connection. All in all, a fantastic and enlightening read.

An excellent, well-written book examining the use of statistics and analysis to create a winning, baseball team with the smallest possible salary. Michael Lewis is an anomaly, for he is able to deftly weave personal history and technical insight to create an intellectually and emotionally engrossing read. Any lover of baseball, business analysis, or economics will love this book.

Moneyball made me more interested in baseball. Part of the reason I hadn't appreciated baseball was due to the fact that it always seemed like big market teams can buy championships. While that still remains true to a point, this book sheds light on what it takes to win baseball games, and that the statistics historically used aren't necessarily indicative of the value of a player. There are lots of lessons to be learned, but the book itself is an entertaining read. If you are a fan of business, value, statistics, or baseball, I can't recommend this book enough.

Also, if you are reading this review, you should read Michael's masterpiece, Liars Poker.

What a great book. Michael Lewis really put the picture together. Game and who PLAYS it.

Not much I can add that has not already been mentioned about this revolutionary book. It does get a tad repetitive and wordy in the economic theory portions, but the fact that pro baseball teams, their scouts, and other top brass utilize Lewis and Beane's theories prove this book has merit. Moneyball is an indictment of all the socialist baseball haters who think money wins baseball games. This is clearly proven false each year, starting with the Athletics nearly a decade ago.

If you love baseball and have any kind of appreciation for statistics, you'll love this book.

Read Michael Lewis' Moneyball before the playoffs get too far along. As Lewis quotes someone in the book "Up till I was 14 years old, everything I learned about baseball came from broadcasters. And it was all b------t!" So before Joe Morgan et al start waxing eloquently about "manufacturing runs, etc." (which means abandoning the game that got you to the playoffs), you better immunize yourself with this book. It's simply the best baseball book ever.

Provides intriguing insight into the real skills that are required by a major leaguer and those coaching decisions that do and don't make sense.

Anyone who considers themselves a die-hard baseball fan must read this book.... but you knew that already.

First off, this is not a book by Billy Beane, or anyone in the Oakland Athletics organization. This is a look at the use of Sabermetrics in baseball, originally thought up by Bill James, and how it can be used to help evaluate talent, and give you an edge in an unfair game, as the title states.

Reading this book, whether you are a casual or avid baseball fan, gives you a whole new look at the game of baseball, the way it is played, and the way teams are run. It breaks away from the norm, and shows that it is not the size of the payroll you have on your team, but how you use the money you have. Also, it is set a few years back, and it mentions some of the players that were scouted and drafted by Beane and his staff. It is nice now to read it, and see how these players have panned out.

Again, great book, flows very well, and I would recommend that if you are even a little interested, you pick this book up in a second.

Moneyball changed the face of professional baseball and pro sports in general. It is a very compelling portrait of A's general manager Billy Beane and how he explits market inefficiencies to create a winning baseball team, despite having a small payroll. Highly recommended to all readers.

Michael Lewis's "Moneyball" tells the incredible story of how rationality was brought to bear on the management of a Major League Baseball team, the Oakland A's. By rationality I mean that the A's made staffing decisions based not on the gut feelings of their scouts, but on objective evidence that allowed them to predict how much each potential player could be expected to contribute to a winning season. You'd think every team in MLB would be run that way, but there you'd be very wrong.

At it's heart, "Moneyball" is the story of the clash within MLB between the insiders (the coaches, scouts, and managers that use traditional "soft" measures to evaluate players) and the sabermetricians (those who base players' worth solely on hard statistics that correlate with their ability to win baseball games). The A's general manager, Billy Beane, and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, were the first MLB insiders to adopt sabermetrics, a scientific approach to baseball invented by Bill James in the late 1970's. What sets the A's front office apart is that they saw the value of sabermetrics, adopted it as their sole criterion for picking players, and somehow managed to force it on the rest of their organization. Lewis shows how this approach allowed the A's to sign players that all the other teams were uninterested in at incredibly low prices. Yet despite their low payroll, the A's achieved win/loss records comparable to teams spending three or more times as much.

Based on the book's afterward and some of the other reviews I've read here, I think a lot of people have missed the book's main point. It's not that Billy Beane and his assistants invented sabermetrics, that they have found a guaranteed way to win, or even that all the players they picked should be expected to become stars. Rather, "Moneyball" makes a compelling argument that their approach allows them to exploit the inefficiencies of the market to staff a team that has the highest likelihood of winning given the relatively limited dollars available for players' salaries. Baseball is a game of odds. Beane and company have simply found a way to maximize the expected wins-per-dollar ratio.

I'm no baseball fan, but I found "Moneyball" engrossing. I learned a lot from this book -- not only about baseball, but also about the often irrational ways people assign value to things. Perhaps due to his own Wall Street background (see Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street), Lewis draws illuminating analogies between financial markets and the market for baseball players.

This is the book that should have changed Major League Baseball, but instead the baseball establishment reacted with outrage and derision. How irrational.

An intelligent sports book, a bit of a rare thing oftentimes.

It takes a look at a team with less money trying to find ways to get the most out of what they have. This involved an executive looking to do things differently and an assistant with some statistical acumen, and willingness to research.

Basically, they find out that drafting young teenagers is silly, drafting grown men with proven skills from college or other leagues makes more sense, and that a lot of drafting is handled in an amateur fashion.

It gives some player examples, but basically he found that defensive ability and speed was overvalued, so went looking for hitting and strikes.

How did Billy Beane consistently win 101 games a year with a payroll 1/2 that of the Red Sox and 1/3 that of the Yankees? It couldn't all be luck. According to Moneyball, it wasn't.

While it is a must-read for baseball fans, non-baseball fans will enjoy this well-written David over Goliath tale as well.

In 2002, the season that this book concerns itself with, the Oakland Athletics tied for the league lead with 103 victories. The book Moneyball frankly admits that it doesn't wish to concern itself with pitching, but rather with hitting--runs and on base percentage (OBP). The reader is told time again that runs and OBP define the game, that pitching is secondary and fielding a distance third. This strikes me as fundamentally ridiculous: the way baseball teams win games is not by scoring runs, but by scoring more than the opposition. And that means pitching is essential.

Let's look at the 2002 Athletics. Despite all the talk about runs, the A's were eighth in the league. In a league with only 14 teams, that puts them in the bottom half. Only one player (Miguel Tejada) had 100+ runs. And what about On-base percentage? The A's were a bit better, but only 5th in the league. Not one of their players, including MVP Tejada, was in the top 10 in the league in OBP. By their own metrics, this hardly seems to indicate they tied for the league lead in wins. By using common sense, however, we can deduce that the A's pitching was probably very good. And indeed it was. The Athletics had three pitchers (Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder, from lowest to highest) with Earned Run Averages (ERAs) under 3.50 and two with ERAs under 3, respectively placing 3rd, 6th, and 10th in the league. The A's pitching staff led the American league in ERA, shutouts, and fewest homeruns allowed. After the season was over Barry Zito was awarded the Cy Young award for the best pitcher in the league.

The point of this is not to (neccessarily) criticize sabermetrics or Billy Beane's strategy. This is a book review, and Michael Lewis could have written a better book. He devotes much page space to lengthy biographies of A's players and Billy Beane himself, whom the author seems to revere wholeheartedly, while not answering fundamental questions such as the title for this review: "What about pitching?" I have nothing but respect for the way Billy Beane's Athletics always seem to be in the thick of the hunt despite a low payroll, but that does not make this book any less flawed

For better or worse, more and more teams are playing "moneyball" these days. This is the book that started the game's changing focus from batting average to on-base-percentage. Most teams have statisticians on payroll now, and old school managers who don't play "the numbers" are becoming dinosaurs. You don't need to be a baseball fan to enjoy this book, however--statisticians, managers, and sabermetricians will all find the book fascinating.

I'm not a huge baseball fan, but still enjoy watching the sport. I found this book fascinating. A great story about how the game is managed and what makes teams successful.

I picked this book up, thinking it would be a great sports read. It turned out to be one of the most insightful business books I've ever read - whose principles can be applied to valuing businesses, real estate, individuals (baseball, in this case - but also football recruiting, which is my passion).
Michael Lewis captured so much in this great book!

Mr. Lewis has really created a gem in "Moneyball." It's hard to imagine a book about sabermetrics and statistics becoming an interesting and compelling story. Lewis has someone melded together a character study of Billy Beane along with the revolution of objective statistics in baseball in a way that doen't make people roll their eyes. This book is truly wonderful and probably one of the most important books on baseball since Bill Jame's baseball extracts.

On top of the interesting bits regarding the behind the scenes workings of a major league ball club is something even more substantial. This book can change the way the reader views all levels of baseball. What should high school coaches teach regarding hitting? This book suggests patience and knowing one's strike zone. Should pitcher's be worried about arm strength or deception? The book could easily be used to help coaches of all levels of baseball groom young players to be more effective ballplayers. It will even help those coaches with game strategy. In that sense this book is revolutionary. Sabermetrics used to be for a special class of baseball fan who spent more time at their computers than actually watching or playing baseball.

Now sabermetrics belongs to the masses.

And just imagine if this book sparked interest in applying objective criteria in other areas of life. What's the best way to manage a group of office workers, who is the best candidate to hire for a particular job, how can a business owner use previous sales numbers to formulate a strategy for the future? It may seem like a stretch but this book could change the way readers think about a whole host of issues, some not even close to relating to baseball.

Everyone can learn a lesson from this book and no baseball fan or businessmen should go without reading it.