Great Business Book Disguised as a Baseball Story
The book is an easy and very interesting read. Michael Lewis is a great writer. Although he is writing about a topic I have little interest in (baseball) I was still drawn into the characters of the story and the business lessons the story offered.
MONEYBALL - Great book!
MONEYBALL is a great book. Michael Lewis is a writer who knows how to keep the reader moving through the book. There is a lot of detail in this text and it is written with excitement that keeps you flipping the pages. There is a constant sense of, "What is going to happen next?" or "Why did they do that?" and Lewis is able to present already interesting information in an even more interesting format that keeps your eyes glued to the page: "All he saw was that one major league baseball team treated him like a used carpet in a Moroccan garage sale..." When you have language such as this, coupled with information as to how an under-bankrolled baseball team produces winning records, you have one awesome book.
Statistical information proves that numbers are better at determining what is successful than what the eye can see. Purchase this book if you want to learn a few things and, simultaneously, be entertained in the process.
Paradigm Shift For Baseball
In the early 1990s Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland A's, combined Bill James statistical data for baseball junkies, hired Harvard graduates and brought the power of technology to baseball.
Neccessity is the mother to invention. The Oakland A's ownership did not have the money to compete for players in a league with no salary caps. And he figured out a way to build a competitive baseball team using statistical analysis.
Up to that point, baseball relied on having 100s of scouts watch players and rate them numerically with KPI's like hitting, hitting for power, speed, arm stregth and fielding ability. The rating's input was only as good as the amount of times the scout saw the the High School or College player. And the ratings were subjective, unique to each scout, so there was no way to compare ALL scouted players. Scouting main objective was to provide a GM input in the amateur draft.
Beene did not have the money to employ enough scouts to cover the country. So he decided to only draft college players as opposed to HS players because the former had a rich and accurate database of statistics.
It is more complicated than this - but Beene believed that the most important hitting skill was "on base percentage". So he drafted players in each round based on this object number
He went on to use Harvard graduates to refine the objective number. One iteresting refinement was actually divided each ball park into a gride using thousands and thousands of rows and columns. By doing this he deducted hits that an average fielder should have made an out and added hits that an exeptional fielder denied a hit.
His concepts now are widely used. So much in fact that the "playing field" has been leveled and the richer teams now again have the advantage.
Michael Lewis is a great writer. His other books have all been successful. The latest of which was called "Blind Side" that was made into a movie and Sandra Bullock just one a Golden Globe for here performance in the movie.
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