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TechnoTV - Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $5.49
Your Save: $ 8.46 ( 61% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.3570691
EAN: 9780393324815
ISBN: 0393324818
Label: W. W. Norton & Company
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2004-04
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Studio: W. W. Norton & Company
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Author of Pain Killer Marketing Loves This Book!
Comment: Pain Killer Marketing: How to Turn Customer Pain into Market Gain
This baseball book does a great job of asking and answering the question: What are the hidden benefits and values that others do not see? The book explains why decisions should be based upon predictive metrics, not emotion. This is the same message from our book about business. Great stories and enough explanation to relate the lessons from each story to a business situation. A great read!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Achievement
Comment: Aristotle once argued that there are three main purposes to art and writing: to teach, to delight, and to inspire. Rare is the book that accomplishes all three but Michael Lewis's "Moneyball" does exactly that: it is all at once a readable economics textbook, a classic good guys versus bad guys page-turner, and an edifying epic.
"Moneyball" is the story of three obsessive-compulsives -- Bill James, Billy Beane, and Paul DePodesta -- who re-imagined baseball from a game of stars and heroics into one of numbers and discipline.
An unemployed self-declared baseball critic Bill James understood that baseball statistics weren't just numbers and trivia: they were fundamentally a myth and a morality that sought to explain the game. Consider the statistic "error" which sought to eliminate luck from the game, and is a moral statement on who is at fault. This statistic, like most statistics in baseball, Bill James argued, was pig-headed, wrong, and irrelevant: it neither discounted luck from the game nor properly accounted for why a team won nor helped predict if they would win.
So what does? Here Bill James turned from critic to metaphysic: what really is baseball? It's a game where each team must score as many runs as possible without getting three outs. In other words, while great fielding is beautiful to watch, baseball is fundamentally an offensive game, and Bill James discovered that "on-base percentage" (the times a hitter gets on base divided by the times a hitter goes to bat) and "slugging percentage" (the number of runs a team generates each inning divided by the number of batters a team sends to the plate each inning) were the best indicators of a team's future performance.
Of course it didn't matter if Bill James was right or wrong because he was irrelevant. Baseball was a club that was dominated by those who played the game. Players became coaches and general managers and sports commentators, and they all thought alike and treated baseball as a sacred temple only they could access. Since the mid-eighties fantasy baseball players had taken James and made him into a self-publishing phenomenon, and amateur baseball theorists who counted among them expensively-educated and expensively-paid statisticians were constantly proving and refining James' theories -- but who listened to geeks anyway? The revolution needed to come from within, and it did.
Billy Beane should have been a baseball Hall of Famer -- with his build and athletic prowess he could have been the baseball Hall of Famer. That's what baseball scouts kept on telling him, and while Billy Beane did make the major league his heart really wasn't into baseball, and he was only a little above mediocre. At age 28 -- usually the prime of a baseball player's career -- he did the unthinkable, quit playing, and asked for a scouting job in the Athletic A's organization. And while Billy Beane was a member of baseball's sacred fraternity he had first-hand experience that they could at times be all wrong, and when he became the Oakland A's general manager he began systemically to prove that they were in fact all wrong.
As general manager Billy Beane hired a Harvard number-cruncher Paul DePodesta to implement and refine Bill James' theories. DePodesta made the critical insight that "on-base percentage" was three times as important as "slugging percentage," and used this new knowledge to draft college baseball's most undervalued players. What Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta found was what Bill James had long argued: that the market for baseball players was incredibly inefficient. Players who could get on base and wear out an opposing pitcher -- a team's most important contributors -- were underpriced, and the players who could hit jaw-dropping home-runs after striking out many times and make terrific catches that nevertheless did not alter the inexorable logic of the game were overpriced. By exploiting this market inefficiency Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta created one of baseball's most winning teams on one of baseball's smallest budgets.
And Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta saved some of baseball's best players from obscurity. Take, for example, Chad Bradford, one of baseball's most consistent closers. But why did no teams want him? He threw underhanded. Baseball teams couldn't dispute the facts -- Chad Bradford was a winner -- but in the end they decided aesthetics were more important than facts.
Then there's Scott Hatteberg, one of baseball's smartest players, and definitely the most patient and disciplined: for him baseball was a mental game, and as the game's most consistent hitter he wore down opposing pitchers by raising the ball count, gleaming valuable information in the process. What was his problem? He wasn't man enough -- not aggressive and reckless enough in the batter's box. In other words he didn't strike out enough -- and it was again Billy Beane who saw the absurdity of mainstream baseball's reasoning and snapped up Scott Hatteberg as soon as he could.
In many ways "Moneyball" is even more "Fountainhead" than Ann Rayn's best-selling classic. Like Howard Roark Billy Beane is not a person you'd like to meet. Nevertheless, motivated by his insatiable need to win, he is fighting against the forces of stupidity and unreason, and in so doing making a world a better place. And it is a credit to Michael Lewis's patience and discipline as a writer to just let this great story tell itself.
"Moneyball" is a brilliant achievement.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Leadership Classic
Comment: Lewis's MONEYBALL is impossible to put down because it is speaks as much to leadership as it does to baseball. The key premise is that instead of worrying about what you do not have, do all you can with the resources you do have.
Worthy of its praise and glowing reviews. A great read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Comment: CDs were in great shape. I got them within a few days of ordering.
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Summary: This is what happens when you question assumptions
Comment: More than baseball, Moneyball is about questioning assumptions - challenging everything you know to be true about your situation and asking yourself if maybe it "ain't necessarily so." How did Billy Beane and the Oakland A's achieve so many wins with such a limited budget?
1. They questioned assumptions (about the valuation of players).
2. They determined that various time-honored metrics metrics (for determining a player's value or worth) did not hold up under scrutiny.
3. Because no one ELSE did 1 and 2, they were able to invest their limited resources on players who were clearly undervalued.
What happens when you question assumptions? You often arrive at winning solutions! Discussed in detail (along with other great examples) in:Shake That Brain: How to Create Winning Solutions and Have Fun While You're At It
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Editorial Reviews:
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Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in Baseball. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-bedget Oakland Athletic's visionary general manager Billy Beane, and a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge - insights that will give the little fellow who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.
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