While studying abroad in Spain in 2005, one of my fellow travelers was reading Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" and raving about it. She and I were in the habit of swapping books and I completely trusted her recommendation. I bought the book once we returned to the States, but it wound up sitting on my book shelf.
A few years later this same friend recommended I read Lewis' football-centric book "The Blind Side." I had heard this book was being turned into a movie, so I rushed to read it in the fall of 2009 before the movie came out in November. While reading "The Blind Side" I fell in love with Lewis' writing. When it came time to pack for my Cape Cod vacation, I stood in front of my book shelf and knew instantly it was finally time to read "Moneyball."
For those who don't know, "Moneyball" is the story of how one Major League Baseball team rose to the play offs year after year despite having one of the lowest budgets for player salaries in the entire league. Though Lewis admits when he first set out to write about this new approach to building a team he planned to included examples from multiple clubs, the Oakland A's were the perfect case study and so he centered the book around them.
"Moneyball" explains how Oakland's general manager, Billy Beane (a former MLB player himself), re-arranged his team's thinking about who are the valuable players to draft. While most teams have scouts (who are typically older men who didn't make it far in their own baseball dreams) who report back on the best players, Beane began to rely heavily on statistics instead.
Not only was Beane laser focused on statistics, he was focused on numbers other teams weren't looking at. The numbers he cared about were walks and on base percentage. Though traditional scouts look for what they describe as "five tool guys," Beane looks for players who can get on base, no matter their make up.
What's cool about the book is that it was published in 2003 so many of the young players Beane was after are now superstars: Jason Giambi, Barry Zito, Nick Swisher and Kevin Youkilis, just to name a few. Lewis writes:
"All these other teams will assume that Billy Beane is interested in all these oddballs because he can't afford normal players, and Billy encourages the view. And it's true he can't afford anyone else. . . Billy uses his poverty to camouflage another fact, that he wants these oddballs more than the studs he cannot afford."
Lewis tells the stories of individuals players Billy Beane chased, bringing the rise of the Oakland A's to life on a very human level. He shares intimate details of the lives of Jeremy Brown, Scott Hattenberg and Chad Bradford. I think his writing shines brightest when he tells these personal stories. In these segments of the book, his writing reminds me of former Sports Illustrated columnist, Rick Reilly, who is one of my all time favorites.
The highlight of the entire book for me was the chapter about the 2002 draft. The chapter is titled "The Jeremy Brown Blue Plate Special." It goes through every phase of the team's draft experience - deciding which players to put on their wish list, Beane taking calls from other general mangers trying to make their game plan, and then the actual draft (which is a conference call on speaker phone) and how the team's plan evolves as they hear who has been taken. I felt like I was in the room, feeling the pressure. This book is currently being made into a movie (with Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane) and I know this is going to be the best scene.
Lewis does a great job showcasing the Oakland A's ascent to play off contender.
"Each year the Oakland A's seemed more the financial underdog and each year they won more games. Maybe they were just lucky. Or maybe they knew something other people didn't. Maybe they were, as they privately thought, becoming more efficient. When, in 2001, for the second year in a row, they lost to the Yankees in the fifth and deciding game of the play-offs, the Oakland front office was certain that theirs had been the better team and that it was the Yankees who had gotten lucky--and that the Yankees front office knew it."
At the end of the book, I actually learned something pretty interesting about our very own home team, the Boston Red Sox. When the Red Sox were purchased by John Henry, he was also a fan of this statistics-focused approach to building a team. Henry hired Bill James, the author of the "Baseball Abstract" and Voros McCracken, the brain behind the "Defensive Independent Pitching" formula. To round out his all star staff, Henry made a job offer to Billy Beane is 2002. Beane ultimately declined the generous offer and the position was given to Theo Epstein.
For baseball fanatics, the intel provided in "Moneyball" may not be new information, but it was for me. It was fascinating to read how Billy Beane and his right hand man, Paul DePodesta, reinvented the criteria for draft-worthy players. Lewis makes you feel like you are in on a tremendous secret and you feel the Oakland A's momentum building on every page.
The edition of the book I have includes a new afterword in which Lewis describes the reaction to the book from both inside and outside the baseball world. Within the MLB, other general managers were outraged and began calling Beane an ego maniac. However, the reaction from the general public was not only positive, but several business owners wrote to Lewis saying they learned things that helped them trim the fat from their own business practices. Who knows, if you read "Moneyball" perhaps you'll learn more than just the Beane-isms of baseball.
