Geoffrey

I expected this book to be heavy on statistics and sports strategy but what made it enjoyable was the human elements, especially the impact of the season on the authors themselves who left with an unexpected appreciation for the role that the minor league baseball experience played in the lives of those who made the team.

Entertaining, very well written, and moderately balanced even though the author is a fan of the band (the chapter on their final two albums was appropriately critical).

I lost my respect for Becker/Fagen after reading the story of how they took not only 100% of the royalties from an early rap group who sampled “Black Cow”, but also took the plaque from an award the song received.

I expected this book to be heavy on statistics and sports strategy but what made it enjoyable was the human elements, especially the impact of the season on the authors themselves who left with an unexpected appreciation for the role that the minor league baseball experience played in the lives of those who made the team.

I've enjoyed books by Michael Lewis and plan to read others, but this one could not hold my attention.

Chapters 1, 8, and 9 were engaging but the remaining chapters seemed to drag on without making progress toward key concepts.

When it did touch on some of Kahneman and Tversky's ideas, it seemed forced. “Buying insurance is, strictly speaking, a stupid bet.” “Gamblers accept bets with negative expected values” (which is understood by many to be risky, not rational). “Back when a ducat was a ducat.”

I had high hopes for this book but I think I would have benefited from reading Kahneman and Tversky's works directly instead.

I enjoyed the first chapter and the chapter on distribution curves (standard, exponential, Erlang) and corresponding prediction models.

Much of the rest of the book was frustrating to read. It tries to cover so many topics so thinly that it barely gets into one observation before it leaves it behind for another.

On page 74 it starts into an interesting discussion of sports tournaments and mentions Lewis Carroll's pamphlet on lawn tennis brackets. But then, in less than a page, it skips over Carroll's proposed solution (because it's an “awkward take”).

Or the page on unlimited vacation time for employees (which features a quote from a friend of mine) barely addresses a single objection and then moves on to other topics.

Instead of introducing readers to the complexity and nuances of the difficult and often decades-long dilemmas of computer science, it turns them all into misleading single page summaries.

I would have preferred to read a book where they picked half as many topics and discussed them more thoroughly.

Reading this book confirmed a new personal approach to avoiding books that will be disappointing:

- About 250 pages long
- Subject is vaguely scientific or mathematical
- Uses the Gotham font or another geometric sans anywhere

This book satisfies all three and now I know that I should avoid buying this kind of book.