Moneyball

An engaging story about human nature and trying to find truth, interspersed with solid chunks of stats and player names that i could unfortunately neither follow nor bring myself to care about.

It's the numbers Sharon! The numbers!

Story: 10 / 10
Characters: 9
Prose: 7
Content density: 9

An absolutely incredible book and I don't even watch sports.
Moneyball will probably teach anyone to love data, numbers, and mathematics.

Highly recommended.

This was a bit different than I expected. I had seen the movie years ago and had kind of assumed that the book was a bit more analytical and the movie had just expanded upon slight narrative threads that may have existed in it, but actually the book is very invested in Billy Beane as a character and spends a lot of time on small vignettes of many players. A lot of the stories are nice little land-of-misfits success stories that can sometimes be a bit cheesey and seem a bit overindulgent, but I still enjoyed quite a bit.

I listened to this as an audiobook from the library. Scott Brick does an excellent job narrating and I can't even really putting my finger on why. He just has a nice, engaging voice that adds to the material.

I found this book fascinating. I am not a baseball person. I'll watch a game with my dad on occasion but I don't have cable and rarely go out of my way to watch. This book made the topic very interesting. I appreciate the depth of knowledge even if most the names went over my head.

I would say if you even have a cursory passing interest in baseball or math and statistics; check this book out.

Lewis (of Liar's Poker fame) is such a top writer - he makes the business side of a sport I don't even fully understand the rules of (let alone follow) fascinating. It's all about using data to make decisions, rather than relying on human perception and emotions...so topical stuff. Soon to come out as a film, starring Brad Pitt, aparrently(!)

Had to give up on this one: disregard this review if you are interested in baseball.

This just doesn't feel like it has enough content to make up a whole book. On the way to the thing that makes it different than other sports books, it does the classic ‘here's what they all looked like and their relationships with parents and hometown' thing. It finally gets to the bits that are somewhat interesting, the reforms of the hiring system are mostly seen as revolutionary since they were pretty off-the-hinges in the past.

Sports insiders have determined that the best way to put together a club was to spend the most money. Billy Beane (and the New York Yankees of late) have proved otherwise. The A's have discovered that choosing ball players based upon their uncanny ability to get on base, rather than throw gas or mash a bunch of home runs, is the key to winning. And that is what they have done.

They have provided the template for what financial investors term, “Buy low and sell high.”

This was a great book. You can tell this by all of the professionals who dismiss it at their own peril.

I'm not sure why, but this non-fiction tale about building an efficient baseball team was fascinating. Maybe the attention paid to supporting characters inside and outside of baseball by author Michael Lewis is what grabbed and held my interest.

Published in paperback by W. W. Norton.