my beau laughs at me because he says this is a book on statistics. i say it's about baseball. strangely, you don't have to be a fan of either to love reading this great story of how david kicks goliath in the pants. ( )

It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it, just how much time and money and energy and brain power have been invested in professional sports over the past hundred years or so, and none more than major-league baseball. Tracking and evaluating individual and team statistics has become an entire industry, and it’s an established enough industry that it can support heated debates about methodology and best practices. Moneyball is a fascinating peek into that world. It examines some of the arguments and grudges that have sprung up over the years among analysts and baseball insiders, and it somehow manages to do it in a way that will pique the interest of even non–baseball fans.

In 2002, the Oakland Athletics had the second lowest payroll in baseball, yet they managed to acquire more wins than all but one other team. According to conventional baseball wisdom, this was an impossible feat. So how did they do it? Michael Lewis answers this question by telling the story of A’s general manager Billy Beane.

Beane, drawing on very unconventional analysis by a baseball scholar named Bill James, believed that winning games depended far less than commonly believed on things like hitters’ batting average and fielders’ number of errors and relief pitchers’ saves. Instead, the most telling indicators of success were things like a batter’s ability to get on base with or without a hit and a pitcher’s strikeout percentage. Through the course of the 2002 season, Beane’s scrappy team won game after game while acquiring players everyone else thought were worthless and emphasizing strategies most other teams scoffed at. It seemed Beane was being proven right.

Of course, not everyone agreed. The 2002 A’s were an anomaly, some argued. But the numbers speak for themselves. Even readers with little or no interest in baseball will be intrigued by Lewis’s ability to describe and analyze statistical trends. Billy Bean comes off looking like a heroic David fighting against the Goliath of major-league baseball’s institutions. Traditional baseball scouts and others who hold fast to supposedly time-tested “truths” about America’s favorite game come across as naïve at best and downright foolish at worst. Through it all, the background stories of players—some whom no one but the most ardent baseball fans have ever heard of—add a delightful element of human interest, and the team’s ultimate success gives the book an almost epic hero’s-journey feel.

One word of caution: baseball is a dangerous sport to become interested in. With 162 games per season, not including the playoffs, loyally following even one team is a time-consuming enterprise. If you’re a baseball fan already, Moneyball will make you watch and think about games differently. If you’re not a fan, reading this book just might make you one. ( )

Michael Lewis is a brilliant observer of human beings and writes eloquently on a variety of topics. In this book, although not necessarily intentionally, he offers insight into one crucial feature of leadership—that it matters what you measure. By chronically the efforts of one baseball team, the Oakland As, which, with paltry investment in players and low-ticket sales became a consistent top producer to a large extent by analyzing data that others tended to ignore. Instead of measuring home runs, batting averages, and other statistics that appear important but do not necessarily produce wins, they discovered that on base percentage was the winning statistic that produced real results and hired players with that in mind. Their success defied the prevailing wisdom and challenged sacred assumptions. The key takeaway from the book is that often we miss the most important factors that cause success in organizational life. Finding it is the key.

I included this book in my book: The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. www.100bestbiz.com. ( )

This is an insanely good book, and I am not a big fan of baseball (I watch parts of perhaps 5 games a year). The book is about a true revolution in how baseball is managed and thus played, perhaps the first revolution in decades. It introduces the wider population to Bill James and his theories, sabermetrics, and using new statistics about player performance to mix winning with managing the economics of the salary cap and player compensation. The book is captivating, well written, and its setup around the life of Billy Beane is emotionally wringing enough to plant the seeds of sorrow and momentum that later turn into victorious happiness for the reader. It's so rare for a book to spark what truly has become a religious war in baseball. This is a must read for any student of business or data or performance of any institution (colleges, who are picking students, to be athletes, scholars, and future financial contributors, are a great example). ( )