Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003)

by Michael Lewis

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Members	Reviews	Popularity	Average rating	Mentions
5,577	130	1,895	(4.21)	107
Business. Sports & Recreations. Nonfiction. Economics. HTML:Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the giant offices of major league teams and the dugouts. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?… (more)

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31
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall (zhejw)
zhejw: Both books are stories of outsiders changing the conventional way of approaching a sport. Both authors write compelling narratives that draw the reader into the stories of the individuals who are at the center of this new way of looking at their sport.
10
Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting by Kevin Kerrane (simchaboston)
simchaboston: A good look at how baseball scouts work and what they look for, and an interesting counterpoint to the stats-based approach described in Moneyball.
10
The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First by Jonah Keri (tmarlow05)
tmarlow05: Details the rise of the Tampa Bay Rays. Shows how techniques used on Wall Street can be utilized to put together a competitive baseball team.
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Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport by Simon Kuper (chazzard)
chazzard: The authors of Soccernomics frequently refer to Moneyball, and apply similar statistical methods.
23
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt (tcarter)

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Not since the glorification of the closer - curse you, Tony La Rossa - has any one or two men so fundamentally changed the nature of baseball. [[Bill James]] put together a statistical analyses of the game and published them in a little-known, self-published annual periodical. Billy Beane read them, and then applied them to the wistful, broke Oakland A's. The season that followed saw the team in the playoff contention and also saw them break the consecutive games won record, winning 20 in a row (Typically, the record books list the 1916 New York Giants holding the record at 26, but the team had a tie game in the middle of that run - so, asterisk.) Beane was courted to take over the Red Sox after that season, but turned more money down to stay in Oakland.

James is an interesting character - he penned a great true crime book [The Man from the Train: Discovering America's Most Elusive Serial Killer] - and his mind sifts data like no other. But Beane is the real color in this book, and the team of broken toys he used to put together a 103-win season, using James' work.

If you love baseball, read this book - you'll understand so much better the nature of the modern game. If you love statistics, read this book - few other people have ever taken data so far in any arena.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended (

)

blackdogbooks | Jun 25, 2024 |

Sports

BooksInMirror | Feb 19, 2024 |

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. (

)

MXMLLN | Jan 12, 2024 |

Fascinating and gripping read. Interesting that clubs don't take this more seriously, but seeing how it is changing as well. I'd like to maybe read more from Lewis. (

)

robkoechl | Oct 27, 2023 |

This is a great sports book. If you love baseball you have to read this. Everyone can learn from what Billy Beane and the A's did when they decided to question they way baseball players had traditionally been evaluated. Of course those who argue against the new perspective are only afraid that the new philosophy of "Moneyball" proves that they have been doing their jobs wrong the entire time. (

)

CMDoherty | Oct 3, 2023 |

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▾Other authors

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Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Michael Lewis	—	primary author	all editions	calculated
Neugarten, Robert	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

▾Series and work relationships

Has the adaptation

Moneyball [2011 film] by Bennett Miller

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▾Common Knowledge

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Canonical title

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Original title

Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game

Alternative titles

Original publication date

People/Characters

Important places

Oakland, California, USA

Important events

Related movies

Moneyball (2011 | IMDb)

Epigraph

Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the
passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred
pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards
at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking-- had he the gold?
or the gold him?
--John Ruskin, Unto This Last

Dedication

For Billy Fitzgerald
I can still hear him shouting at me

First words

The first thing they always did was run you.

Quotations

Last words

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Wolfe, Tom

Maslin, Janet

Gerson, Mark

Original language

Canonical DDC/MDS

796.3570691

Canonical LCC

GV880.L49

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (15)

Advanced metrics

Baseball Think Factory

Bibliography of Oakland, California

List of Major League Baseball career on-base percentage leaders

▾Book descriptions

Business. Sports & Recreations. Nonfiction. Economics. HTML:Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the giant offices of major league teams and the dugouts. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.
In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

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