Book Review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

In an attempt to make the best out of a team with an abysmally low budget for baseball players, Billy Beane looked for a new way to assess the talent of players hired by the Oakland Athletics. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he worked with Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate with no professional baseball experience. What DePodesta did have was a computer and lots of data. He did analysis on player performance, though he looked for statistics that were not considered most important in the "received wisdom" of baseball. He looked for players who were undervalued, either because of their appearance or their unorthodox play style. The real thing DePodesta looked for was results, even if a player had some other flaws that made them look undesirable to regular scouts. Then Billy used his ability as a wheeler-dealer to get inexpensive players who would improve the A's performance over the year. Once a player did work out and become a hotter commodity in the baseball market, Billy would trade him for another underrated talent. 

The book focuses mostly on Billy because he is a fascinating character. He started out as a baseball player with a lot of promise. His biggest enemy was himself--his lack of confidence would kick in as soon as something went wrong; his temper often got the better of him. He did not have much of a career as a player. He had a very unorthodox career as a general manager. He didn't watch the games because he would lose his objectivity. He'd get angry when things didn't go well and he'd take it out on the office furniture (so maybe he hadn't changed from his playing days). He did have confidence in the analytics and in his ability to make trades and choose players to draft. He became so good that other managers would get nervous as soon as he called with a new deal for a nobody.

The book also looks at other people, including eccentric players like Chad Bradford, a pitcher with a great record but an unorthodox throw and a desire to be anonymous, or Scott Hatteberg, a catcher who lost his ability to throw but was an ace hitter and became a solid first baseman. The book also looks at Bill James, who wrote a series of self-published (and eventually regularly published) books in the 1970s and 1980s gathering baseball statistics and commenting on what they meant for the game. He looked at statistics in unorthodox but very persuasive ways. James was the origin of Beane's and DePodesta's system. The characters are interesting and Lewis underlines their dramatic qualities.

The book ends on something of a tragic and cryptic note. Even though their statistical analysis had the Oakland A's performing well during the season, they never got anywhere when they made it to the playoffs. The author passes it off as a discrepancy between a statistically predictable 160-game season and a statistically unpredictable (because there isn't enough data) five-game series to make it to the next round of the playoffs. "Science will get you to the playoffs but luck is too much of a factor once you're there" is the implication. The numbers game doesn't work without enough numbers. This struck me as a cop-out. If you can figure out a science of the season, you can figure out a science of the post-season. Maybe a different shift in thinking is needed, one not so dependent on numbers, one that looks at hard to quantify factors like human psychology and the heightened environment of playoff season.

Slightly recommended--it is a fascinating read but not fully satisfying.