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”Billy uses his poverty to camouflage another fact, that he wants these oddballs more than the studs he cannot afford,” Mr. Lewis writes. And he must do this with fake ingenuousness, because ”it is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying” to cheat. ”Moneyball” follows the careful reassessment of how players are rated once computers and sophisticated statisticians begin dissecting Retail foreign exchange trading the game. Traditional scoring of errors may mean nothing when it comes to a team’s long-term record; on the other hand, the ability to get on base even if it means walking is a valuable asset. The recent emphasis on measuring each player’s on-base percentage is one of the incremental changes that have revolutionized baseball strategy, at least in Oakland. ”Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking,” one of the game’s new breed of analysts has said.
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Like all of Michael Lewis’s books, Moneyball is addictively readable. Getting my almost-two-year-old Currencies forex to fall asleep every night has become an epic battle of wills.
Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind.
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Besides being beautifully written, Lewis never forgets the human element—the “romantic” side—of baseball in his characterizations of an ensemble cast of fascinating, flawed, and idiosyncratic people. In 2002, Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, decided to do something so radical as to have the appearance of utter insanity. Has phenomenal insight on the inner workings of the front office of baseball. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Additionally it offers an incredible perspective into the complex world of baseball stats. I feel like I understand baseball waaaaaaaaaaaaay better because of reading this book. The book is part biography of Billy Beane, part homage to Bill James , part explanation of the unorthodox strategies employed by the A’s, and part a case study in resistance to change. Personal stories of a few A’s players are also included.
Sometimes it’s meanings within meanings, and it often requires a deeper read between the lines. Simultaneously among the top 10 sports books and the top 10 economics books.
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This can, at times, be grating, as the former regime has certainly had successes in developing star players. Of course, most of this work occurred prior to the computing age, so they did not have the same tools, and, therefore, it is not a level playing field by which to judge. I did not see the need to come down so hard on some individuals, who are hard-working baseball people with good intentions. While straightforward statistical analysis is interesting enough to me , where Moneyball shines is it’s more detailed investigations into the development of statistical analysis in baseball, and some of the individual players who made up the A’s successful 2002 squad. It is these investigations that give the Beane storyline depth and character, and add credence to the statistical analysis strategies the A’s employed. I would highly recommend this book to baseball fans, even if they’ve seen the movie version, because the book is more in-depth and has great stories that didn’t make it into the film.
Eventually James punctured countless myths about what was important to winning in baseball. He devised a formula to measure “runs created”–a forex formula that predicted, from just a few aspects of a player’s performance, how many runs he would produce for an average team.
According to Lewis, the most important statistic to Beane and his statistician in determining what position players to draft is the ability of players to draw walks. They look for players who have exhibited the ability to work deep in the count and to draw walks.
As for writing I agree it’s sometimes overwhelming with author trying to fill pages and pages with statistics’ jargon only to prove how important it is to understand the orthodox methods and again to prove them wrong. And sometimes, it also feels like, in order to establish a small relation between a random player and Billy author starts off into a way too long back say from player’s childhood days, his influences, or his playing style etc., which seems out of the track a bit.
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Of course, James does not advocate bad pitching, and, presumably with his help, the team has acquired three new relief pitchers. But, interestingly, they also seem to have designated one as their closer, perhaps deciding to let this particular battle wait for another day. Using extensive statistical research, Beane incorporated a scientific approach for managing his team’s finances and guiding its hiring strategies.
After the season, however, they lost three key free agents, including all-around masher (and later-admitted PED user) Jason Giambi. Beane wanted to replicate his team’s success, but he had to do it on a shoestring budget. I can’t speak for others, but I don’t watch baseball games in order to watch hitters work deep into the count, draw a walk, camp out on the bases until somebody gets an extra-base hit to drive them home. The strategy utilized by Beane and his proponents may produce a more efficient style of baseball, about that I am in no position to quibble. It may be the only way that a small market team like the Oakland A’s can compete with the deep pockets of the New York Yankees and other large market teams (the ‘unfair game’ mentioned in the book’s subtitle).
- Scouts are experienced in the sport, usually having been players or coaches.
- In 2002, they ranked twelfth in payroll again–and first in wins.
- The approach brought the A’s to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003.
- A 162-game season presents a tremendous sample size, which should iron out aberrations; and yet year after year, entire seasons come down to a single bad bounce or mistimed swing or hanging curve or missed call.
- On base percentage plus slugging has upstaged the traditional measurements of RBIs, runs scored, and batting average.
- And Mr. Lewis, like the A’s under Mr. Beane’s aegis, is playing at the top of his game.
One of the most prominent device Lewis uses to convey this idea is imagery. “A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was as if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A’s draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk.
(a.) Michael Lewis examines the fallacy behind the major league baseball refrain that the team with the biggest wallet is supposed to win. Over the past four years the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league payroll, have had one of the best records in the country. Michael Lewis examines the fallacy behind the major league baseball refrain that the team with the biggest wallet is supposed to win. Sometimes, I bet you can sense author’s brutal honesty in depiction and his gutsy approach in narration.
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And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. As he has often demonstrated, most dazzlingly in ”Liars’ Poker” and ”The New New Thing,” Mr. Lewis is a terrifically entertaining explicator. Like Tom Wolfe (whose enthusiasm for ”Moneyball” is cited in its jacket copy), he can be trusted to make anything interesting, and to cast even the familiar in a bright new light. You need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of his thoughts about it. ”The mood is exactly what it would be if every person in the room was handed his own personal vial of nitroglycerine,” he writes, describing the day of the team’s 2002 amateur player draft. At the end of ”Moneyball,” Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, is said to fear that no one will ever really know what revolutionary things his team has accomplished, or how this ingenious strategy was devised.
In using data rather than professional intuitions, Beane confirmed this point. They contain a conspicuous lack of extra base hits and walks. What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed.