Rating: ****
Tags: Sports, Lang:en
Summary
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
front offices of major league teams and the dugouts, perhaps
even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all
these possibilities - his intimate and original portraits of
big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission -
but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers - numbers! -
collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur
baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall
Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors." "What these
geek numbers show - no, prove - is that the traditional
yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed.
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. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of
the Oakland Athletics." Billy paid attention to those numbers -
with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he
had to - and this book records his astonishing experiment in
finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball
is a roller coaster ride : before the 2002 season opens,
Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and
expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and
comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for
consecutive wins.