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I read Moneyball at a time when I wasn't reading too much besides preschool kids books and reread it for the baseball book club I am a part of on good reads. Michael Lewis follows the story of general manager Billy Bean and his 2002 Oakland As, a low budget baseball team that managed to win their division going away. What is remarkable is that Bean built his team focusing on sabermetrics, not home runs and RBIs. He knew he did not have money to compete with the Yankees of the world and assembled...
Michael Lewis hit this one out of the park. I love his writing style -- he is able to explain complex and insider ideas to a layperson, and he makes it interesting. That skill is as valuable to a reporter as a baseball player's on-base percentage was to the Oakland Athletics.The story follows the Oakland A's during the 2002 baseball season, which was when their general manager, Billy Beane, was following a different set of principles for assembling a team than the majority of the league. Beane a...
For the most part, the is a fun book to read about the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. The first half of the book was very enjoyable. Toward the end, though, it became a bit repetitive. It's not that the author repeats himself--he does not. It's just that the stories about hiring and trading for good baseball players started to sound all the same after a while.Billy Beane was the general manager during the late 1980's, early 1990's. His team was one of the poorest in the
This is a good book, but not as good as I thought it was going to be. Sometimes I find technical writing to be a bit repetitive and this definitely leans more toward technical non-fiction than biography (I was hoping for more of a human interest story here)—because even though Billy Beane takes up a large chunk of the story, it isn’t really a story about Billy Bean per se.Moneyball was published in 2003, only a year after John Henry bought the Boston Red Sox. Before that time, very few people in...
It was a better story before I knew the whole story. Almost every book on randomness I have read had a reference to Moneyball and I had built up my own version about this story (I had even told a few people that version!) and it imagined everybody doing what Billy Beane was doing, and Billy Beane doing some sort of probability distribution among all players and randomly picking his team, winning emphatically, and thus proving that a truly random pick of players is the equivalent of a true-simula...
The major taxing of this book is not the baseball terms, but there are so many people appeared in the book, and the similarities in names are not helping. For example, the main protagonist is Billy Beane, and there is another important character whose name is Billy James. That's my only concern when reading this book. Some people maybe not comfortable with the writing style in this book, jumping from one subject to another without smooth main story.I am not a professional baseball fan although I...
Moneyball is a book that shook the world of professional baseball, but not necessarily in the way it should have. Let me explain...Moneyball is framed around the story of Billy Beane, a hot prospect who never panned out in the majors, who became general manager of the Oakland A's in 1997. Since that time, the A's, while consistently having one of the lowest payrolls in baseball, have been one of the best teams in the game. How is this possible? The book details how Beane and a few trusted associ...
Non-fiction about how Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane used sabermetrics to develop winning baseball team at less expense than the wealthier teams in the industry. Published in 2003, we can see much of Beane’s philosophy being practiced now throughout the game. There are fewer sacrifices, hit & runs, and steals, and more emphasis on walks and reliance on statistical probabilities in making decisions. On base percentage plus slugging has upstaged the traditional measurements of RBIs, runs
Michael Lewis and greatness finally intersect. They have orbited around each other for years before this book arrived.The story is narrow in scope, discussing a baseball team. Or more narrowly, discussing the general manager (i.e., the person responsible for hiring and firing players and coaches) who doesn't have enough money to hire new players. Or even more narrowly, how this manager realized he could never win using the traditional tools of the trade, so he cobbled together a new toolset and
A couple cons:The writing’s a little heavy-handed in places, which might just be a hazard of writing about baseball. Ex: “The batter’s box was a cage designed to crush his spirit.” Plus, as a poet, I always feel guilty reading books like this when I could/should be reading Proust or Shakespeare…But:Overall, I really enjoyed Moneyball, and I’m glad I read it. Even though it’s focused on the emergence of new baseball-thinking, Moneyball seems much more comprehensive, and much more narrative than...
In nearly everyone's mind, for any topic which they care about at all, there is a mental model. Not, generally, a probabilistic population of models, but rather, one model: The Way This Thing Is. It may be how the economy works, it may be how politics works, it may be how romance works (or fails to). Whatever it is that a person needs to have an opinion on, because it impacts their life and they must deal with it (which means they must have a strategy for dealing with it), people have a mental m...