Book Review #2 - Moneyball

The second book I read for our class was Moneyball, written by Michael Lewis. The book covers the 2002 Oakland Athletics during the era where they remained competitive with large-market teams such as the Yankees and the Red Sox. The book delved into how such a small-town team could be competitive.

The answer? Sabermetrics.

General manager Billy Beane was ahead of his generation and used tons of advanced stats to further break down baseball players. While most of the teams in Major League Baseball still valued the common attributes, like batting average, runs batted in and stolen bases, Beane found other ways of measuring success.

He broke down the game even further. He looked at on base percentage, slugging percentage, average when runners are in scoring position. He developed a new set of defensive ratings that were used to measure a player's defensive value. It was such a different way to analyze baseball players that it wasn't accepted among the league.

Beane came along and thought outside of the box, while everyone else was confined to it. No one wanted to go against the olden ways, how everyone else did, so they got left behind. The A's thrived in identifying players no one else would have dreamed of taking in the early rounds of drafts. Beane prided himself in raising his talent through his own farm system, rather than signing expensive free agents in the off-season.

After the A's success, Beane's methods exploded on the scene and all of a sudden everyone wanted to examine stats in a sabermetric way. The playing field was evened, and now that's why the A's aren't as competitive as they once were. Because everyone is doing what they were doing 10 years ago.

It was an excellent penned book by Lewis, and I would strongly suggest it to any baseball fan out there. But be weary, there are lots of stats and it gets broken down pretty intensely. Still, I read it in a few days and it remains one of my favorite books.