Present About Books Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
| Title | : | Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game |
| Author | : | Michael Lewis |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 317 pages |
| Published | : | March 17th 2004 by W. W. Norton Company (first published 2003) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Sports. Baseball. Business. Economics |
Chronicle Conducive To Books Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe
List Books In Favor Of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
| Original Title: | Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game |
| ISBN: | 0393324818 (ISBN13: 9780393324815) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | Casey Award (2003), Listen-Up Award (2011) |
Rating About Books Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Ratings: 4.26 From 94861 Users | 4820 ReviewsCriticize About Books Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Having the misfortune of being a Kansas City Royals fan, I thought Id had any interest in baseball beaten out of me by season after season of humiliation. Plus, the endless debate about the unfairness of large market vs. small market baseball had made my eyes glaze over years ago so I didnt pay much attention to the Moneyball story until the movie came out last year and caught my interest enough to finally check this out.Despite being a small market team and outspent by tens of millions ofA wee bit all over the place and rambling but more than made up for by the fascinating subject matter.
It breaks your heart, A. Bartlett Giamatti wrote of baseball in a piece called The Green Fields of the Mind. It is designed to break your heart. And so it does, year after year. Baseball, as has often been noted, is a game predicated on failure. The games best hitters only succeed in roughly three out of ten at bats. 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
This just didn't wow me like I thought it would. I guess I just like the play on the field better than the behind-the-scenes action.
A couple cons:The writings a little heavy-handed in places, which might just be a hazard of writing about baseball. Ex: The batters 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 ShakespeareBut:Overall, I really enjoyed Moneyball, and Im glad I read it. Even though its focused on the emergence of new baseball-thinking, Moneyball seems much more comprehensive, and much more narrative than I
I found this book extremely interesting, especially since I didn't read it until eight years after it came out, meaning I knew how all the draft picks and other players mentioned in the book panned out (a topic on which a good deal has now been written). Only my rule of always reading the book before seeing the movie prompted me pick it up now, a decision I don't regret.The book had some interesting tidbits I wasn't aware of, such as where the term sabremetrics came from ("The name derives from
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 isnt 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
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