The Science Behind an Unfair Game

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

W.W. Norton & Company Inc.

©2004

Nonfiction

301 Pages

By Justin Moross

“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life,”

Mickey Mantle once said. As an avid baseball fan, and a high school baseball player, I thought I knew tons about baseball until I read Michal Lewis’ Moneyball.

Michael Lewis’ striking best seller, no pun intended, examines the story of the poor market baseball team, the Oakland Athletics (also known as the A’s). Billy Beane, the General Manager of the

A’s, adopts a theory created by Bill James, a baseball statistician and author, whose method is a tricky way for a general manager to build a baseball roster at an inexpensive price. This method happened to be called Moneyball, which gives the title its special meaning.

In 2001, the A’s lost to the New York Yankees in the first round of the playoffs after a wonderful

102-win season. During the offseason, Oakland lost three of their most important players on their roster: Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, and Jason Isringhausen. These players all signed for different teams who were much richer than the Athletics.

Many fans and scouts couldn’t answer the Oakland A’s simple question: What is the problem? Is it the fact that they lost three of their key baseball players?

Nope.

Did they need to replace 39 home runs and 120 RBI’s?

Nope.

The problem is that there are rich teams and poor teams. The poor teams never get the benefit of the doubt because they don’t have the money to spend. Baseball is an unfair financial game, and Billy

Beane recognized that.

Lewis does an amazing job of describing each and every baseball player. He gives background, where they specifically came from, and flaws that caused baseball scouts and general managers to ignore the players. But Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta, his assistant, ignored these backgrounds because of what they were looking for, which was the ability of the player to get on base. One of Lewis’ great descriptions is the reason why former catcher Scott Hatteberg was ignored by baseball teams: “His right hand still felt like it belonged to someone else. He’d played half a season with a ruptured nerve in his elbow… but when the operation was over, he couldn’t hold a baseball much less throw one.”

People who know of Bill James always wonder why he would want to redefine the game of baseball in his books.

James never coached, managed or played baseball. So, if he never had baseball experience

Lewis had to describe him as someone unoriginal, and someone who had no reason to even put himself in the same name in a baseball sentence. “There, at the University of Kansas, James studied economics and literature. He didn’t know any literary types, had no apparent role models, and was not encouraged in any way to commit his thoughts to paper… a fruitless layover in graduate school, he found a job as a night watchman in a Stokely Can Camp pork and beans company.” Although Michael Lewis does a great job of describing certain people, he gives a history lesson on Bill James in a long chapter, describing the mathematical and scientific equations James came up with.

How fun, right?

To some readers, the chapter of math and science is way too long, technical, and boring. It could make a reader never want to pick up the book again. But a baseball fan like me really wanted to see how this chapter would play a role throughout the book. As I kept reading, I saw how this abysmal chapter turned into one of the most important chapters in the entire book.

These strengths and weaknesses of Lewis’ writing has been his style of writing in many of his books. He has written many non-fiction books, like Losers, Pacific Rift, The Blindside, Next, and The New

New Thing. Liar’s Poker was Lewis’ first book ever written, and it happened to be a memoir of his days working at the Wall Street firm called Solomon Brothers.

Alongside from Lewis’ other successful non-fiction books, Moneyball is his standout book for fans of baseball looking for a true baseball story to read. It shows readers to not let others stand in the way of one’s ideas or decisions. Billy Beane risked the organization, his job and the job of the baseball scouts. Many people believed that the experiment was going to fail, and that Billy Beane has made an all-time big mistake.

Most Blind Brook High School students may like Moneyball depending on how much they love the game of baseball. If you love baseball, you will fall in love with Moneyball. This book will make you think about baseball from a different and interesting standpoint. On the flipside, if you don’t have any interest in baseball, don’t even bother looking at the cover of the book.

For me, as an insane baseball fan, on a scale from one to five, I’d have to give Moneyball a five.

If you love baseball like I do, I urge student to go to the library and pick up their copy of this book as soon as possible!