My review of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Here's my pitch. If there's anyone thinking of drafting me to their team, their first question should be: "What's wrong with her that we can get her for anything less than a million dollars?". Get the story of how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane's shot at a professional baseball career was turned upside down. And how he managed to return the favor -- by throwing out conventional wisdom, recruiting undervalued players just like himself, and creating one of the most successful baseball franchises in history. By rethinking convention, he turned the tables and beat the well off baseball owners that once rejected him at their own game. This is my review of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.

I went into this book not knowing much about baseball and learned a whole lot more than I imagined possible! This is a sport with a devoted fan base of "baseball nuts" who make thinking through every move in the game a mental sport unto itself. That "thinking through" process has significantly evolved since Billy Beane started, and was subsequently rejected from, his professional baseball career in the 1980s. Back then, well-to-do baseball scouts were gatekeepers for who got picked and whose chances were dashed based on an entirely subjective set of criteria. The scouts would look at potential recruits and size them up based on what they could see with their eyes: physical attributes, emotional stability, where or if they went to college, their age, and how they played baseball as observed on the field. The stakes were sky high, with scouts spending tens of millions of dollars to snag players to major league teams.

Seriously talented people who differed in any way from even just one the subjective ideals held by these major league scouts were written off and cast away as not worth their time. They had no recourse for their rejections either. Not until Billy Beane. Billy knew that he and so many people just like him were exceptionally talented, but somehow different. And he was done with it. He would have none of it. Billy made his way to the Oakland A's team as a player in 1989. Fast forward to 1998. He became General Manager for a previously well funded team brought under new ownership. That new ownership made him make due with about a third of what other teams had to spend on players. Billy had to run his team on a shoestring and just find a way to make it work. Having personally been rejected from the big leagues for a reason that had nothing to do with his actual performance, Billy already had every incentive to fight both for himself and for guys just like him. He would take what he wanted for himself and give it to other people. He didn't need the shoestring budget to force his hand as an extra incentive. He already had one. Game on.

This is where this living true story really takes off. Billy starts looking at statistical data gathered from the field. He isn't interested in anything else. For him, statistics tell the whole story. They give the "outside baseball" view of objective facts correlated to player accomplishments over time. Together with economist Paul DePodesta, Billy started the journey of taking baseball from a subjective sport to a factually calculated one. Bill James' Baseball Abstracts were brought into use. AVM software, too. Soon enough, economists, mathematicians, and other bright Jamesian sabermetricians wanted in on the action to further refine tools for statistical analysis. The scouts were another story. The establishment scouts stuck to their subjective ways, spending up to millions on draft picks and trades. They would keep on drafting the good looking players without regard to statistical performance. This is where Billy was able to get what the statistics showed as talented players at bargain prices. This is what makes the A's a successful team made up entirely of oddball top talent.

Not really knowing much about baseball, I found the concept of team ownership contracts for players up to ten years in duration troubling. Because those players are subject to being traded at any time to another team without any warning. They have no say in it. The book really gives insight into how this must feel from a player's perspective. The vivid description of Ricardo Rincon being given twenty-five minutes to take one team jersey off and walk out of the bullpen straight to another team where his last name had been freshly ironed onto a new team jersey was jarring. It didn't help that Rincon had limited English proficiency. This guy sat on the A's bench for the first time in a daze when this happened. But this is the game, and that's how it's played.

Billy's player trades were business transactions. He refused to let his emotions get in the way. He got creative with assigned player contract values, getting two-for-one player deals in trades, and taking extra cash for the difference of a high value player that could be spent on another traded player. He also had no shame in hiding his strategy from scouts to get the players he wanted. He looked at every angle of baseball decisions differently and gamed an unfair game.

Jamesian statistical player performance evaluation criteria was criticized for years before major league teams started including their own sabermetricians inside their front offices. That's partly because statistical analysis is a better performance predictor over the longer duration of games leading to playoffs. That's to do with probability theory and the rule of large numbers. It isn't for the few short playoff games that follow baseball seasons. The playoffs are the games people notice the most. It's like admiring the tip of an iceberg without seeing or appreciating the vast glacial depth below it. For some, it's just a social game. For others, it's about wit and strategy. For those willing to put in the effort and challenge what they think they know, it's a smarter game. And that's the point.

Who doesn't like the idea of unconventional underdog heroes outwitting established big money and power? That's what this is all about. General Manager wasn't just a job for Billy Beane. It was a cause. Toward the end of his time with the A's, the Boston Red Sox offered him a five year $12.5m contract. It was more money than he would have ever seen. He couldn't take it. He wouldn't. In that moment of truth, he had to admit to himself that this never was about money. It was about bringing a vision to life, and he had done it.

Oakland is a city right in my backyard and I never knew this special story about it. By the way, Oakland is filled with resilient people. It's the perfect home for the A's. Do you relate to this story? I want you to be proud and own it. This book is funny. Michael Lewis is a talented writer. He explains in the afterward that Billy Beane was mostly indifferent to his efforts to observe him. He hardly saw the value in it. What's brilliant is that this story, while based on facts, has a generous amount of fiction to it. What I mean is that Michael Lewis took the sparse facts he could get and "reconstructed" the story of how it all might have played out from the perspective of his mind's eye. I nearly fell out of my seat laughing countless times reading it. "What's wrong with him that the A's got him?" is a running joke. "What's wrong" doesn't make one bit of difference! Will you accept the status quo or will you think on your own feet to change it? It's a million dollar question. The answer is priceless. Play ball.