Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this book. It's fascinating to see concrete examples of how conventional wisdom and "common sense" can be proven completely incorrect when faced with some simple data analysis. I also *really* liked learning about some of the founders of sabermetrics, who were writing and publishing on topics like these 30 years before Moneyball became a household term. The fact that baseball is my favorite of the major American sports, doesn't hurt either.
I also, thought this books complimented the movie nicely. The movie had a great dramatic arc, and fantastic dialogue, but didn't really make much sense in terms of explaining the relationship between the actions of Billy Beane and "Peter Brand" (The actual Oakland A's assistant GM, Paul DePodesta apparently didn't authorize the use of the image for the movie...) and the outcomes on the field.
However, I found that in some sense, Moneyball raises more questions than it answers. For example, none of the radical scouting prospects discussed at length in the book have had auspicious MLB careers since the book was published. Moreover, after 4 amazing years, 1999-2003, the Oakland A's have been pretty mediocre. (According to Wikipedia, Billy Beane says this is 'cause everyone else is using the strategies documented in Moneyball, and so the players he might of otherwise been able to sign for cheap are going to the richer teams, which I suppose is plausible.) However, the thing that I find the most mysterious is that, apparently, the "data mining" behind Moneyball involves selecting players that have a high on-base percentage and slugging percentage (and empirically tweaking formulae that rank players based on these stats). (And for pitchers, looking for many strikeouts and few walks.) I appreciate the thesis behind the books that There is Still New Knowledge to Be Discovered in Baseball, but the Knowledge discussed here doesn't seem that profound to me.
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