Lägg till bokmärkeMoneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
"One of the best baseball—and management—books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written o... (show more)
"One of the best baseball—and management—books out....Deserves a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame."—Forbes
Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly Standard).
I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?
With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors.
What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics.
Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins.
In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win...how can we not cheer for David? (show less)
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The apex of sports writing. Math, baseball, disruptive thinking that trumps bigoted, obsolete traditions - awesome. On top of all the positive stuff that everybody else has written, I really enjoyed the Billy Beane "redemption" story - from baseball failure to baseball's smartest man, how the lessons he learned during his days as a baseball bust taught him to look more deeply at a player's statistics, rather than looks or physique. Starting the book with a story about Beane's low po... (show more)
The apex of sports writing. Math, baseball, disruptive thinking that trumps bigoted, obsolete traditions - awesome. On top of all the positive stuff that everybody else has written, I really enjoyed the Billy Beane "redemption" story - from baseball failure to baseball's smartest man, how the lessons he learned during his days as a baseball bust taught him to look more deeply at a player's statistics, rather than looks or physique. Starting the book with a story about Beane's low point as a young washed up player and then contrasting that with a scene from a maniacally successful A's draft is a genius move. (show less)
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It's amazing to think that something other than money and the ability to purchase star players can be at the heart of a team's ability to win baseball games. But that is essentially Michael Lewis' argument in explaining how the Oakland A's, a Major League Baseball team with one of the smallest budgets, came to dominate for several years under coach Billy Beane in the early part of the 2000s. Lewis finds that much of what has been taken for granted or commonly accepted as Truth among baseball'... (show more)
It's amazing to think that something other than money and the ability to purchase star players can be at the heart of a team's ability to win baseball games. But that is essentially Michael Lewis' argument in explaining how the Oakland A's, a Major League Baseball team with one of the smallest budgets, came to dominate for several years under coach Billy Beane in the early part of the 2000s. Lewis finds that much of what has been taken for granted or commonly accepted as Truth among baseball's insiders isn't all that. For instance, the idea that something other than the ability to pound home runs and slug with great power make the best hitter may be anathema to fans and most team managers. But, an examination of statistics other than these commonly accepted ones, such as a hitter's ability to get on base a lot, to draw a lot of walks and avoid outs, while not as physically stimulating ot the eye or attractive to the recruitment market, nevertheless can offer powerful assets to a team. Players who demonstrate such qualities are often deemed unattractive to star teams like the Yankees or the Red Sox, and can therefore be purchased at an excellent price by teams such as the A's and bring lasting benefits to the ballgame. Equally, pitchers who appear unorthodox in style or who cannot deliver a Nolan Ryan fastball may be overlooked by a majority of scouts, but may nevertheless have other amazing numbers such as a low ERA and a large number of saves. Lewis' book looks at the the history of statistic-keeping in the game and shocks the reader by pointing out how salty baseball insiders seem averse to new knowledge or fact-finding that can help teams their improve their performance. If expensive, flashy players who "look good" are the measure by which team success is usually determined, Moneyball is a convincing iconoclastic effort to show that cold, objective numbers and hyper-efficiency in team performance should rate as least as high. That the Oakland A's, despite being a financially poor team, put up some incredibly wins and losses for several years running, shows that there's definitely something in this argument. Perhaps the fact that other teams such as the Toronto Blue Jays and Boston Red Sox are seeking to emulate this model in their scouting and recruitment shows that baseball insiders are finally beginning to appreciate it too. (show less)
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