In brief, Moneyball is about Billy Bean, the general manager of the Oakland A's, and the revolutionary techniques of appraising talent and selecting baseball players he and his staff pioneered. Despite having one of the lowest payrolls in all of major league baseball, something like 1/5 the size of the biggest budget teams, Oakland won more games than any other team over a recent four year stretch, though their post season success was lacking. How were they doing it? Why weren't other poor teams emulating them? Why weren't the rich teams stealing their ideas and outbidding Oakland for every player they wanted? Who was Billy Bean and how did he come up with his ideas?

The book covered most every question I had, in detail, as well as adding numerous interesting player profiles, game descriptions, and much more.  It was really an excellent read; informative and very interesting. To the scores.

Moneyball, the Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis
Concept: 8
Presentation: 7
Writing Quality: 6
Presents/Explains the Topic Clearly: 6
Entertainment Value: 8
Rereadability: 6
Overall: 8.5

Going in, I'd heard that Moneyball was all about the Oakland A's 2002 draft, and how iconoclastic their techniques were. That draft is covered in the book, but it's just a small part of the whole, and I was glad to see how much other information was included. I didn't expect there to be such a strong human element, with detailed thumbnail biographies of numerous players and of Billy Bean himself.  His character and personality is really the main topic of the book, and while he's not the most likable guy alive, he's quirky and very interesting, and that's a great combination of attributes for the star of a documentary-style book.

The brilliancy of Billy is his rejection of all typical analytical baseball stats, and the fact that he found better stats to measure talent. His style was largely one of necessity -- the budget he had to work with in Oakland wasn't large enough to get the players everyone else thought were solid. His style was also arrived at from personal experience, and not in a way I expected. When he was a young baseball player he was an incredible physical specimen and very successful at the lower levels, but was never any good in the big leagues. Basically he coasted on his physical skills and he never had the mental toughness and determination; he dreaded failure, thought too much, and worried constantly, and as a consequence he psyched himself into failure.  It took years for baseball teams to give up on him though, since after all, he had all the tools. Size, strength, a great throwing arm, the perfect physique, etc.

Much to Billy Bean's credit, he learned from the mistakes others made in evaluating him and realized that it was stupid to draft and pay guys who looked great if they couldn't produce. After all, baseball isn't a sport that requires great physical talents. They don't hurt, but plenty of short guys, fat guys, slow guys, and clumsy guys can be excellent players since they've got the hand/eye coordination to hit, or the arm movement to pitch, and the confidence to believe they'll succeed.  Billy was also one of the first GMs to realize that minor league and college stats actually meant something, and could be translated to pro stats with some reasonable accuracy. High school stats can not, since the level of opposition is so varied and frequently low, which is one of the reasons that drafting high school players is such a bad strategy; a bad strategy that almost every team but Billy's follows regardless of their success rate at it.

Besides his past history, Billy's other quirks are well-documented. One that I've heard some comment on is that he literally can not stand to watch his team play. He gets so tense and nervous that he often leaves the stadium during games, or shuts himself up, away from the game. He doesn't even listen to it on the radio. This seems pretty bizarre for the general manager, but it makes perfect sense once you understand Billy's feeling about the game. Individual games are a crapshoot; luck rules, bad luck kills, and individual performances can overcome all other factors. Over the course of a season superior management and player acquisition will win out, but from game to game, anything goes. Billy understands this, and while he lives to move chess pieces around on the huge board of the entire season or league, he can't do anything to effect the action in a single game, and knows that randomness can and will trump all of his plans. That's largely why Oakland has been unsuccessful in the playoffs; losing three straight years in the last game of a series, largely due to unexpectedly bad performances by one of their best players, or superb performances by a single player or two on the other team.

The in-depth and behind the scenes coverage of the infamous Moneyball Draft includes a great deal of revolutionary logic based on this sort of thought. Billy starts off with these huge lists of top prospects, and simply throws away at least half of them right away. Guys he knows Oakland can't pay, high school guys he doesn't think are anywhere near as good as the scouts say, guys who look good but don't have any stats, guys who have stats other teams like but not stats he thinks are valuable, etc.  The draft is amazing, since Billy has the utmost confidence in his projections, and negotiates numerous contracts before even signing the players, all of them for way way way below market value for a draft pick of that level. He does this by picking players far ahead of the rounds other teams were going to take them, and frequently by picking players other teams didn't want at all.

There are several detailed stories about players who were fat, or slow, or unconventional in some way who didn't even think they were going to be drafted, and who were so thrilled just to be drafted at all that they agreed to virtually any sort of contract Billy wanted. The funny part is that he wasn't picking them just because they were the only ones he could afford; they really were the guys he wanted most, and most of them weren't even on the radar for other teams.

While the draft and player evaluation portions are fascinating, the absolute best chapter in the book, for me at least, was the one about Bill James and the birth of sabremetrics. Bill James was just some guy in Kansas City; a night watchman at a warehouse who loved baseball and thought about it constantly and eventually came to the conclusion that most of the conventional wisdom about the game was bullshit. Better yet, he didn't just think it, he set out to prove it, and started writing books about it with endless stats to back up his arguments. Starting from nothing, with a tiny ad in the Sporting News, his annual books grew in popularity, until they were bestsellers after a few years, and at the forefront of a revolution in baseball thought.

The most amazing thing was that no one actually in baseball paid them any attention, and that's what I most enjoy about Moneyball; the portrait of how clueless and hidebound almost everyone in the sport actually was, and to a large part they still are. A quote from the bottom of page 93, courtesy of the Amazon.com "look inside this book" feature.

Even though baseball executives had no interest in trying anything new or learning from their past failures, other book publishers were taking notice of James' work, and trying to make money off his his style. Another quote from Moneyball:

Prior to reading Moneyball, I'd known about Bill James, and thought he was a crusty old man, bitter at being ignored for so many years (He finally got a job in baseball a couple of years ago, helping to evaluate talent for the Red Sox. The fact that they won their first world series since 1918 less than a year later is impossible to overlook.) by the idiots inside baseball. After reading Moneyball, and a great series of Bill James' book summaries on Rich's Weekend Baseball Beat, (Check the "Abstracts from the Abstracts" links in the right nav bar.) I now know that Bill James is not an ornery old coot. No, he always was ornery and biting and completely lacking in patience with idiots. Even before he was old.

He's also a fascinating subject for a book, and I got so much enjoyment from the chapter about him in Moneyball that I would recommend the book just for those 30 or 40 pages.  Fortunately, the rest of the book is a great read as well, and while far from perfect, it I really enjoyed it.

The ultimate legacy of Billy Bean remains to be written. His players have performed very well, and he's revolutionized the style of baseball management. He's been so successful in fact that he might be doomed, since his protégés now manage the Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Toronto Blue Jays (those organizations literally went down the list of Oakland's front office people and tried to hire them away, for far more money than they were making), and Billy's style of player analysis has spread even more widely than that.

The main criticism of Billy's tenure, other than his team's unfortunate post season failures, is that the main reason for Oakland's recent success is the "big 3" their three great starting pitchers, all of whom were drafted shortly before Billy Bean took over the team. He gets credit for promoting them to the majors and surrounding them with talent to win games, but he obviously had some luck in inheriting those weapons. Since two of them are now gone, traded away before they became free agents and thus became far too expensive for Oakland to afford to keep, 2005 should be the best test yet of Billy Bean's ability to massage a low-pay group of players into a quality baseball team.

The fact that Oakland has had by far the best record in all of baseball the last few years over the second half of the season, when trades have been made and underachieving teams have been fleeced, argues that Billy Bean can evaluate talent and put together a winner from players other teams didn't want. But we'll see if that skill continues into 2005, when many traditional pundits have Oakland picked for last place. Of course these traditional pundits are the types Bill James was talking about in the quotes above, and they're guys who have never liked Bean's style and have never understood his results, so you'd do well not to read too much into their predictions.