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This book is fundamentally about baseball statistics and how they work. But you should read it anyway.

source: Amazon

I acknowledge that not everyone finds the arcana of baseball data as compelling as I do; but I think the business reporter Michael Lewis's Moneyball is likely to hold something for you:

• There are a number of intriguing personal portraits. Lewis focuses significantly (though not exclusively) on Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. Beane was a former player himself, but has taken a route different from most former players who end up in management: he has broken with one baseball tradition after another in a quest to get a leg up on the competition. Several other characters, and their idiosyncratic stories, get coverage here too, from Harvard-trained Paul DePodesta (Beane's Assistant GM) and sabermetrician Bill James to a host of old-timer scouts and fresh-faced minor leaguers. Lewis does a good job sketching the diversity of characters who are drawn to and who make up big-league baseball.

• There are business principles applied in thought-provoking ways. Lewis's big argument is that the rational application of analytical tools to evaluate value and efficiency is a foreign and usually unwelcome practice in Major League Baseball. But that fact is one that Beane and the A's exploited to find players who were undervalued by other teams — and whom they could snap up at bargain prices. I never expected to read a baseball book with so much discussion of financial markets and derivatives theory, but the juxtaposition makes for exciting reading. ("Where are the inefficiencies in my industry that I could take advantage of?")

• There is lots of baseball and lots of baseball statistics. An in-depth excursion into the path-breaking role of Bill James and his Baseball Abstract in questioning the numbers we use to count good things and bad things in baseball (the batting average, the fielding percentage) is worth the price of admission alone.

One weakness of the book — and perhaps of Beane's iconoclastic system itself — is a notable silence on the place of pitchers and pitching statistics in the evaluation of teams' effectiveness. I'd love to know more about what Beane really thinks about this (though undoubtedly, he won't be talking as freely to anyone as he did to Lewis anytime soon), and it's a flaw in Lewis's book that he didn't take seriously enough the disadvantage of remaining silent and accepting Beane's protests that it's all about hitting.

Such a complaint hardly detracts from the overall quality of this book, however. Read it for the people, for the business insights, or for the baseball — or for all three — and you'll find a one-of-a-kind book.

It should be noted that the book is definitely R-rated for language, because (no surprise) baseball men themselves are R-rated, and Lewis is an evocative recorder of their private conversations.

Considered in this review: Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

first published Sep 18, 2004