Moneyball Book Summary

Book Summary

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Brief Summary

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is the story of one baseball team’s ability to play competitive baseball using sabermetrics over the usual numbers associated with a winning player. Rather than focus on players already in demand, the Oakland A’s opted to approach the game as a team effort and not an individual’s chance to shine. This also allowed them to help players who may have previously been overlooked to get a chance to develop into stars.

About the Author

Michael Lewis is an American financial journalist and bestselling non-fiction author. He has written for Vanity Fair since 2009. He has published 18 books, three of which were turned into best selling movies. He is the best selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works. He graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in art history in 1982. He enrolled at the London School of Economics and received an MA in economics in 1985. After graduating, he worked in New York for the Saloman Brothers as part of their training program and later in their London office as a bond salesman. He married three times and currently resides in Berkeley, California with his wife Tabitha Soren.

Topics

Biography & Memoir

Moneyball Book Summary Preview

When it comes to learning lessons about business and life, baseball might not seem like the obvious choice as inspiration. However, there is always something to learn from other people’s success.

And nothing says success quite like being champions without breaking the bank.

In Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Michael Lewis looks at how the Oakland A’s were able to use statistics to create a winning formula that carried them into the history books.

Not only does he touch on the team’s success, but also what drove that success.

This is not just the story of baseball, it is the story of using a more analytical approach to business in order to achieve one’s dreams and goals.

Where Moneyball begins:

In the early 2000’s Major League Baseball was all about the big budgets and winning games. As budgets increased, being competitive became even more difficult for teams that could not afford payrolls associated with big market teams, such as the New York Yankees.

The Oakland A’s wanted to change the game, but in order to do this, they needed to save some money. Using statistics, the team was able to not only win the playoffs, but also set at least one American League record with 20 consecutive wins.

However, unlike other teams, they did not need the highest payroll in baseball to do it. In fact, they were able to achieve baseball supremacy all while having the lowest payroll in the MLB.

The question is, how did the Oakland A’s achieve this level of success on what essentially amounted to a budget?

The answer is surprisingly easy. The team took advantage of statistics and used the numbers to their advantage.

What this means is that with the help of a set of statistical analytics developed by Bill James, known as sabermetrics, the team was able to remain competitive, even as some of their biggest players defected to other teams for a higher paycheck.

While many baseball teams chose to focus on traditional numbers associated with statistics surrounding things like runs batted in and batting average, the Oakland A’s took a different approach.

Thanks to General Manager Billy Beane, a former player, the team opted to use the sabermetrics approach to putting together their team. Based on the sabermetrics approach, one looks at runs as what wins a game.

Rather than just focusing on a standard batting average, which sees hits divided by at-bats, this new approach looks at all of the ways a player might get on base. This means that both hit-by-pitch and walks are included in the numbers.

Using these statistics the Oakland A’s determined that there are two indicators that would better determine a player’s future success - slugging percentage and on-base percentage. Two numbers that had rarely been looked at when it comes to determining how a player would do in the future.