Moneyball – Michael Lewis

The most controversial baseball book since Ball Four, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis doesn’t have the most extreme statistical takes in it, but it did open up that world for the regular baseball fan. More than any other individual brought out into the open that baseball teams were using more than the eye test, batting average and RBI to choose draft picks, free agents and trade targets. While the book was written about the Oakland Athletics, it easily could have been about the Cleveland Indians, Toronto Blue Jays or the Boston Red Sox, who actually hired Bill James, the architect of the statistical revolution.

The controversy itself is a little confusing and probably stems from the fact that most “old school” baseball fans have not read the book, only heard what it is about. In fact, the post script of the paper back version is devoted to these people, including the mighty Joe Morgan. Getting down to basics, all baseball fans have to agree with the basic principles of this book.

In general, those basic principles are that players in different leagues (at any level, high school through the Majors) can’t be equally compared statistically, that the most most valuable aspect of a hitter is to get on base and that speed is most useful when used intelligently.

The first is probably the most important lesson in the book, more than Billy Beane’s personal life, which is what the movie version is focused upon. If thought about, it is hard to imagine that there are baseball fans who can’t understand things as simple as NL pitchers having better ERA’s because 1/9th of the batters they face are pitchers to the fact that different high school and college divisions differ in balance of talent to the point that basic stats are meaningless. A large part of the draft discussion is combining what the scouts saw in person with normalized stats that help compare one player to another.

There is no denying that the Athletics outperformed their team salary from 2000 through 2006 and Moneyball simply explains the way they were able to be a play-off team every year without signing expensive free agents and simultaneously trading off great talent.

What makes this book most interesting is that it is a look behind the scenes as Ball Four was before it. For Indians fans, there are multiple cameos from (at the time) GM Mark Shapiro as Beane actually let Lewis in to discussions that are generally beyond the reach of the media. Actually getting inside of the draft room and knowing the truth about everything that goes into a trade should be the uniqueness extolled of Moneyball. There are many better sabrmetric tomes, quite a few written by James himself, but that is not really the primary focus of this book. Moneyball attempted to bring that style of thinking into the main stream (which he did extremely successfully), not to get in depth.

Because of this, even those who despise the idea of advanced stats should read this book. Isn’t it better to understand how a stat heavy franchise operates than to simply argue against it on principle? Combining this story with those in Francona‘s book about his Red Sox years, this is obviously not an isolated team operating independently. At this point more teams use at least some internal statistical analysis than don’t and they do so because it works. There are no guarantees, but the more a team knows about their players, those they are competing again and the amateurs they are looking to draft, they better off they will be.

An added benefit of reading the book, which was published in 2004, now is that the predictions made within can be reviewed. Some players worked out, some didn’t. Some draft picks made it big, others, including Jeremy Brown, the most talked about prospect in the book, didn’t. This is as important as anything else as neither pure scouting, nor pure statistical analysis is a perfect predictor of who will become a superstar. The answer is a combination of both, but even then there are hits and misses.

In addition to the basic knowledge of being able to relate to the current state of baseball (Moneyball is, by far, the most referenced baseball book or movie over the past 30 years), Tribe fans will get the added benefit of tons of praise extolling the performance of Nick Swisher. This is good for some nostalgia back to when he was a promising young outfielder and who knows, maybe some of the reasoning that caused Chris Antonetti to sign him in the first place.