Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Michael Lewis

W. W. Norton & Company, Mar 17, 2004 - Sports & Recreation - 336 pages

"This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame." —Forbes

Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-budget Oakland A's, visionary general manager Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge—insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - tjl - LibraryThing

I've never really been a big fan of baseball. That said, I really enjoyed this book. He does an excellent job of portraying the various people in the story. He spends the time for most of them going ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - KurtWombat - LibraryThing

To celebrate the opening of baseball season, decided to delve into the most talked about baseball book of recent years. I was as surprised as I was dissappointed. The book became notorious for ...

Contents

• THE CURSE OF TALENT: 4
• HOW TO FIND A BALLPLAYER: 15
• THE ENLIGHTENMENT: 44
• FIELD OF IGNORANCE: 65
• THE JEREMY BROWN BLUE PLATE SPECIAL: 98
• THE SCIENCE OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME: 120
• GIAMBIS HOLE: 139
• SCOTT HATTEBERG PICKIN MACHINE: 163
• THE TRADING DESK: 189
• ANATOMY OF AN UNDERVALUED PITCHER: 218
• THE HUMAN ELEMENT: 245
• THE SPEED OF THE IDEA: 264
• THE BADGER: 282
• INSIDE BASEBALLS RELIGIOUS WAR: 288
• Acknowledgments: 304
• Index: 306

Popular passages

Page x - As thus: lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking — had he the gold? or had the gold him?

Page 19 - He was fascinated by irrationality, and the opportunities it created in human affairs for anyone who resisted it. He was just the sort of person who might have made an easy fortune in finance, but the market for baseball players, in Paul's view, was far more interesting than anything Wall Street offered. There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience.

About the author

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project, and The Fifth Risk. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and three children.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
• Author: Michael Lewis
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004
• ISBN: 0393066231, 9780393066234
• Length: 336 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Management; Sports & Recreation / Baseball / History; Sports & Recreation / Baseball / Statistics; Sports & Recreation / Business Aspects