As depicted in the movie, the team actually consisted of undervalued players from other teams. A prime example is Scott Hatteberg, who went from being a catcher to playing first base, and another example is Chad Bradford, who’s a submarine-style pitcher. The best book of the year, [Moneyball] already feels like the most influential book on sports ever written.
The Oakland Athletics have reached the post-season playoffs three years in a row, even though they spend just one dollar for every three that the New York Yankees spend. Their secret, as Lewis’s lively account demonstrates, is not on the field but in the front office, in the shape of the general manager, Billy Beane. Unable to afford the star hires of his big-spending rivals, Beane disdains the received wisdom about what makes a player valuable, and has a passion for neglected statistics that reveal how runs are really scored.
What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. With the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to? To conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted.
“Moneyball is the best business book Lewis has written. It may be the best business book anyone has written.” “Rarely has the lesson of a book…had such an enormous impact….[Moneyball] showcase[s] Lewis’s great gift of finding the perfect characters and narratives to animate big, complex ideas that have been hiding in plain sight.” Election years are, perhaps, not our most dignified as a nation. Maybe once the candidates have tired themselves out with all the fighting, whining, and yelling, they’d like to take a load off with a nice book. Lewis explored several themes in the book, such as insiders vs. outsiders (established traditionalists vs. upstart proponents of sabermetrics), the democratization of information causing a flattening of hierarchies, and “the ruthless drive for efficiency that capitalism demands”. Michael Lewis’s beautiful obsession with the idea of value has once again yielded gold…Moneyball explains baseball’s startling new insight; that for all our dreams of blasts to the bleachers, the sport’s hidden glory lies in not getting out.
He is widely known for his revolutionary ways when it comes to team management. Lastly, Beane played a key role in changing the traditions of baseball and brought in a statistical approach that benefitted his team and even their contemporaries. While Moneyball has some fictional elements for storytelling, the core characters are based on real-life individuals who were a part of the Oakland Athletics squad in the 2002 season. The dynamics that we see between the characters are similar to what unfolded in the actual game, and they are a nearly accurate representation of the tension and collaborations that played out during the actual games.
College players have played more games and thus there is a larger mass of statistical data on which to base expensive decisions. Lewis cites A’s minor leaguer Jeremy Bonderman, drafted out of high school in 2001 over Beane’s objections, as an example of the type of draft pick Beane would avoid. Bonderman had all of the traditional “tools” that scouts look for, but thousands of such players have been signed by MLB organizations out of high school over the years and failed to develop as anticipated. Lewis explores the A’s approach to the 2002 MLB draft, when the team had a run of early picks. Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. The central premise of Moneyball is that the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) over the past century is outdated, subjective, and often flawed.
Baseball traditionalists, in particular some scouts and media members, decry the sabermetric revolution and have disparaged Moneyball for emphasizing sabermetrics over more traditional methods of player evaluation. Nevertheless, Moneyball changed the way many major league front offices do business. In its wake, teams such as the New York Mets, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox, Washington Nationals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Guardians,[2] and the Toronto Blue Jays have hired full-time sabermetric analysts. Bennet Miller’s directorial, Moneyball (2011), is a movie that explores the real-life events surrounding the Oakland Atheltics’ distinct approach to building a competitive basketball team for the 2002 season. Many ardent fans of baseball and movie aficionados are interested in knowing if Moneyball is based on a true story and what the facts and real events that led to it are. Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times).
The Oakland A’s began seeking players who were “undervalued in the market”—that is, who were receiving lower salaries relative to their ability to contribute to winning, as measured by these advanced statistics. Stats master Bill James devised the term “sabermetrics” in 1980 to describe the analytical work he and other members of the Society for American Baseball Research were doing, but author Michael Lewis introduced it to the general public. “Moneyball” has entered baseball’s lexicon; teams that value sabermetrics are often said to be playing Moneyball.
He paid attention to those numbers—with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Sabermetricians argue that a college baseball player’s chance of MLB success is much higher than the more traditional high school draft pick. Beane maintains that high draft picks spent on high school prospects, regardless of talent or physical potential as evaluated by traditional scouting, are riskier than those spent on more experienced college players.
“The best book of the year, [Moneyball] already feels like the most influential book on sports ever written. If you’re a baseball fan, Moneyball is a must.” The team did introduce a data-driven strategy in a game that is primarily rooted in tradition. This new approach led to their remarkable 20-game winning streak, even when the expectations of their performances were low. Following their exceptional display on the field, sabermetrics became conventional in team building. “By playing Boswell to Beane’s Samuel Johnson, Lewis has given us one of the most enjoyable baseball books in years.” This is the book that covers the beginning of a new era of baseball–the era of advanced statistics.
[An] ebullient, invigorating account of how an unconvential general manger named Billy Beane rebuilt the A’s, a team with the second lowest payroll in baseball, into a team that won 103 games last year — as many as the filthy-rich Yankees. The book is parodied in the 2010 Simpsons episode “MoneyBART”, in which Lisa manages Bart’s Little League baseball team using sabermetric principles. The film adaptation is mentioned in Brooklyn Nine-Nine as being Captain Raymond Holt’s favorite film because of the beauty of its statistical analysis. Additionally, Moneyball was the namesake for the Moneyball Act by U.S. Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark DeSaulnier with the intended purpose of having MLB teams that move 25 miles from its former home city, including the Athletics, to compensate them. Art Howe is also a real-life individual who managed the Oakland Athletics throughout the 2002 season.
Stunning….[Lewis’s] explanations of the science of baseball…are spellbinding. “Michael Lewis’s beautiful obsession with the idea of value has once again yielded gold…Moneyball explains baseball’s startling new insight; moneyball the art of winning an unfair game that for all our dreams of blasts to the bleachers, the sport’s hidden glory lies in not getting out.” A brilliantly told tale….Michael Lewis’s beautiful obsession with the idea of value has once again yielded gold.
He transitioned from being a catcher and an undermined player to being on the first base and became the highlight of Moneyball. His transition is accurate, and one really finds his determination to be endearing. “It’s a sports story that’s actually a business story that’s also a story about preconceptions. Plus, Michael Lewis’s writing is so clear, readable, and highly entertaining.” The response from other organizations to the Oakland method is outrage.