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Audio CD Description Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans. Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe

Customer Reviews On the short list of great baseball books... ...we need to find space for Michael Lewis' "Moneyball" This deservedly sits on my shelf alongside books by Kahn, Halberstam and Angell. A brief description would be "the story of Billy Beane" and his tenure as GM of the Oakland A's. That's selling it short. By a mile. This book is educational, informative and inspiring. It is a book that makes you look at baseball with new eyes. It takes you, briefly but lucidly, into the world of the draft, high school sports, minor leagues, retired players, coaches at all levels, computers, the language of statistics...and above all, the inside world of major league baseball. But this time, from a point of view...from a manner of thinking...you have never considerd. For some strange reason, it now makes me look at my world of medicine in new ways. Here's the thing: it's more important to not make an out, than it is to get a hit. It took a few minutes for that to really sink in, but that subtle shift in perspective makes an enormous amount of difference. It really does. Lewis, through the tale of Billy Beane, makes this idea crystalline in clarity with statistics and theory, but not robbing the story of any of its' humanity. Beane was a high school phenom; Lewis does some of his best work describing what it must be like to be one. He doesn't make it in the bigs, but through some pretty radical decision-making, ends up the GM of the A's. You will follow a few players from their drafting to singular moments in their careers, and you will cheer. Out loud. I did. I read this entire book on a flight from Detroit to L.A., and many of my fellow passengers thought me daft. A loon. Here's this guy, in his window seat, woo-hooing while reading a hardcover book. Laughing out loud. Saying "Yesss!" like some bad Marv Albert impersonator. Scott Hatteberg will stick with me for the rest of my life. I feel like I know the guy. I wanna have him over for dinner. As I do Billy Beane, and Mr. Lewis as well. There are over a half dozen other people who spring to life, due to some terrific writing, but if you've read this far, I want you to discover them on your own. How many times in your life will you read a book that changes fundamentally the way you look at something? Something that you have thought pretty much the same about since childhood. Since Little League and watching my beloved Dodgers back in the 70's, stealing second was "good", a sacrifice bunt was "going by the book"...there are whole tenets of baseball wisdom that are challenged here, but challenged for the love of the game, not the contrary. His quote from Bill James (a person I now feel I must seek out and buy all his books...) about errors being a statistic of "opinion" made total sense to me; I almost felt like an idiot that I never thought that way about it myself. If you love baseball, if you only like baseball, if you like a great story well told, your next purchase NEEDS to be this book. I guarantee...guarantee, mind you...that you will not be disappointed. Book Provides an "Aha" Experience I never understood nor really liked baseball. I bought the book mostly to read about the inspired use of statistics, and the creative thinking that went into looking for the real keys to victory. I can safely say that while I may not have fallen in love with baseball, I will never find it boring again. If you have someone you want to turn into a fan, this book a superb gift option. The amount of detail in this book--for example, just the description of the strike zone and what different pitches and batters do to narrow the zone, what can be known about specific individual propensities and vulnerabilities associated with that little box, are truly inspirational. This is a really excellent book. If we managed the national security budget the way Billy Bean managed the Oakland A's, we'd have faster better cheaper military hardware, and a lot more plowshares. I was also impressed by the way in which Billy Bean built a team, in which players who might not have been individual stars excelled at setting up others in a true team effort where the group as a whole is stronger than the sum of the parts. Others have written better reviews from a baseball fans point of view--as a non-baseball fan, I can attest to this book's being an "aha" experience. A minor league good idea I prefer fiction, but when given this book that revolves around my love of baseball and youth's rooting interest, the Oakland A's, I had to take it in. It's a fascinating read. I am particularly appreciative of the A's attitude to 'think outside the box.' I came away with a new positive outlook about a few people, player Scott Hatteberg high on that list, and not much respect for others. Billy Beane's approach works, but I surely wouldn't want to work for such a volatile human being. It will be interesting to see how Beane's disciples do in Toronto and Los Angeles. The latter is new, but the former has been going without success for several years. Many of the young players discussed in the books have just begun making it to the major leagues at this writing (spring, 2005) so that is another aspect to watch, how well everyone's plans and drafts work out. The tension between innovation - divergent thinking, and conventional wisdom managed to strike a bothersome chord in me. Philosophically, both are equally appealing to me. In some places, my profession most prominently, I find that innovation by outsiders tends to be counterproductive, if anything. In baseball, there's clearly room for it, but I think only to a limited degree. If Beane's way became the norm, and more than a dozen teams were trying it, the dilution of Moneyball-appealing talent would be damaging to the teams and games, and those teams thinking outside Beane's box would get the productive, more conventional players, probably for less than they could now. Beane's hit upon a divergent way that works on its small scale, but I suspect only there. I'm glad I read it. It was unsettling to my mind in some ways, something I appreciate. Great, it's not.