"Moneyball"

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

"Moneyball" isn't just about baseball. It's also about what happens when a scientific approach challenges conventional wisdom, and whether natural aptitude beats mental fortitude, and what asking the right questions can bring about. It changed how I think about baseball and to a lesser extent competitive sports as a whole, but it also challenged my understanding of what it means to play to win.

Minor spoilers below.

Everyone who saw Billy Beane – the story's focal character – at bat in high school said he was the most naturally gifted athlete they had ever seen. He gave up a Stanford scholarship to start his professional baseball career, but something happened in the pro leagues. He began to fail. He started striking out, began second-guessing himself, and couldn't seem to live up to the potential everyone just knew he had.

Fast forward a couple decades and Billy Beane has given up pro ball to become general manager of the Oakland Athletics. The team has the second-lowest payroll in professional baseball and can't afford the players everyone just knew had potential – the players like Billy. They're out-bid, so they settle for other teams' trades and has-beens, and then they go out on the field and win, again and again and again.

How did they do it? By being open-minded, ignoring conventional wisdom about how to play, and focusing on the one statistic that mattered the most.

Chapter 4 tells the story of Bill James, father of sabermetrics. I think everyone interested in data should read this chapter because his commentary is so applicable to every problem I've ever heard about or worked on. Take a look at this:

The details of the thing didn't matter. What mattered was James's ability to light a torch in a dark chamber and throw a new light on a dusty problem. He made you think. ... His preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for others to admire.

The tidy lie is an intellectual crime: it closes the door on future inquiry. There's an unfortunate tendency to aggregate and slice and dice and smooth things out, to scrutinize them into banality. That brings me to another quote:

"I wonder," James wrote, "if we haven't become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them."

Data is only useful insofar as it's used to understand. "Data for its own sake" isn't much of a goal.

"Moneyball" was also the first audiobook I've listened to in years, and it turned out to be a great choice to get back into the medium. When games were described, it was like having my own personal baseball announcer, and really helped me to experience the excitement of the game: a team sport centered around the individual drama of pitcher versus batter, each closely studying and attempting to outwit the other.

My favorite bit from the entire book:

Elation transforms him. He shouts at his teammates. He’s not saying: "Look what I just did." He’s saying: "Look what we just did! We won!" As he runs, he sheds years at the rate of about one every twenty feet. By the time he touches home plate, he’s less man than boy.

I was practically jumping up and down and cheering with the crowd, celebrating what everyone there had to know was a career highlight.

My highly subjective rating: Two baseball mitts way up. A must-read for anyone interested in any combination of baseball, data analysis, or psychology.