Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Enlightening and troubling
The only negative review so far at this site seemed to confuse the author's craftmanship with his subject. This is a well-written, quick read, which, if you are any kind of baseball fan, will cause you to stop repeatedly and think about what you've just read.Every baseball fan has asked themselves over and over, why are marginal players overpaid? Why are millions invested in ONE player to the detriment of the team? Why does ownership seem trapped in some preconceived notion of what a ballplayer should look like? This book seeks to answer those questions and present an alternative view of how to run a winning team. And here, in a nutshell is that answer: Position players should be signed based on the On Base Percentage. Pitchers should be signed based on Strikeouts, Walks, Home runs allowed and groundballs. There. That's it. Time to go home and enjoy your vast savings, Mr. Steinbrenner. Of course it's more complex than that, but perversely, Major League Baseball seems to have based its criteria for quality on a completely subjective and error-prone system: Wins, earned run average, batting average, runs batted in. The book does a wonderful job of demonstrating how a small germ of an idea took hold, slowly grew, and then became embraced by people with the position to do something about it. It's the Revenge of the Nerds and it's positively engaging. Billy Beane comes off as some 21st Century tortured prince, except he's not Hamlet trying to avenge his father's death, he's every jerk high school jock you ever met who, as an adult, hates himself. Freud wouldn't even get out of bed for this one. It's sad because he and his computer geeks could actually save baseball from itself. But there is not one incident of joy reported in this book. It would be nice to read that he turned down the Red Sox job because he wanted to stay close to his daughter, but she is never mentioned as a consideration. It's just a shame that someone whose eyes were opened to the real value of ballplayers doesn't carry the exhileration of someone lost, now found, but rather wields it like some terrible weapon. And objectivity, statistics and mathematics notwithstanding, the fact is that nine Miggy Tejadas are preferable to nine Scott Heddeburg (sp?).
Rating: - Rethink What You Know About Baseball
Lewis' account of the Oakland A's during a few years in the late 1990s when Billy Beane was their General Manager is a good look inside the strategy of baseball. How do teams select players, which players will be most effective over their careers, and what player traits lead to victories? These are the questions that Billy Beane has considered and reconsidered since he took over the helm of the low-budget Oakland team and found himself competing against teams like the New York Yankees, who could spend three times as much on player salaries.Through heresies like reading the number-crunching of Bill James drafting fat ballplayers, and worrying more about On Base Average than fielding skills, Beane both outrages the baseball establishment and builds successful teams that make the playoffs and stay on budget. This is a good book. You may not agree with Beane's strategy -in fact, that's precisely the point- but the book is well-researched and well-written. Lewis has done his homework. I only wish he'd talked to more people who disagree with Beane's approach. Over and over we read that Beane is an innovative genius with a Midas touch, but we never read any of the arguments against his strategy. A bit more balance would have been nice. But overall, this is good reading for the serious baseball fan.
Rating:  - Moneyball?
I got the impression from reading reviews and snipits from Moneyball, that the book would give me a "fantastic" new behind the scenes view of the A's front office and Billy Beane. The book had it's moments(specifically when Lewis went in depth about the A's "new philosophy" and how things went down before the trade deadline), but the thing I took from the book more than any other, is that Lewis is a master of filler. I got the impression that he went in-depth about the family-life/history of Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteberg because he wanted to make his book a more respectable length, because lets face it, the fact that Chad Bradford throws side-arm, or the fact that he was taught to throw sidearm by his highschool coach/preacher has absolutely nothing to do with the economics of the game and he loosely tied Bradford in with Voros who makes the miraculous discovery about how pitchers don't consistantly give up the same number of hits year-in and year-out(I'm not trying to demean the discovery).I've seen some of the reviews saying "WOW THIS IS THE BEST BASEBALL BOOK I'VE EVER READ", if that's the case, baseball books are in a equally sad state on par with the game and it's economics. It wasn't a bad book, but out of the 5 books I've read in the last three weeks, it falls in at number five from best to worst. As a baseball fanatic(and self-proclaimed stat nerd) I can't even fathom how this book could possibly be interesting to the average fan or baseball novice.
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