Moneyball

Lewis has a great reporter’s gift for seeking out great real-life stories you maybe didn’t know existed.

Moneyball takes us through a year at the Oakland A’s baseball team, and its manager’s experiment in applying statistical analysis to assess player value. I’m currently writing a book about sport and modernity, so for me this is always the book to start with.

There’s nothing narrow, though, about Lewis’s focus, and his message about the world’s drift toward quantification is even more relevant today. To say this is just ‘a book about baseball’ is like saying The Odyssey is just a book… show more.

Even though this one has been out for 20 years, it’s still a must-read for baseball fans who want to understand how the game got from where it was in the 20th century to where it is in the 21st century.

I have a particular affinity for this book because I was covering the A’s for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in 2002, when Lewis was following the team around to write the book. Yes, he does leave out a lot of what made that team good—like Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Barry Zito, Miguel Tejada, and Eric Chavez—but it’s nonetheless… show more.

Anyone who saw the movie of the same name starring Brad Pitt knows the story here. So yes, this is a book about the advent of analytics into the game of baseball and how it has changed the way players are evaluated and teams assembled. But more than this the book tells the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane as it touches on themes of fairness (or lack thereof), humanity, fortitude, and the cruel realities of a game that is really just a bottom-line business.