Moneyball

I finally picked up Moneyball by Micheal Lewis. It has been sitting on my bookshelf for a couple years and I've always wanted to read it but never actually sat down to do it. I think it was a combination of Fantasy Baseball heating up, I just got done with a Business Statistics class, and I saw the movie 21 about card counting in Vegas. Once I started, I was done in 3 days.

I do recommend this book even if you don't like baseball. It is the story of a general manager, Billy Beane, of the Oakland A's and how he looked at Major League Baseball differently than the other general managers by relying heavily on statistics. Billy Beane used an analysis called Sabermetrics, which ignores some traditional stats and looks for stats that actually have a difference in the outcome of the game.

The book walks through how Beane got into baseball, dives into the detail about the "history" of Sabermetrics, and the season of 2002. The Oakland A's had a salary of $41 million, roughly 1/3 of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox and still had to find a way to be competitive. For Billy Beane and his staff, to be competitive and have an incredibly low salary, he had to look at the game completely different.

One of the most intriguing chapters of the book is about the draft and being "in the room" when all the decisions were made about who to draft and when. Because the A's valued different statistics and qualities in players their draft was unpredictable and highly questioned among the rest of baseball.

If you like baseball, if you have an interest in statistics, if you want to look at something completely different than everyone else in your field, I encourage you to read this book.