Michael Lewis\'s 2003 Book Moneyball: The Art

Michael Lewis's 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a compelling narrative about the business of baseball. Yet Moneyball is no ordinary baseball story. Lewis discovered that the 2002 Oakland Athletics managed to compete at the upper echelons of Major League Baseball while maintaining the second-smallest budget in the entire league. The story focuses on the Oakland Athletics management and the strategies they used to win in spite of having a budget lower than average in Major League Baseball.

The story appeals to readers on a number of different levels. From a business standpoint, Moneyball shows how being stuck in outmoded patterns of behavior and thinking can cause failure. On the other hand, taking risks, accepting change and embracing novel ideas into the workplace are keys to success. Moneyball is also an exposition of strong leadership skills, which are a critical component to organizational success. The Oakland Athletics needed a novel strategy for winning; unlike the New York Yankees the team could not rely on a big bankroll to fund a beefed-up team of superstar players. Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane decided to take a risk on signing undervalued players and crafting a team of players that met a new set of statistical measures.

In fact, the crux of Moneyball is the revolutionary methods used to analyze player statistics. On this level perhaps more than any other, Moneyball will appeal to baseball fans. One of the remarkable things about using the sabermetrics system discussed in Moneyball is that has the potential to democratize the sport -- at least in a small way. Many baseball players are overvalued because scouts and general managers are using outmoded methods of evaluating performance. As Lewis points out in the opening chapter of Moneyball, running throwing, fielding, hitting, and power hitting are among the most basic needs of a baseball player. Player performance statistics like runs batted in and batting average are important but, as Billy Beane found out, not the only indicators of player and team success.

However, traditional statistics were how baseball prospects were valued on the labor market. This at times led to a major gap between rich and poor teams. The poor teams, not understanding the intricacies of sabermetrics yet, would purchase a few solid players and thus amass a team of potentially incompatible players. Teams with deep pockets could purchase the best players on paper. Sometimes, thought, the old formula of measuring team and player success was not working. "The bottom of each division was littered with teams -- the Rangers, the Orioles, the Dodgers, the Mets -- that had spent huge sums and failed spectacularly," (Lewis, 2003, p. 2). At the other end of the spectrum were teams like the Oakland Athletics.

As the author notes in the preface: "The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly," at the millennium (Lewis, 2003, p. 1). At the time Billy Beane started to use sabermetrics, the budget of the Oakland Athletics baseball team was a fraction of that of the Yankees. "At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A's and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a third of that, about $40 million," (Lewis, 2003, p. 1). The Oakland Athletics were the second poorest team in baseball but they would go on to achieve landmark successes that redefined the way other low-budget teams in the league operated. Until 2002 and Billy Beane, poor teams seemed doomed to failure. All that changed when sabermetrics as a system was introduced to Major League Baseball. "For the past several years, working with either the lowest or next to lowest payroll in the game, the Oakland A's had won more regular season games than any other team, except the Atlanta Braves," (Lewis, 2003, p. 2).

Sabermetrics is a scientific method that far outperformed traditional methods of scouting. Because it relied on empirical evidence rather than subjective or sentimental views on baseball, sabermetrics turned out to be a revolutionary method of picking players that seemed to contradict everything ingrained in American baseball culture. Sabermetrics was not to be trusted by the old boys' club. At first, the uncanny success of the Oakland Athletics was dismissed as an "aberration" by MLB Commissioner Allen H. "Bud" Sellig (Lewis, 2008, p. 3). The dynamics of baseball management is one of the major themes in Moneyball, which reveals the ways Major League Baseball -- and likely all other professional sports organizations -- are no different from any other corporation. Success is measured in terms of financial performance: hence the title of the book Moneyball.