Moneyball Review

Was this a book about baseball? Was it about business? Was it about manipulation of athletes and their temperament? Moneyball is about all of the above and more. Author Michael Lewis gives us personal concepts that surround the career of one Billy Beane who managed the Oakland Athletics with undervalued players with various qualities, both hidden and obvious, and astonishes the baseball insiders with his methods, methods that are brought to him by non-insiders and computer nerds arriving on the baseball scene with non-traditional baseball skills.This has countered the tradition of scouting, what baseball is developed on. This book is so well written that many ‘insiders’ actually thought that Billy Beane was the author and not Michael Lewis.The computer delivers statistics for every possible event and outcome that can happen on the field of play; those stats, until Billy Beane put them to work had been the work of one Bill James who started keeping statistics while he watched over the assembly line and storage of Stokely Pork and Beans and their plant’s operations. His first book was a mimic document that sold 75 copies. Mr. James is the forerunner of all that Billy Beane and his Harvard graduates hold sacred. He writes in this baseball book, “In the early 1980’s, the US financial markets underwent and astonishing transformation. A combination of computing power and intellectual progress led to the creation of whole new markets in financial futures and options. Options and futures were really just fragments of stocks and bonds, but the fragments soon became so valued that Wall Street created a single word to describe them all: “derivatives.”” Lewis'  background helps with the brilliance  combined to make one of the best sport books of all time. The book was so good that it was recently produced as a movie starring Brad Pitt and won many prestigious awards. A person into business or sports will love this because it shows one how the money and the player stock have a huge value in any professional sport. People overlook that al the time, their not use to seeing what is behind the doors or lockers of teams. Finally, what makes this a great read is that it is based on a true story. Billy Beane should have been one of the best baseball players of all time. Instead, he was washed up from the start, but used his mind to create a winning team out of nobody. I highly recommend it.