Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

The Importance of Data

The main theme of Moneyball is the advantage of using statistics in baseball to analyze players and teams. The entire approach of the Oakland A’s under Billy Beane is based on this statistical analysis. The author doesn’t just cover the use of statistics but emphasizes their proper use—that is, statistics that are accurate and meaningful versus those that are not. Lewis attempts to show, through this one team’s 2002 season, how statistical analysis transformed the game of baseball. He depicts a direct through line from the revolutionary work Bill James did in the 1970s and 1980s to its application in the early 2000s by Beane to the Oakland A’s.

It certainly was a revolution in thinking, as Lewis shows in Chapter 4. Baseball statistics had not changed much since the 19th century. Errors, for example, were introduced in the 1850s, when the game was played under very different conditions. They didn’t tell you much, either—as James noted that “the easiest way not to make an error was to be too slow to reach the ball in the first place” (67). By committing an error, a player showed that he actually did something right by being the correct spot to field the ball. Thus, a great deal of information being collected was useless in predicting how well a team would do. Conversely, other information available from games was being ignored, and James set about creating new statistics. He devised something called the “range factor” that reflected the successful plays a fielder made rather than his errors. His new statistics weren’t perfect, either, Lewis writes, but they opened the door to change through experimentation by asking what actually provided beneficial feedback. Others with greater math skills would eventually fine-tune the new statistics.

It took Billy Beane, however, to put this theory into practice. Influenced by his predecessor Sandy Alderson, Beane sought assistants with college degrees instead of baseball experience. He wanted brainpower that could sift through the data and make sense of it to apply to his team. It was an uphill battle against the baseball insiders like scouts who had always done things the traditional way and were reluctant to change. One factor in Beane’s favor was that the A’s owners had little interest in subsidizing an unprofitable venture and instituted a tight budget. Beane used this to argue that they had to seek out unheralded players through conventional means because they simply could not afford players every team was after. Sabermetrics gave them a way to do this, and it paid off as the A’s were perennial competitors of wealthy teams like the Yankees.

David Versus Goliath

The story of David and Goliath connotes a weaker party triumphing over their stronger adversary with ingenuity. This age-old theme appears throughout Moneyball, as the motley crew on the financially strapped Oakland A’s makes the perfect “David” character as underdogs. The “Goliath” role is usually given to the New York Yankees, the richest team in baseball at the time. The sport itself finally addressed this issue, as Chapter 6 details with the Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics, which concluded that the gap between rich and poor teams needed to be addressed. Left unexplained, Lewis notes, was how the A’s could compete so well with the Yankees if economics held sway over everything.

The A’s aren’t just underdogs financially. Lewis plays up the lack of athleticism in many of the team’s players. Jeremy Brown’s physique leaves even the A’s scouting director feeling the need to explain the catcher’s high draft pick: “This guy’s a great baseball player trapped in a bad body” (282). In addition to players who didn’t look the usual part, the A’s sought out former top players whose circumstances led other teams to view them as damaged goods. As Lewis writes, “The Oakland A’s are baseball’s answer to the Island of Misfit Toys” (158).

The final scene in the Epilogue is a good illustration of the David versus Goliath trope. The author describes a game in October 2003, after Brown has made it to the big leagues. He comes to bat in the second inning after the opposing pitcher has gotten three straight outs in the first inning. Brown gets a solid hit off the fourth pitch and takes off running. He loses the ball momentarily but assumes it would bounce off the wall and back onto the field—probably a triple. As he rounds first, he loses his footing and falls, then thinking he’d lost his chance to extend the play he quickly makes his way back to first. His teammates in the dugout are laughing, and when he looks to the outfield he sees why. He actually hit a home run and didn’t know it. Lewis uses this to show how talented the A’s players were, though they were often underestimated—even by themselves. That they appear somewhat odd only makes it more unlikely that they could beat the “Goliaths” of the game.

Thinking Outside the Box

This theme is at the heart of the conflict between the baseball insiders and outsiders. Managers, position coaches, and scouts had always been former players or at least involved in the game somehow in their younger days. They relied on instinct and received wisdom to make decisions and looked at statistics that had been around for a century. In other words, they were set in their ways and because baseball was a rather insular sport, no one challenged them for decades. Then along came Bill James to shake things up with his series of Baseball Abstracts. James’s followers created a kind of second generation of would-be change agents. It takes Billy Beane, both an insider and outsider, to apply the new methods to a Major League club. Lewis presents him as the perfect vessel for this mission because his time as a player gave him credibility in the old world. Beane was the type of player who personified the insiders’ approach, the “Greek god” type with the right athleticism. Yet his career fizzled, which made no sense to him or the pundits. It was only when he read about Bill James’s ideas that he began to understand why.

Throughout the book, Lewis shows the insiders butting heads with the outsiders. Because they were so set in their ways, they couldn’t see any other possibilities or understand the need for them—even when presented with evidence. Time and again they fall back on their old ways and need to constantly be reminded and prodded by Beane to do things his way. He thinks outside the box because he was tormented by his lackluster career as a player. He chooses his assistants because of their status as outsiders. DePodesta and others are college graduates with degrees in economics or math who rely on statistical data. Some of the analysts starting companies to compile baseball data or writing about the game come from the financial field—Wall Street types with a love for the sport. Lewis devotes an entire section in Chapter 6 to the comparisons between the financial markets and baseball. From this vantage point outside the sport, these analysts had a unique perspective that allow them to think in new ways that reinvigorate the sport.