Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Michael Lewis

Moneyball is among the top couple of books Michael Lewi. Its on one level a story of the Oakland As and how they do well with almost no money by capitalizing on a new way of looking at baseball that was developed by Bill James, one of the great baseball statisticians of all time.* Its also about larger trends in sports (and the world) toward analytics. If baseball, or stats, is you kind of thing, you’ve read it. If it isn’t, this review isn’t going to convince you to do so.

Like all of Lewis’s books its fun and well written, and really that is reason enough to read this, but I just want to flag that I also think there is a mini-trend happening of books that make a fetish out of numbers and statistical models and I kind of wonder what it says (if it says anything) that some of these books (Freakanomics, Moneyball, Signal to Noise) have been huge best sellers. Are people becoming more interested in the analysis that numbers offer, is it just a fad in mathlite, or does it not mean anything at all?

I’m not sure, but this one is recommended.