Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish
its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by
just about everyone--but then comes roaring back to challenge the
American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest
teams in baseball win so many games?
In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only "the
single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but
also what "may be the best book ever written on business" (Weekly
Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places--the front
offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant
players--but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of
numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of
amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall
Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors.
What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success
for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us
by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This
information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League
Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of
the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the
second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct
an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody
else wanted.
In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into
the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball
knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big
Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not
cheer for David?
