I picked up Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis after hearing about it on one those sports commentary shows: Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn, I don’t remember. I expected a lecture on economics and baseball, two subjects that are near and dear. Before the insanity of high school sports I crushed a softball off the tee to win a hitting for distance contest, but I was primarily a contact hitter and loved to stretch first-to-second into first-to-third and first-to-home when someone’s attention was diverted.

Moneyball is less an economics lecture and more a story of a new logical philosophy that flies in the face of an anecdotal one. Everyone knows that good players produce more victories, but the evaluation of good players has been governed subjectively by scouts who may view hundreds of high school and college players in a season. The book starts with a history of statistical modeling in baseball, called sabermetrics, but the theory is down to earth and does not baffle the reader with mathematical equations beyond the four basic operations. The General Manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, seeking an edge to give their team better performance with limited funds, are the first to employ statistical theory. After a couple of seasons of good results, the methods are picked up by Toronto and Boston (who you may recall won the World Series in 2004).

The book notes that the statistical theory, like statistics in general, favors large sample sizes. The 162 games in a team’s season constitutes a large sample size, where the maximum possible postseason is 17 games (7 World Series + 7 League Championship Series + 5 Divisional Series). The consequence of this is that the Oakland A’s regularly are awesome during the season but have not done well in the playoffs, where Billy Beane attributes his losses to bad luck. Moneyball also mentions Billy Beane’s other talent: getting other teams to undervalue their players so he can buy them cheaply, and getting the most money out of his own players when he trades them. As a result, the Oakland A’s are continually dominant after the All-Star break, when most other teams give up chasing after a pennant and sell off their more costly assets.

Lewis’s work challenges the generally accepted philosophy that revenue sharing is the only way to make smaller market teams (like my beloved Kansas City Royals) ever have a shot at the title. I find no small joy in this because revenue-sharing is essentially socialist in nature. The Oakland A’s make this statistical theory work because the market in baseball is highly inefficient, and the goal of getting good players cheaply has been accepted by most as impossible. As Beane’s practice moves into other teams, this may provide a self-governing cost control for baseball that will keep us from having to pay the $80 ticket for a Dallas football game.

This book is wonderful for those that have even just a passing interest in the American game. Sports buffs will appreciate the behind-the-scenes information about some of their favorite players, how two pitchers from opposing teams in the same game were traded and suited up for the other team, and the imposition of a little order in a game that may have overrated luck and subjective ability. My brother-in-law should get first crack at my copy, which is an easy read: I finished these 301 pages in less than 3 days.