Web crawl snapshots generously donated from Accelovation. This data is currently not publicly accessible.
From the site:
Accelovation is pioneering the delivery of Insight Discovery? software solutions that help companies move from innovation idea to product reality faster and with more success.
Our solutions are used by leading firms in the Fortune 500 and beyond ? companies from a diverse set of industries ranging from consumer packaged goods to high tech, foods to chemicals, and others. We help them mine the online world for market and technical insights to help speed the process of innovation.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/all/20060325190630/http://www.whatbooks.com/store/book/0393324818.html
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
by Authors:
Michael Lewis
Paperback Description:
Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans.
Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era (Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe
Average Customer Rating:
It is so much more than ball game
If you manage a business, you will like this book
If you like math, you will like this book
If you like figuring out how things work, you will like this book.
If you're a financial guru, you'll like this book.
Even though I am Yankee fan (ok, I know a number of people have just said that the review is not helpful and refuse to read further, but)...I loved this book
Michael Lewis, with candor and feeling tells us why Oakland was consistently able to beat the odds - despite the best "talent" in the business not understanding why. He simply solved a different problem. Contrary to taking the heart of the game, he opens your eyes to new levels of enlightenment. (As Spirng training starts, I am looking at the players through a totally different lens).
The writing is solid, the approach, uncluttered. A simply great read - before you go to Opening Day
An Opus for Sabermetrics
After reading this book twice over, I am surprised that Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane decided to reveal his operations and modus operandi to Michael Lewis. This is especially since the book exposes some unflattering portrayals of other teams, GM Beane's views on how make trades (illuminating how he operationalizes who to trade for, motivations, tactical and strategic intentions, etc.), organizational management style, which will likely encourage future GMs with Billy Beane's ambitions to keep journalists with masters degrees in economics at shoulder length distance.
Lewis's book can be delineated in two parts. One, a semi-historical breakdown of the rise of "moneyball," which is an adaptation of the theories of baseball historian and statistician Bill James. This is an approach, something we baseball stats geeks call `sabermetrics,' that concentrates heavily on the use of objective, quantitative analysis of baseball talent, based on a faith in statistics, and the privileging of certain statistics (like on-base percentage, OPS [on-base percentage plus slugging percentage], strike-out-to-walk ratios [for both hitters and pitchers]), which supposedly gives baseball executives and managers a better way of assessing players' skills. Lewis does an excellent job of chronicling the problems that James' quantitative approach experienced in becoming accepted in the mainstream (something I can attest to, since I was one of those who read James' Baseball Abstracts back in the 1980s and remember my own baseball coaches warning in those days against taking too many pitches), how there still exists an old-boys club amongst baseball's elite against moneyball, and how people like Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane helped in breaking down those barriers and employ James' theories on a small market team.
Basically, the moneyball approach is a euphemism for the way small market teams like the Oakland A's can stay competitive by drafting smart, expending what resources it has on player development, with a strong organizational encouragement for hitters to concentrate on home runs and on-base percentage (and pitchers to record outs). In essence, it is a baseball application of the old market investment strategy of buying low and selling high. You buy low by looking not for the five-tool players all the other teams want. Instead, you look for the player who may be a little slower, but who has excellent plate discipline, a little home run power, and a pitcher that simply gets people out (without focusing solely on the speed of that prospect's fastball). You sell high by trading these commodities you've drafted, developed, and allowed to blossom over to large market teams for new talent, money, extra draft picks, and the kind of other resources you can not depend on when your team ranks near the bottom of the league's payroll.
The second part of the book is a dissection of the day-to-day operations of the Oakland Athletics under GM Beane. This includes numerous stories on Beane's idiosyncrasies (he doesn't like watching the games his team plays in), his borderline egomania, and how he utilizes the moneyball approach in the everyday functions of his team--in how the front office judges talent, the manner in which it attempts to manipulate hitting styles on its minor league teams (with a focus on walks for batters and use of other teams' reclamation projects on its pitching staffs), judging minor league talent before the draft, etc.
In hindsight, Beane's forthrightness was the most refreshing and surprising part of this book. It's not every day that you hear a baseball GM declare that they only attended church on Sundays because they were hedging their bets. The portrayal of the front office of the Mets and Orioles take a hit in this book (with big market teams who constantly trade for overpriced players seen as a cash cow for clubs like Beane's A's). The draft was also an interesting foray into something that is often ignored in Major League Baseball, as opposed to the extravaganzas that the NFL and NBA drafts have become (this is due in part because the MLB draft is conducted during the season).
:Observations:
Overall, this is an excellent book, although I have one reservation, and that is while Lewis does a remarkable job of illustrating the moneyball vs. old boys club split in baseball, in the process he gives short thrift to the old boys club (again, presumably because of his obvious sympathetic portrayal of the A's and those like-minded believers in the moneyball approach). However, there are numerous criticisms of moneyball, even from a quantitative perspective, which deserves credit. For starters, moneyball ignores or does not give much credence to the importance of the fundamentals of the game (such as bunting, base running [since people like GM Beane consider the stolen base to be generally detrimental], and defense [just read the travails of U.L. Washington in trying to turn guys like Jeremy Giambi and Scott Hatteberg into a passable fielders]). Lewis defended the A's post-season ineptitude as a statistical aberration, but you can not ignore how fatal this was for them in the 2003 ALDS against the Red Sox (a series the A's could've easily won had several of its players knew how to adequately field the ball and run the bases). This does not mean you have to go back to the 1985 Cardinals and the era of small ball to win in post-season play, but you only have to look at the way Eric Byrnes ran the bases in the 2003 ALDS to understand the cost of not stressing your players being able to take an extra base, or at least run them properly.
Moreover, by ignoring defense and base running, moneyball underestimates the value of running speed. As ex-St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog notes, running speed is one of those few attributes a player can use on both offense and defense. This goes into the other big weakness of the quantitative approach in baseball. While the use of statistics in baseball is pretty effective, albeit not perfect, in measuring offense, it is less than admirable and complete in aptly measuring the value of defense and pitching. Lewis does try to answer some of this by showing how the A's even attempted to quantify the number of runs it was surrendering by giving up centerfielder Johnny Damon (yes, Red Sox fans, yours is not the only team he's ever played for). The problem with fielding and pitching, though, is that it is purely dependent on where the pitcher pitches the ball and where the hitter hits it. Zone Rating may do a good job of measuring the fielder's ability to get to a ball hit in (at least to this point) his fielding zone, but we have yet to solve the problem of who dictates how that baseball arrives there (and how hard or softly that ball is hit in a particular zone, its angle, etc., the kind of information that can possibly skew statistics). Is the game being determined by the pitcher (at which point pitching statistics become more important) or the hitter? Moneyball implicitly sides with the hitter, but only because pitching statistics are still rudimentary and dependent on variables with numerous externalities (and with sample sizes that are sometimes much too small and subject to non-randomized circumstances).
Still, on the whole, Moneyball is a fantastic book in its in depth coverage of the subjects, Lewis's insider access into the daily lives and workings of a baseball team, as well as knowledgeable explanations of the statistical components to the game (and by extension the moneyball approach). Also appreciated is that this book shows the rise of a method that was for over two decades outside of the mainstream, but is now every bit a part of the game of baseball (with the A's, Blue Jays, Red Sox, even the hated Yankees, employing fellow moneyball enthusiasts in its front offices). If anything, one can only wonder about the possible future of moneyball in Oakland, as more teams begin to apply Beane's successful approach, thereby sapping the talent pool of those gems in the rough his organization was so successful at developing over the years.
Informative, mildly entertaining, and a person you love to hate
I think Mr. Lewis' great writing style makes this book more enjoyable than the subject matter really is.
First of all, statistically speaking, while the A's production during the regular season is impressive, equally as impressive has been their record of post-season futility.
The antagonist of this book, A's GM Billy Beane, comes across as a boorish, loud-mouthed, idiot. Of course, we all experience idiots in life everyday, but Mr. Beane wants everyone to know that he's a genius and all the rest of us are the uninformed (sounds like the Democratic Party...It takes a Village?).
Hardly. Mr. Beane and some others (Theo Esptein of the Red Sox) in baseball subscribe to a unique set of baseball stats to make the bulk of their baseball decisions. Most importantly, these include on-base and slugging percentage. Moreover, they view previously used stats as being completely irrelevant. Now, anyone that has taken a college-level stats course will tell you that most stats can be tailored to someone's own views or goals. This is the backbone of Moneyball.
Armed with this knowledge and arrogance, Beane and his crew of sycophants seek to change to rules of baseball by awarding lesser known players with stats to their liking while eschewing the higher priced talent that Beane views as being overpaid (spare me please the endless comparisons of teachers, police officers, etc. It's called a free market and if people are willing to shell out $5 for a bear and support poor management, don't blame the players) and underproductive. For several years, this has worked for the A's. However, year after year, the playoffs were not kind to the budget conscious A's.
I'll save deep analysis of the A's/stats geeks tenure to better baseball minds, but a cursory review shows a disturbing pattern in their thinking. Yes, of course, many A's players were seeking outsized contracts after seemingly being underpaid based on current market rates, but losing Jason Giambi and Alfonso Soriano (sp?) and replacing them with unknowns isn't always good for the team, fans, baseball and the player. Giambi, of course, had a rapid dropoff following his trip to the Yankees, but did come back to have a great year in 05. Soriano is desperate to leave the hell that is life with the trial-lawyer Peter Angelos' horrific, committed to losing Baltimore Orioles.
The question is, isn't there a happy medium? Of cousre, not all contracts pay off (A-Rod's Rangers deal), but Beane and the A's take an approach to loyal players that teeters on the verge of being negligent.
Beane comes across as a profoundly arrogant moron who belittles, yells, and pouts like a giant child. None of his crew seems to either mind or be willing to tell Beane to check himself. To his great credit (or ignorance), Mr. Lewis tells us that Mr. Beane did nothing to counter that image in his book. You can't read this book without thinking that you are glad you don't have to work with Beane.
I don't ask much of books, movie, and tv. Just entertain or inform me. I did learn quite a bit about the Beane-Epstein approach to baseball, but I also learned about the other side of the player disloyalty arguement. Fans always whine about players leaving for other teams, but they sometimes don't take into account the team's approach to negotiations (Ex. the Red Sox made it clear they were not going to give a big contract to Johnny Damon).
This book provides a unique look at these behind the scences decisions.
Can't find the book you're looking for? Then try Google.
DVD's
It is so much more than ball game 
Informative, mildly entertaining, and a person you love to hate 
