Michael Lewis’ best books have always been morality plays. Whether his subjects are the misanthropic mortgage traders of Salomon Brothers from Liar’s Poker or the frighteningly precocious investor Jonathan Lebed from Next, Lewis has been our best chronicler of those outsiders who have invented better mousetraps and forced the world to beat paths to their door.
What if that story was transferable to baseball? What if the story could be told primarily from the perspective of an insider groomed for stardom, who only achieved a different kind of success by embracing the theories and worldview of a previously invisible group of outsiders (and who came with a wonderfully volatile personality)? And what if that story was combined with an intellectual history of a mass movement, which was invisible to the larger baseball world for almost two decades before forcing a reluctant industry to yield to its insights? And finally, what if, instead of having to resort to statistics and abstractions about how the resulting efficiencies enrich a larger public, the morality play could be completed by showing individuals getting a chance to dream a little longer (and make plenty of money as well) who would have been barred from doing so under the old, prejudicial ways of doing business?
If you had all those things, you would have Michael Lewis’ new book Moneyball. And we do.
The book is a combination of a business case study, an intellectual history and a morality play. And as Rob Neyer notes, it is the story of an idea - "the notion that objective knowledge does have an important role in baseball, an industry that's long resisted this notion." It is a story of how the Oakland Athletics, primarily (though not solely) through the leadership of general manager Billy Beane, dared to think for themselves and learned the lessons of two decades’ worth of baseball scholarship that was viewed condescendingly by the baseball establishment – on those rare occasions when it was viewed at all, that is. In doing so, the team has built a very successful organization and overturned several decades of conventional wisdom, creating competitive pressures that are forcing the rest of the industry to adapt or die – or, even worse, become the Detroit Tigers. And thanks to the A’s new way of doing things, certain players who would have languished in the minor leagues or never even been drafted by professional baseball are getting the chance to play baseball for a living – and do very well (both on the field and at the bank). Few writers could have told any of those stories as well as Michael Lewis, and no one can tell them all together as well. This book should become a staple of MBA syllabi and any list of great baseball books. (I have suggested to friends who are Met fans that the most productive thing they could do for their team is to mail a copy of the book to the team’s owners.)
The book arose out of a question: Virtually everyone who wrote or spoke about baseball from an official or publicly authoritative standpoint argued that a team without lots of revenue had no hope to compete for a championship. Yet as those arguments grew louder, the A’s, whose revenues and payroll ranked virtually last in baseball, kept winning more and more games even as they kept losing many of their best players to other teams for financial reasons. After making the playoffs three straight years, it was hard to argue with a straight face that their success was an aberration (though that never stopped baseball commissioner Bud Selig). How were the A’s doing it?
The answer is explained through the book’s main subject, Billy Beane. Beane was a spectacular athlete who was drafted by the Mets out of high school in 1979 and expected to be a star, but was temperamentally unsuited for the game and never became more than a fringe major leaguer. He entered the front office of the Athletics, which was already in the middle of an organizational revolution based on the ideas of a writer relatively well-known among baseball fans but utterly ignored within baseball: Bill James. Lewis explains how and why Bill James is viewed as a Jedi Master for a certain subset of baseball fans, and how Beane and the A’s draw on James’ theories and modes of questioning to rethink just about everything about building a baseball organization.
The centerpiece of the book describes the 2002 amateur baseball draft, where Beane overruled his scouts’ traditional perspectives and drafted a number of prospects whom no other team would deem worthy of consideration. Lewis focuses on one particular player, Jeremy Brown, and notes how he was rocketing through the minor leagues faster than even Beane could have anticipated. Lewis’ account of the draft shows how Beane’s A’s, by daring to do things differently (the cliché “thinking outside the box” would actually be appropriate in this case), are able to unearth talented players that other teams choose to ignore. More importantly, as Lewis notes on page 117:

A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A’s draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk. The footnote at the bottom of the page said, “He’ll never go anywhere because he doesn’t look like a big league ballplayer.”

Of course, the book sparkles throughout with typical examples of Michael Lewis quotations. My favorite example is the description on page 101 of a scout’s entrance:

Billy O doesn’t bother to smile. Too much trouble. He somehow conveys the idea of a smile without moving a muscle. … Billy O is what you’d get if you hammered Shaquille O’Neal on the head with a pile driver until he was six feet two. He’s big and wide and moves only when he is absolutely certain that movement is required for survival.

For what it describes, the book is close to perfect. It is important to note, though, that the book does not discuss two key aspects of what the A’s have done in building their organization: one which is not original to the A’s, and one which may be more original than anything Bill James ever devised or described by Lewis.
The first aspect is the A’s judicious use of multi-year contracts with their young players. In baseball, a player’s salary is generally determined by a mixture of performance and seniority. A player’s rights belong to his team for the first six years of his career – thus, another team cannot bid for his services – limiting competition which could drive up his salary. After that time, any team can bid for a player whose contract has expired (the player becomes a “free agent”), thus driving up his salary through competition for his services. Since the A’s have no money, they generally cannot afford to outbid other teams for players who have become free agents and can sign with any team. By signing their good young players to long-term contracts early in their careers, the A’s accomplish two things. First, the team achieves cost certainty with respect to those players and do not have to risk unanticipated budget increases imposed by salary arbitration – essential for a team whose budget is as tight as the A’s. Second, by showing a commitment to the player, the A’s can often induce a player to agree to extend the contract a year or two beyond the point at which he would become a free agent – thus increasing the length of time the A’s can afford to keep him. This tactic was used to great effect by the Cleveland Indians in the early 1990s, but it is even more essential for the A’s because they have a tighter budget. When business schools teach classes on Billy Beane’s management of the A’s, this aspect will be highlighted as an important cost-saving measure.
The second aspect is the A’s program with their young pitchers. The current centerpiece of the A’s team is the trio of young starting pitchers: Tim Hudson, Barry Zito and Mark Mulder. To have developed three young pitchers without having any of them break down is impressive enough; the actuarial statistics on young pitchers are nothing short of gruesome. It is possible that the A’s have merely been lucky to this point, but they don’t think so. They have an extensive program at every level of the organization regarding pitching mechanics and pitch counts, and they have a fascinating program in the lower minor leagues regarding pitcher usage. As Lewis describes in the book, the A’s do not believe in drafting high school pitchers (pitchers aged 18-22 are the worst injury risks in baseball, by several orders of magnitude). The A’s are loaded with pitching prospects in their minor leagues, and they apparently did not have a single major arm or elbow surgery all of last year (the Yankees, by contrast, should have qualified for group discounts on such surgeries). A while ago, I had an e-mail debate with James Suroweicki of The New Yorker about the likelihood that the A’s program truly represented an advancement in the development of young pitchers. The jury is still out on that question, though some of what I’ve read over the last few months has led me to be more optimistic. But the possibility that it may be true is something very newsworthy. Nothing in baseball is tougher than developing a young pitcher, due to the massive rates of injury among the species. If the A’s have really built a better system for doing so, then they should rename the Hall of Fame after Billy Beane. Lewis should have discussed the subject in Moneyball.
Notwithstanding those two omissions, it is difficult to overstate the accomplishment of this book. If anything, I understate. In particular, those of us who have been reading Bill James and his heirs for 15+ years have reacted viscerally to the book. Part of it is due to Lewis’ skill and comprehensiveness in describing the work of James and the sabermetric community (he even describes, quite skillfully, the recent pathbreaking work of Voros McCracken regarding pitching and defense); we have finally found our bard! But Lewis speaks to us as more than a biographer: he provides validation. Virtually every fan of Bill James, every would-be sabermetrician, has raged at his favorite team at some point over the last two decades for some blitheringly stupid personnel move. Virtually every such fan has raged at the cliché-choked ignorance of the sports media on a mostly constant basis over that time. We knew that at our fingertips, available to anyone who cared to approach the subject with an open mind, was information that could easily disinfect the garbage being spewed by the ignorant media. We knew that if our team had only read the same books we did, or had only cared to think about the issues as much as we did, it would have been better off.
And thanks to Lewis and Beane, we know we were right.

“It is a wonderful thing to know that you are right and the rest of the world is wrong,” [Bill James] concluded. “Would God that I might have the feeling again before I die.” He never had a clue – not then, not later – that the world was not entirely wrong. No one ever called James to say that an actual big league baseball team had read him closely, understood everything he had said along with the spirit in which he had said it, and had set out to find even more new baseball knowledge with which to clobber the nitwits who never grasped what Bill James was all about.

- Moneyball, p.96.