Moneyball

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

How statistics revolutionized baseball. Goes into detail about the famous (now movie) season of the Oakland A´s season and why and how they succeeded despite a pitiful budget. It highlights our human faults and how some can benefit greatly from exploiting other people´s biases.

🎨 Impressions

It was a good book that was binged in quite a short time. Cool book.

Also science is awesome.

How I Discovered It

Saw the movie and wanted to read the book as a consequence.

Who Should Read It?

Everyone who likes a good story and like numbers and analytics. It is also a good business case. Identify what is important and what is needed from that.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

✍️ My Top Quotes

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise
There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t. There was also a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy’s most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next. Thirdly—but not lastly—there was the bias toward what people saw with their own eyes, or thought they had seen.
Some of the scouts still believed they could tell by the structure of a young man’s face not only his character but his future in pro ball. They had a phrase they used: “the Good Face.” Billy had the Good Face.
Roger Jongewaard, the Mets’ head scout, says, “You have to understand: we don’t just look at performance. We were looking at talent.”
“And Billy was a premium premium guy. He had the size, the speed, the arm, the whole package. He could play other sports. He was a true athlete. And then, on top of all that, he had good grades in school and he was going with all the prettiest girls. He had charm. He could have been anything.”
To the chagrin of Billy’s mother, who was intent on her son going to Stanford, Jongewaard planted himself in the Beane household. That didn’t work either. “I wasn’t getting the vibes I would like,” Jongewaard now says. “And so I took Billy to see the big club.”
The Padres told Zito that he didn’t throw hard enough to make it in the big leagues. The Oakland A’s disagreed and selected him with the ninth pick of the 1999 draft. Three years later a top executive for those same San Diego Padres would say that the reason the Oakland A’s win so many games with so little money is that “Billy got lucky with those pitchers.”
It turned out that Scott Hatteberg had been on the Oakland A’s wish list for several years. He’d never done anything flashy or sensational. He didn’t hit an attention-getting number of home runs. He had never hit much over or under .270. He had the same dull virtues as David Justice and Jeremy Giambi: plate discipline and an ability to get on base. He, like them, was a blackjack dealer who understood never to hit on 19. The rest of baseball viewed Hatteberg as a catcher who could hit some, rather than as an efficient device for creating runs who could also catch.
In any case, you had only to study the history of the draft to see that high school pitchers were twice less likely than college pitchers, and four times less likely than college position players, to make it to the big leagues. Taking a high school pitcher in the first round—and spending 1.2 million bucks to sign him—was exactly the sort of thing that happened when you let scouts have their way. It defied the odds; it defied reason. Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball.
Up till then, Grady had every reason to feel secure in his job. Other teams, when they sought to explain to themselves why the Oakland A’s had won so many games with so little money, and excuse themselves for winning so few with so much, usually invoked the A’s scouting. Certainly, Grady could never have imagined that his scouting department was on the brink of total overhaul, and that his job was on the line.
“The biggest thing that AVM does is extract the element of luck. Everyone in baseball knows how much luck is involved in the game but they all say, ‘The luck evens out.’ What AVM was saying is that it doesn’t. It’s not good enough to say, ‘Aw, it just evens out.’”
Paul had said the scouts ought to go have a look at a college kid named Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis was a fat third baseman who couldn’t run, throw, or field. What was the point of going to see that? (Because, Paul would be able to say three months later, Kevin Youkilis has the second highest on-base percentage in all of professional baseball, after Barry Bonds. To Paul, he’d become Euclis: the Greek god of walks.)
He was left wondering. Months passed without any word of Beck from the scouting department. Paul finally asked Grady about him. And Grady said, “Oh yeah, I forgot, I’ll have one of the scouts go have a look.” But he didn’t do it, at least not seriously. When Paul asked again, Billy Owens, the A’s scout responsible for covering Tennessee grudgingly came back to him with the word that Beck was “a soft tosser.” Soft tosser was scouting code for not worth my time. Paul still had the impression that no one had bothered to scout David Beck.
“He’s a tools guy,” says the old scout, defensively. The old scouts aren’t built to argue; they are built to agree. They are part of a tightly woven class of former baseball players. The scout looks left and right for support. It doesn’t arrive.
More silence. Decades of scouting experience are being rendered meaningless. “I hate to piss on the campfire,” one of the scouts finally says, “but I haven’t heard Teahen’s name once all year. I haven’t heard other teams talking about him. I haven’t heard his name around here all year. It wasn’t like this guy was a fifty-five we all liked.”
It’s what he doesn’t say that is interesting. No one in big league baseball cares how often a college players walks; Paul cares about it more than just about anything else. He doesn’t explain why walks are important. He doesn’t explain that he has gone back and studied which amateur hitters made it to the big leagues, and which did not, and why. He doesn’t explain that the important traits in a baseball player were not all equally important. That foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone.
Billy had his own idea about where to find future major league baseball players: inside Paul’s computer. He’d flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul’s laptop. The Internet now served up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country, and Paul knew them
“Come on,” says Erik, “you guys have all played with guys who were bad bodies and good baseball players.” “Yeah,” says Billy. “I played with Pitter.” Everyone laughs, even Pitter. “Another thing about Brown,” says Billy; “he walks his ass off.” “He’s leading the country in walks,” says Paul. Walks! “He better walk because he can’t run,” says one of the scouts. “That body, Billy,” says the most vocal old scout. “It’s not natural.” He’s pleading now. “He’s got big thighs,” says the fat scout, thoughtfully munching another jumbo-sized chocolate chip cookie. “A big butt. He’s huge in the ass.” “Every year that body has just gotten worse and worse and worse,” says a third.
Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.
All these attempts to manipulate his psyche he regarded as so much crap. “Sports psychologists are a crutch,” he said. “An excuse for why you are not doing it rather than a solution. If somebody needs them, there is a weakness in them that will prevent them from succeeding. It’s not a character flaw; it’s just a character flaw when it comes to baseball.”
“Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.”
Word had spread this time: 250 people bought a copy. To an author who viewed a sale of 75 copies as encouragement, the sale of 250 was a bonanza. James’s pen was now an unstoppable force.
When his fastball registers 82 miles per hour on the radar gun, he’s having a good day. “I’ve faced guys who threw harder in high school,” says Hatteberg. “This guy wouldn’t get drafted. He could go out and try out for a team right now and if they didn’t know who he was he wouldn’t get signed.” That one of the best pitchers in the big leagues couldn’t get beyond a tryout tells you something about the big leagues. It also tells you something about pitchers.
Feiny was putting his college degree in medieval European history to work preparing videotapes for the Oakland A’s.
“Baseball is a war of attrition,” Billy Beane was fond of saying, “and what’s being attrited is pitchers’ arms.”
What most scouts thought of as a learned skill of secondary importance the A’s management had come, through hard experience, to view virtually as a genetic trait, and the one most likely to lead to baseball success.
Baseball players and coaches often used the newspapers to send memos to their general managers.
“You don’t walk off the island.” The Dominican hitters were notorious hackers because they had been told they had to be to survive.
Players of the opposing teams shall not fraternize at any time while in uniform. —Official Baseball Rule 3.09 By the summer of 2002, the memo might as well have been addressed directly to Scott Hatteberg. First base as he played it became a running social event. “Guys come to first,” he said, “and they step into my little office. And I do like to chat.”
His father didn’t have any particular ambition for him, except that he should be happy, remain a Christian, and that his happiness and his Christianity should occur within the confines of Mississippi.
As Chad watched the tape of his old self, Peterson made his point. “You’re a Christian, right, Chad?” “Yeah.” “You believe in Jesus?” “Yeah.” “Have you ever seen him?” “No, I’ve never seen him.” “Ever seen yourself get hitters out?” “Yeah.” “So why the fuck do you have faith in Jesus when you never seen him, but you don’t have faith in your ability to get hitters out when you get hitters out all the time?”
James had observed in baseball what he called a “law of competitive balance.” “There exists in the world a negative momentum,” he wrote, which acts constantly to reduce the differences between strong teams and weak teams, teams which are ahead and teams which are behind, or good players and poor players. The corollaries are: 1. Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength. 2. The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind. 3. Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards.
Calculated that the average difference in baseball due to skill is about one run a game, while the average difference due to luck is about four runs a game. Over a long season the luck evens out, and the skill shines through. But in a series of three out of five, or even four out of seven, anything can happen. In a five-game series, the worst team in baseball will beat the best about 15 percent of the time; the Devil Rays have a prayer against the Yankees.