When Beane was 18 years old, Stanford University had offered him a football and baseball scholarship. But I thought that he could work.”Īnd so Moneyball became in large part the drama of Billy Beane: the autodidact who gave himself an education.

You would only talk to me when the lights were out.

I got home, I had notes all over the paper, I was writing over my own handwriting, but I started scribbling. I can’t remember what it was now, but it was interesting. And you started talking about your relationship to the game. “We were coming back and it was night and dark, because I remember I couldn’t see my notepad. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win.“But there was a moment,” continues Lewis, “when I thought, ‘Ha, I can work with this.’ We went down to-” 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. Billy paid attention to those numbers, and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. This information has been around for years, and nobody paid it any mind. These numbers prove that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. But the real jackpot is a cache of numbers collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can't buy: the secret of success in baseball. With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar's Poker. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it - before I had a story to fall in love with. I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story.

Michael lewis money ball