How Did Michael Lewis Win Without The Big Money

Money of Billy Ball Baseball

Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball in order to answer the question; how does a big league baseball team win without the big money? In today’s baseball, where players are paid such high salaries it has become harder and harder for the poorer teams to fairly complete. The Oakland A’s was a poor team, but they were winning. Lewis tells the story of one of the best managers in baseball, Billy Beane, and how he uses statistics to scout and select players and win games.

Lewis is a nonfiction writer, born in 1960. He has written financially based books, such as Liar’s Poker, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine and Flash Boys. He received a master in economics from the London

Lewis explains how baseball players were scouted in the early years, before the days of “Billy Ball”, a nick-name of the Oakland A’s during the Beane years. He starts with how he was scouted in his early years in high school. Beane was selected for his pure talent, and he looked the part, like a baseball player, but he did not succeed, as the scouts had predicted. When it came time to play in the big league, Beane did not have the mindset of a winner. He did not have control of his temperment; baseball is a mental game as much as it is physical. Beane learned through his experiences as a player that there must be a better way to select

So in 2002, Beane was now the scout for a very poor team and had to figure out how to get the best for the least. Beane’s job was now to select players as Lewis wrote, “they were the heart of the game” (26). Billy was always saying, “The draft has never been anything but a fucking crapshoot” (28), because only a very few ever made it. Beane was about to change baseball scouting forever, and for the time being, level the playing field a little. Beane’s type of scouting was base on performance, not on talent. He does this with a college graduate in economics from Harvard, Paul DePodesta, his computer in hand, definitely not a baseball player. DePodesta zeros in on different statistics in selecting players, one of his most important is the on-base percentage. He is in the draft room, usually kept for baseball scouts