Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Author: Michael Lewis

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2004-03-17

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0393066231

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Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of [Lewis’s] thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times). One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone—but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). Lewis first looks to all the logical places—the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players—but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information had been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics. He paid attention to those numbers?with the second-lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to?to conduct an astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. 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. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win . . . how can we not cheer for David?

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Author: Michael Lewis

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2004-03-17

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0393324818

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Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manager, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, "Slate") but also what "may be the best book ever written on business" ("Weekly Standard").

Moneyball
Moneyball

Author: Michael Lewis

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780393057652

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The Oakland Athletics have a secret: a winning baseball team is made, not bought. A story about money, science, entertainment, egos, "Moneyball" traces the remarkable success of the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league budget.

Moneyball
Moneyball

Author: Michael M. Lewis

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780786259687

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The funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since -- well, since Lewis's Liar's Poker, 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. After mining all the obvious possibilities, Lewis was left with the mystery of how the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest teams in baseball, won so many games. Here he records how general manager Billy Beane -- alone among Major League managers -- paid attention to some very humble statistics in order to find and field a team that nobody else wanted on the second-lowest payroll in baseball. Book jacket.

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract
The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

Author: Bill James

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 1026

ISBN-13: 1439106932

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When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.

Cricket 2.0
Cricket 2.0

Author: Tim Wigmore

Publisher: Birlinn Ltd

Published: 2019-10-10

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1788851889

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WISDEN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 Winner of The Telegraph Sports Book Awards 2020 Heartaches Cricket Book of the Year 'Fascinating . . . essential reading' – Scyld Berry 'A fascinating book, essential for anyone who wishes to understand cricket's new age' – Alex Massie, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 'An invaluable guide' – Mike Atherton, The Times 'excellent . . . both breezily engaging, and full of the format's latest, best and nerdiest thinking' – Gideon Haigh, The Australian 'The century's most original cricket book . . . An absorbing ride . . . some of their revelations come with the startling force of unexpected thunder on a still night' – Suresh Menon, editor Wisden India Almanack Cricket 2.0 is the multi award-winning story of how an old, traditional game was revolutionised by a new format: Twenty20 cricket. The winner of the Wisden Almanack Book of the Year award, the Telegraph Sports Book Awards' Cricket Book of the Year and selected as one of The Cricketer's greatest cricket books of all time, Cricket 2.0 is an essential read both for Test and T20 cricket lovers alike, and all those interested in modern sport. Using exclusive interviews with over 80 leading players and coaches – including Jos Buttler, Ricky Ponting, Kieron Pollard, Eoin Morgan, Brendon McCullum and Rashid Khan – Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde chronicle this revolution with insight, forensic analysis and story-telling verve. In the process, they reveal how cricket has been transformed, both on and off the field. Told with vivid clarity and insight, this is the extraordinary and previously misunderstood story of Twenty20, how it is reshaping the sport – and what the future of cricket will look like. Readers will never watch a T20 game in quite the same way again. "For people that love cricket it's really important to read it," said Miles Jupp. "I found it extraordinary."

The MVP Machine
The MVP Machine

Author: Ben Lindbergh

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 1541698959

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Move over, Moneyball -- this New York Times bestseller examines major league baseball's next cutting-edge revolution: the high-tech quest to build better players. As bestselling authors Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik reveal in The MVP Machine, the Moneyball era is over. Fifteen years after Michael Lewis brought the Oakland Athletics' groundbreaking team-building strategies to light, every front office takes a data-driven approach to evaluating players, and the league's smarter teams no longer have a huge advantage in valuing past performance. Lindbergh and Sawchik's behind-the-scenes reporting reveals: How undersized afterthoughts José Altuve and Mookie Betts became big sluggers and MVPs How polarizing pitcher Trevor Bauer made himself a Cy Young contender How new analytical tools have overturned traditional pitching and hitting techniques How a wave of young talent is making MLB both better than ever and arguably worse to watch Instead of out-drafting, out-signing, and out-trading their rivals, baseball's best minds have turned to out-developing opponents, gaining greater edges than ever by perfecting prospects and eking extra runs out of older athletes who were once written off. Lindbergh and Sawchik take us inside the transformation of former fringe hitters into home-run kings, show how washed-up pitchers have emerged as aces, and document how coaching and scouting are being turned upside down. The MVP Machine charts the future of a sport and offers a lesson that goes beyond baseball: Success stems not from focusing on finished products, but from making the most of untapped potential.

Astroball
Astroball

Author: Ben Reiter

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2019-03-26

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0525576657

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The inside story of the Houston Astros, whose relentless innovation took them from the worst team in baseball to the World Series in 2017 and 2019 “Reiter’s superb narrative of how the team got there provides powerful insights into how organizations—not just baseball clubs—work best.”—The Wall Street Journal Astroball picks up where Michael Lewis’s acclaimed Moneyball leaves off, telling the thrilling story of a championship team that pushed both the sport and business of baseball to the next level. In 2014, the Astros were the worst baseball team in half a century, but just three years later they defied critics to win a stunning World Series. In this book, Ben Reiter shows how the Astros built a system that avoided the stats-versus-scouts divide by giving the human factor a key role in their decision-making. Sitting at the nexus of sports, business, and innovation, Astroball is the story of the next wave of thinking in baseball and beyond, at once a remarkable underdog tale and a fascinating look at the cutting edge of evaluating and optimizing human potential.

Baseball's Great Experiment
Baseball's Great Experiment

Author: Jules Tygiel

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780195106206

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Offers a history of African American exclusion from baseball, and assesses the changing racial attitudes that led up to Jackie Robinson's acceptance by the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

Author: Michael Lewis

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2011-10-03

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0393082245

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“Lewis shows again why he is the leading journalist of his generation.”—Kyle Smith, Forbes The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers. The Greeks wanted to turn their country into a pinata stuffed with cash and allow as many citizens as possible to take a whack at it. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. Michael Lewis's investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations.