AOW 12/12: Moneyball 1

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, is written by Michael Lewis and follows the 2002 Oakland Athletics, who are trying to revolutionize the game. After losing big free agents and facing a tight budget, A's General Manager Billy Beane and assistant GM Paul DePodesta begin to use advanced statistics to help scout and build their team. Their usage of  sabremetrics, advanced statistics, help Beane put together a relatively inexpensive team. Their faith in sabremetrics goes against the "rules" of old baseball; they don't factor in physical traits about the player, such as build, personality, and mentality. Lewis also writes briefly about the baseball superstar that was not, Billy Beane. He writes about his brief career and how he transitioned into the head of the Oakland Athletics. Lewis writes many books about economics, now mostly concerned with the downward economy, but he writes Moneyball with the approach of discussing baseball economics. His inspiration for the story came from him following the low-budget A's in 2002 and also the story of Bill James. James is baseball's most renown expert in sabremetrics and has established many of the stats and guidelines still used today. Currently James is an team sabremetrics advisor for the Boston Red Sox. He uses diction that combines these two ideas, he uses many terms that would be found in the front offices of baseball and other professional sports teams, but he also includes many terms and connections that could be found in the offices of stock brokers, financiers, and economists. He effectively shows the syllogisms expressed from Beane's philosophy, "'We want players who get on base.' 'But Billy he isn't in Baseball America's Top 25 catchers.' 'But he gets on base and walks, a lot'" This syllogistic thinking of Billy Beane shows that in order to succeed with a low budget, statistical measures must be taken to ensure success. Lewis accomplishes his goal because he is able to use conversations from Beane that show the economic factor of baseball.