Moneyball
Michael Lewis spends a season inside the Oakland Athletics under general manager Billy Beane, a former first-round prospect turned skeptical front office leader. With one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, Beane and his analysts use on-base percentage and other underweighted statistics to find undervalued players the rest of the league has overlooked. Lewis turns sabermetrics, a niche fan obsession associated with Bill James, into a story about how markets misprice talent and how organizations resist new ideas. The book changed how baseball is run and how popular nonfiction talks about data and decision-making. It was later adapted into the 2011 film starring Brad Pitt as Beane.
Also by Michael Lewis
What you might want to know about Moneyball
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
How the cash-poor Oakland A's used data to challenge a century of baseball orthodoxy.
Gladwell has compared Michael Lewis's run of nonfiction to Tiger Woods's prime, citing Moneyball as one of the books that prove the comparison.
Basic familiarity helps, but Lewis writes for a general audience and explains the statistics as he goes.
Moneyball was written by Michael Lewis, published in 2003 by W. W. Norton.
Moneyball is 288 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Moneyball takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Moneyball is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.