Moneyball (Movie Tie-In Edition) (Movie Tie-In Editions)

Further Praise for MONEYBALL

“Ebullient, invigorating…. Provides plenty of action, both numerical and athletic, on the field and in the draft-day war room.”

—Lev Grossman,
Time

“By playing Boswell to Beane’s Samuel Johnson, Lewis has given us one of the most enjoyable baseball books in years.”

—Lawrence S. Ritter,
New York Times Book Review

“A journalistic tour de force.”

—Richard J. Tofel,
Wall Street Journal

“A brilliantly told tale…. Michael Lewis’s beautiful obsession with the idea of value has once again yielded gold….
Moneyball
explains baseball’s startling new insight; that for all our dreams of blasts to the bleachers, the sport’s hidden glory lies in not getting out.”

—Garry Trudeau

“Amazing anecdotes…an entertaining, enlightening read.”

—Will Lingo,
Baseball America

“This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

—Rich Karlgaard,
Forbes

“An extraordinary job of reporting and writing.”

—Mark Emmons,
San Jose Mercury News

“Anyone who cares about baseball must read it.”

—Cathleen McGuigan,
Newsweek

“Michael Lewis has written what might be the best book ever about baseball.”

—Steve Weinberg,
Orlando Sentinel

“Lewis has a wonderful story to tell, and he tells it wonderfully.”

—Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein,
The New Republic

“[Lewis’s] descriptive writing allows Beane and the others in the lively cast of baseball characters to come alive.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Lewis’s book is a thoroughly modern, entertaining…even revolutionary look at the way the game has changed and is changing…guaranteed to ruffle a lot of feathers.”

—Brad Zellar,
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“This book is as much for people who take joy in new ideas as in games.”

—Brian O’Neill,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Engaging, informative and deliciously contrarian.”

—Jonathan Yardley,
Washington Post

“Lewis is a five-tool reporter: He can think, joke, characterize, write for average readers and write for powerful decision makers.”

—David Kipen,
San Francisco Chronicle

“Lewis has managed to put together a compelling inside-baseball book that skewers many of the sport’s longstanding sacred cows.”

—Carol Knopes,
USA Today

“Lewis’s glee about the depth of baseball’s irrationality has plenty to say to anyone who’s human…. He rises to Jamesean heights in describing the difference between Beane’s view of baseball talent and the rest of baseball’s.”

—Marta Salij,
Detroit Free Press

“This insightful volume refutes the conventional wisdom of veteran baseball men and celebrates an underdog.”

—David Lieberfarb,
Newark Star Ledger

“I understood about one in four words of
Moneyball
, and it’s still the best and most engrossing sports book I’ve read for years. If you know anything about baseball, you will enjoy it four times as much as I did, which means that you might explode.”

—Nick Hornby,
The Believer

“Fantastically informative and entertaining…bound to excite extreme envy.”

—Josh Benson,
New York Observer

“Open this book…and your mind.”

—Nat Newell, Columbia, South Carolina,
State

ALSO BY MICHAEL LEWIS

Liar’s Poker

The Money Culture

Pacific Rift

Losers

The New New Thing

Next

MONEYBALL

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

MICHAEL LEWIS

W. W. NORTON
&
COMPANY
NEW YORK LONDON

Copyright © 2004, 2003 by Michael Lewis

All rights reserved
First published as a Norton 2004

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lewis, Michael (Michael M.)
Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game / by Michael Lewis.—
1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06740-8
1. Baseball—Economic aspects—United States. 2. Baseball—Scouting—United States. 3. Baseball players—Salaries, etc.—United States. I. Title.
GV880.L49 2003
796.357'06'91

2003005089

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

9 0

For Billy Fitzgerald
I can still hear him shouting at me

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter One
THE CURSE OF TALENT

Chapter Two
HOW TO FIND A BALLPLAYER

Chapter Three
THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Chapter Four
FIELD OF IGNORANCE

Chapter Five
THE JEREMY BROWN BLUE PLATE SPECIAL

Chapter Six
THE SCIENCE OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME

Chapter Seven
GIAMBI’S HOLE

Chapter Eight
SCOTT HATTEBERG, PICKIN’ MACHINE

Chapter Nine
THE TRADING DESK

Chapter Ten
ANATOMY OF AN UNDERVALUED PITCHER

Chapter Eleven
THE HUMAN ELEMENT

Chapter Twelve
THE SPEED OF THE IDEA

Epilogue
THE BADGER

Postscript
INSIDE BASEBALL’S RELIGIOUS WAR

Acknowledgments

Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking—had he the gold? or the gold him?

—John Ruskin,
Unto This Last

PREFACE

I
WROTE THIS BOOK
because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. 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. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?

For more than a decade the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly. At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A’s and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a third of that, about $40 million. A decade before, the highest payroll team, the New York Mets, had spent about $44 million on baseball players and the lowest payroll team, the Cleveland Indians, a bit more than $8 million. The raw disparities meant that only the rich teams could afford the best players. A poor team could afford only the maimed and the inept, and was almost certain to fail. Or so argued the people who ran baseball.

And I was inclined to concede the point. The people with the most money often win. But when you looked at what actually had happened over the past few years, you had to wonder. The bottom of each division was littered with teams—the Rangers, the Orioles, the Dodgers, the Mets—that had spent huge sums and failed spectacularly. On the other end of the spectrum was Oakland. For the past several years, working with either the lowest or next to lowest payroll in the game, the Oakland A’s had won more regular season games than any other team, except the Atlanta Braves. They’d been to the play-offs three years in a row and in the previous two taken the richest team in baseball, the Yankees, to within a few outs of elimination. How on earth had they done that? The Yankees, after all, were the most egregious example of financial determinism. The Yankees understood what New York understood, that there was no shame in buying success, and maybe because of their lack of shame they did what they did better than anyone in the business.

As early as 1999, Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (“Bud”) Selig had taken to calling the Oakland A’s success “an aberration,” but that was less an explanation than an excuse not to grapple with the question: how’d they do it? What was their secret? How did the second poorest team in baseball, opposing ever greater mountains of cash, stand even the faintest chance of success, much less the ability to win more regular season games than all but one of the other twenty-nine teams? For that matter, what was it about baseball success that resisted so many rich men’s attempt to buy it? These were the questions that first interested me, and this book seeks to answer.

That answer begins with an obvious point: in professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it. When I first stumbled into the Oakland front office, they were coming off a season in which they had spent $34 million and won an astonishing 102 games; the year before that, 2000, they’d spent $26 million and won 91 games, and their division. A leading independent authority on baseball finance, a Manhattan lawyer named Doug Pappas, pointed out a quantifiable distinction between Oakland and the rest of baseball. The least you could spend on a twenty-five-man team was $5 million, plus another $2 million more for players on the disabled list and the remainder of the forty-man roster. The huge role of luck in any baseball game, and the relatively small difference in ability between most major leaguers and the rookies who might work for the minimum wage, meant that the fewest games a minimum-wage baseball team would win during a 162-game season is something like 49. The Pappas measure of financial efficiency was: how many dollars over the minimum $7 million does each team pay for each win over its forty-ninth? How many marginal dollars does a team spend for each marginal win?

Over the past three years the Oakland A’s had paid about half a million dollars per win. The only other team in six figures was the Minnesota Twins, at $675,000 per win. The most profligate rich franchises—the Baltimore Orioles, for instance, or the Texas Rangers—paid nearly $3 million for each win, or more than six times what Oakland paid. Oakland seemed to be playing a different game than everyone else. In any ordinary industry the Oakland A’s would have long since acquired most other baseball teams, and built an empire. But this was baseball, so they could only embarrass other, richer teams on the field, and leave it at that.

At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why. Understanding that he would never have a Yankee-sized checkbook, the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, had set about looking for inefficiencies in the game. Looking for, in essence, new baseball knowledge. In what amounted to a systematic scientific investigation of their sport, the Oakland front office had reexamined everything from the market price of foot speed to the inherent difference between the average major league player and the superior Triple-A one. That’s how they found their bargains. Many of the players drafted or acquired by the Oakland A’s had been the victims of an unthinking prejudice rooted in baseball’s traditions. The research and development department in the Oakland front office liberated them from this prejudice, and allowed them to demonstrate their true worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs. Baseball—of all things—was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method.