MONEYBALL / MICHAEL LEWIS

 

I'm not a baseball fan per se. I played in Little League when I was a kid in Texas and used to have a trophy our team Holly Farms won. But I was never very good at it, and I find actively watching it anywhere but the ballpark to be very boring. 

However, Baseball has a history, tradition and folklore that makes you want to like it. They make for the best sports movies as narrative because the long baseball provides for narrative room for the narrative to go from rags-to-riches and be believable. (Football only works narratively IMO on the level of the game itself -- a pivotal or meaningful game.)

When I taught First Year Writing in college, I had many students who wanted to write the sports paper. What I asked them to do was to narrow their topic by writing instead about Sports and _____. Sports as Culture, the Mythology of Sport, Sports as Economics, Sports as Narrative, etc. Moneyball scratches this itch for me in a major way. I think it is significant as Nonfiction Narrative, but also as important in the analysis of Sports as Economics and Human Error in Judgment into What Is Important in a Phenomenon.

The premise of Moneyball is that in a market where large market teams can easily outspend small market teams it is important to identify how to analyze and realize where the real value in the market is. Because of market inefficiency caused by mistaken notions of where value lies, one's ability to realize where meaningful, quantifiable measurements of performance can lead to a competitive edge when fielding a team. This can apply to many areas in life beyond baseball, I believe. There's something intellectually heroic in being able to turn what seems so commonsensical so thoroughly on its head.

(The movie captures this dynamic ably and deserves its own review.)

Review: I can't tell you how many times I've read this book on pure whim. It's both provocative in its analysis and engrossing in the telling thereof. Solid A.