Moneyball

From Wiki Gonzalez

Moneyball is the short name for author Michael Lewis's landmark 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, perhaps the most influential baseball book published since Jim Bouton's Ball Four.

For Moneyball, Lewis was allowed access to the Oakland Athletics front-office decision-making process, where he profiled some of the players on the A's major league roster, a number of minor leaguers drafted into their farm system, and the mastermind of it all, general manager Billy Beane.

In addition to Beane, Moneyball profiled several current and former baseball GMs who reported to Beane at the time, including J.P. Ricciardi and Paul DePodesta.

Moneyball, in Lewis's judgment, ended up being a business management book describing how the A's stayed competitive in the standings despite a severely limited payroll budget, and by implication how other businesses could do the same in their industries when similarly constrained.

Some people felt that Moneyball ended up being a propaganda piece for Beane. Joe Morgan, for his part, has suggested that Billy Beane was wrong to have written Moneyball.

Lewis has defended Beane from his detractors, saying that he himself should bear responsibility for the words and descriptions in the book. He also has taken shots at the baseball mainstream media who criticized the book, calling them a "Ladies Auxiliary" whose criticism proved his point that they were clubby and resistant to outside thinking.

The term "Moneyball" is now often used to refer to "sabermetric-style" teams or sabermetrically-influenced decisions of any sort, regardless of whether they are constrained by money.