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Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only "the single most influential baseball book ever" (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what "may be the best book ever written on business"
[...]... about how they did what they did Calling them in from the field and stuffing them into a dank room in the bowels of the Coliseum for the seven days before the draft had become something of an Oakland custom It was the point of the exercise that was about to change A year ago, before the 2001 draft, the goal had been for the general manager of the Oakland A’s and his scouts to come to some mutually satisfying... noticed The men in this room were the spiritual descendants of the older men who had identified Billy Beane, as a boy of sixteen, as a future baseball superstar Invisible to the ordinary fan, they were nevertheless the heart of the game They decide who gets to play and, therefore, how it is played For the first time in his career Billy was about to start an argument about how they did what they did... lot of money.” The club overruled him The Mets front office felt that the benefits of the national publicity outweighed the costs of raising Darryl Strawberry’s expectations, or even of picking the wrong guy The Mets took Strawberry with the first pick and paid him a then fantastic signing bonus of $210,000 The Blue jays took Garry Harris with the second pick of the draft Darnell Coles went to the. .. one of them on a player who might not sign Plus there was this other thing In the months leading up to the draft the Mets front office had allowed themselves to become part of a strange experiment Sports Illustrated had asked the Mets’ general manager, Frank Cashen, if one of the magazine’s reporters could follow the team as it decided who would become the first overall draft pick in the country The. .. football team had with the Stanford admissions office, and so the baseball coach asked the football coach to have a look at Billy A few hours on the practice field and the football coach endorsed Billy Beane as the man to take over after John Elway left All Billy had to do was get his B in math The Stanford athletic department would take care of the rest And it had By the day of the draft every big league... hollers at one of the scouts to walk off the track again, and make certain that the distance is exactly sixty yards Then he tells the five boys to return to the starting line The boys don’t understand; they run you first but they usually only run you once They think maybe Gillick wants to test their endurance, but that’s not what’s on Gillick’s mind Gillick’s job is to believe what he sees and disbelieve... the nation’s richest trove of baseball talent, Southern California, and invited to the baseball field at San Diego’s Herbert Hoover High to answer a question: who is the best of the best? As the boys get loose, a few scouts chitchat on the infield grass In the outfield Pat Gillick, the general manager of the Toronto Blue jays, stands with a stopwatch in the palm of his hand Clustered around Gillick... dream on Ramrod-straight and lean but not so lean you couldn’t imagine him filling out And that face! Beneath an unruly mop of dark brown hair the boy had the sharp features the scouts loved Some of the scouts still believed they could tell by the structure of a young man’s face not only his character but his future in pro ball They had a phrase they used: the Good Face.” Billy had the Good Face Billy’s...image of the Oakland A’s It was at a Red Sox game that I tried to tempt Ricciardi into a self-serving conversation Months before he had said to me, and with some insistence, that there was a truly astonishing discrepancy between Billy Beane and every other general manager in the game He’d raised one hand as high as he could and lowered the other as low as he could and said, “Billy is up here and everyone... a hundred grand in front of Billy’s parents and it had done nothing to improve the tone of the discussion He began to worry that Billy was serious To the chagrin of Billy’s mother, who was intent on her son going to Stanford, Jongewaard planted himself in the Beane household That didn’t work either “I wasn’t getting the vibes I would like,” Jongewaard now says “And so I took Billy to see the big club.” . 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. 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