“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 check book, the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, had set about looking for inefficiencies in the game. Looking for, in essence, new baseball knowledge.”
SUMMARY: The book delves into the out-of-the-box route to success taken by the budget baseball team, the Oakland A’s, who reached heights of success on par with the Yankees. It is an informative and empowering baseball success story.
TAKEAWAYS: In a sports world where teams often buy the best players, this budget team, the Oakland A’s, was determined to develop the best team instead. The entrepreneurial and passionate manager, Billy Beane, tapped into the power of 1970’s Sabermetrics statistics to choose players who had the best statistical chance of developing into star players. With the help of Harvard graduate, Paul DePodesta, the team was selected using algorithms that proved the best potential players. This meant choosing statistically proven who were unknown over popular, successful, and super-fit players. The result was astonishing and placed the budget team in the same standing as the Yankees. Moneyball is an adventurous story, an entrepreneurial story, and a business story.
READ IF: You enjoy taking a more objective view based on hard data when it comes to strategy and decisions and are tired of people with big ego who believe that they 'just know' all the answers.
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