But did they overvalue it? From the bedsit and campus computers of maths students who played fantasy baseball – a game in which real on-field events are translated into points – came the heretical realisation that some players, while not as traditionally elegant or as fast or as strong as the standard model, were nevertheless highly effective in some important aspect of the game. Historically, baseball coaches had valued athleticism. What were Oakland doing to buck the market? In a sense Moneyball is in this line, in that Lewis was first attracted to the story when he noticed that the unfashionable Oakland A's, despite operating on about a third of the budget of the New York Yankees and other big clubs, consistently outperformed much richer teams. Last year his The Big Short provided the most entertaining and comprehensible explanation of the 2008 banking crisis.

Lewis made his name as a writer about finance – or more accurately a writer about the personalities working in finance – with his 1989 debut Liar's Poker recounting his time as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers. More often the focus is on airless and strip-lit offices, deep beneath the grandstands, where a new breed of nerdy and statistically savvy baseball executives attempted to overturn a century and more of received wisdom as to how the game should be played.

But that said, relatively little of Moneyball actually takes place outdoors on America's fields of dreams. It's played on sunny days and balmy nights and the fact that I read Moneyball during a baking July on Long Island, with the reassuring burble of baseball radio commentaries mingling with the hum of cicadas and whoops of frat boys, surely added to its allure. But while most of my childhood was indeed spent under an endlessly cloudless Swansea sky watching Glamorgan being pummelled by all-comers, there are equally vivid memories of freezing February nights listening on the radio as England were pummelled in all corners of the southern hemisphere.)īy contrast, baseball is a purely April-to-September affair, with October ball only for those heroes who make the play-offs.

But rather than being set in a high school or summer camp, Lewis's 2003 piece of classic reportage treads rather less well-explored ground: behind the scenes in major league baseball.īaseball need defer to no sport in its claim to be the quintessential summer game. Like the cheesiest of summer teen movies, Michael Lewis's Moneyball tells a story of how the geeks and the freaks outsmarted the jocks.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis