adrian is rad

3/25/2006

Moneyball

Filed under: — adrian @ 5:31 pm

I finished Moneyball on Thursday night. It’s about inefficiencies in the baseball player market and how they came to be exploited by the Oakland Athletics and their manager Billy Beane. I found it really interesting for a non-fiction book. I tend to like fiction books and read very few non-fiction books because I tend to get bored with them, but this one kept my attention throughout. I’d recommend it if you like baseball at all, especially now, with the baseball season fast approaching.

A few things that struck me while reading the book is the statistical significance of baseball. A hundred sixty two games a year. A few at bats a game. A few pitches per at ball. Overall, this leads to a statistically significant number of pitches and at bats. You can really run some numbers on this stuff and figure out what is significant in winning games, which is, as it turns out, something that people have done and is explained in this book. Football, with sixteen games a year, maybe a couple more, doesn’t have much statistical significance.

Another thing that stuck me is that all these people going into baseball now are from Harvard and Yale and crap. (Theo Epstein went to Yale). Where are all the MIT people in baseball?

In somewhat related news, I’m trying to read more. In the last month, I’ve finished How We are Hungry, Karoo Boy and now Moneyball. I’m starting Mysteries of Pittsburgh now. Hopefully I can keep this up. I like reading.

3 Responses to “Moneyball

  1. andy (not andyl) Says:

    So the neighborhood they focus on in MoP is totally the neighborhood that we ended up in that night we jump started your mom’s car. It’s a good book. I’m a huge fan of Chabon.

  2. jesse Says:

    people in quantitative finance really like moneyball for the stats. I’m guessing anyone who likes stats would like it.

  3. adrian is rad » Blog Archive » More on books? Says:

    […] While I’m on the subject of books, have you read any books lately that you can recommend? I have a bunch in my list, but I’m going through them pretty well. I’m generally more into good+readable over good+seminal+hard-to-read. […]

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