Rating: 
Summary: An absolute must-read
Review: Any baseball fan must read this book. It's the story of former super-prospect and current super-GM Billy Beane, the low-budget but successful Oakland A's, and one interesting but not transcendent 2002 season, but it's not about the man or the team or the season. It's a basic philosophy that seems intuitive but is practiced too infrequently: a GM must seek out what is undervalued in the baseball market. So this is all about finding out what is valuable in baseball, defining this great game and what makes a good player. Sabermetrician or not, whether or not you agree, this book should be read by every baseball fan.
Rating:
Summary: Fun read, great topic, and you might learn something too
Review: As a fan of books that you can learn something from, yet are fun to read, this is a winner. Michael Lewis does a great job of providing just the right amount of depth for the general public on sabermatrics and the data-driven approach to managing a baseball team. The result is an enlightening and amusing story that will make for a fun read.
Rating:
Summary: New way to access talent and win......
Review: As the Boston Red Sox fan, I found this book to be utterly interesting. The book tells the story of how the money poor Oakland A's managed to fielded a winning team year after year on a budget which is only the third of the many of their rivals. Oakland's General Manager, Billy Beane have developed a new system of accessing talents and getting them cheap. In essence, it all about statistics, theories and possibilities that defied the traditional way for accessing baseball talent.
Of course, as a Red Sox fan, I found this book to be a great interest because the Boston General Manager, Theo Epstein, is the great believer and follower of Billy Beane School of Thought on accessing talents. But unlike Beane, Epstein can applied this concept with a big checkbook and the result I believed was the glorious Red Sox victory of 2004.
I think after reading the book, I believed someone like Epstein can applied the lessons of Beane and make it work more effectively with a big bankroll. Beane on the other hand, have to let go of players he developed as their demand for a larger paychecks continued. Thus lies Beane's great trap in life. He can maintained a winning team but probably never get to the next level because he can't hold on to what he have developed. The next level is, of course the World Series Championship.
A great book for any Red Sox fans out there. It may give us a clue on what Epstein is thinking about when he is giving out contracts, or rejecting a player or getting new player. If not a Red Sox fan, the book is still highly educational in the revolutionary way baseball is changing in front of us.
Rating:
Summary: Your Gut is Wrong! - win Baseball Games with Facts
Review: Awesome! The Oakland A's GM defies tradition and wins baseball games based on a different view of baseball stats and facts. This book has made me look at other sports, business, and life in general a little differently. I read the whole book over a weekend. . .something I almost never do. Fascinating! Read it. (I wish my home town ball club would wake up and read this book too.)
Rating: 
Summary: Even if you don't like baseball, it's a must-read!
Review: First off, I'll confess I detest the game of baseball. I can't watch it on TV, and if I make it to the seven-inning-stretch of a live game it is due to a combination of free tickets and a good conversationalist in the next seat.
That said, I've enjoyed Michael Lewis' "Liar's Poker," "Next," and "The New New Thing." So I gave it a shot.
Michael Lewis manages to make the economics of baseball interesting entertaining by following Billy Bean's management of the Oakland A's, winning a tough division despite a cripplingly low budget for player's salaries. Economics itself is a difficult subject to make compelling prose of, but Lewis proved he could do that from his first book.
For someone who finds himself disgusted, not so much with the amount of money in professional sports, but the inscrutable way that money is distributed among owners and players, it is exciting to read about a guy doing what EVERYONE in pro sports says is impossible. It's not David and Goliath with some sort of divine intervention or freakish streak of luck: it's David beating Goliath by being willing to look at the problem a different way.
This is an excellent book for anyone who is fascinated with the debunking of conventional wisdom, or who loves seeing someone make the unjustly wealthy look flat-out stupid.
If you're a baseball fan, especially one who roots for an underdog or small-market team, I can only imagine that the book would be that much better.
Rating:
Summary: Couldn't put it down
Review: For years, baseball scouts and other game insiders used incomplete, often unscientific methods of evaluating young talent. They focused, for hitters, on batting average and intangibles such as "good swing" and "good baseball body." In the 1980s, baseball fan and statistician Bill James and others like him began developing or relying on more scientific ways of assessing the true "value" of a player--such stats as on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and (later) win shares. This book details the evolution and implementation of some of these principles, particularly in the Oakland organization under the direction of GM Billy Beane, a former player who had all the intangibles of a great hitter but was a Major League bust. The story is gripping, and Lewis, without undue complication, explains the workings and significance of the new stats. Lewis is able to give his readers compelling details about Beane's business methods and negotiation strategies--secrets Beane probably should have kept secret, both to maintain a competitive advantage and to preserve more cordial relations around the league. May be of interest to even the casual baseball fan.
Rating:
Summary: So many ways to enjoy this book
Review: Here is a book that can be appreciated from so many different angles. For fans of baseball (which I'm not) the allure is obvious. For fans of statistics, this book offers amazing insight into how numbers can be employed in real life with very pwerful and very real results. For fans of human nature, this story offers a great look at how mistakes can be repeated and then perpetuated until someone with a strong mind and a stronger will comes along to break the cycle. And for fans of character-driven stories, Moneyball, like any Michael Lewis tale, has that in spades too.
If any of that sounds good to you, give this one a try.
Rating:
Summary: The future of baseball
Review: Hidden in baseball's past statistics is the answer to the future of baseball. The Oakland A's have shown the way it can be done. Now one of the guys using this same approach has gone to Boston and erased the long time curse of the Red Sox. In a few years when the real stats that matter are used by baseball management it may not seem so important. But right now it is.
Fascinating reading, and hard to believe. Hard to believe how stuck in their ways, and how deep in the sand have been the heads of baseball management until now. And for the most part nearly all are still stuck. That will change as those who don't learn the new ways will not be able to compete.
In a way, it strips away some of the human fallible quality that pervades baseball. Even more so how it has been managed. But once the genie is out of the bottle you aren't going to put it back in. The world of baseball has changed. Learn why and how in this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Moneyball?
Review: I got the impression from reading reviews and snipits from Moneyball, that the book would give me a "fantastic" new behind the scenes view of the A's front office and Billy Beane. The book had it's moments(specifically when Lewis went in depth about the A's "new philosophy" and how things went down before the trade deadline), but the thing I took from the book more than any other, is that Lewis is a master of filler. I got the impression that he went in-depth about the family-life/history of Chad Bradford and Scott Hatteberg because he wanted to make his book a more respectable length, because lets face it, the fact that Chad Bradford throws side-arm, or the fact that he was taught to throw sidearm by his highschool coach/preacher has absolutely nothing to do with the economics of the game and he loosely tied Bradford in with Voros who makes the miraculous discovery about how pitchers don't consistantly give up the same number of hits year-in and year-out(I'm not trying to demean the discovery).I've seen some of the reviews saying "WOW THIS IS THE BEST BASEBALL BOOK I'VE EVER READ", if that's the case, baseball books are in a equally sad state on par with the game and it's economics. It wasn't a bad book, but out of the 5 books I've read in the last three weeks, it falls in at number five from best to worst. As a baseball fanatic(and self-proclaimed stat nerd) I can't even fathom how this book could possibly be interesting to the average fan or baseball novice.
Rating:
Summary: Really Enjoyable for Sports Fans or Managers
Review: If you ever have to evaluate performance in any field, or if you are ever evaluated yourself (and this includes virtually all of us), then you should find this book fascinating. Lewis gives us an inside look at the evaluation of baseball talent, and shows us the many ways that people are under- and overrated. Just imaging the difficulty of evaluating performance in fields where there are not dozens of objective statistics. How far off are your evaluations of your subordinates, or your supervisors evaluations of you.
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