MONEYBALL

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• Michael Lewis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
• He has written many best-selling books including Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short.
• He went to school in California and became a big supporter of California baseball teams including the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics.

GENERAL INFO

• It was published on June 17, 2003.
• Published by W.W. Norton and Company.
• Has a total of 288 pages.
• It is non-fiction.

THE STORY

• The story mainly takes place in Oakland, CA and other MLB ballparks.
• It is the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics baseball team from the point of view of the author Michael Lewis.
• The 2002 Oakland A's were run by Billy Beane, their General Manager.
• Billy Beane was not like other general managers and made decisions that were never done before.

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2002 OAKLAND ATHLETICS

• Billy Beane decided to do whatever he thought would better the team, disregarding other people's thoughts.
• He traded well known players who had proven to be good for other players who were inexperienced with little benefits.
• He was also one of the first general managers in baseball who was a former player himself.

2002 OAKLAND ATHLETICS

• Beane believed that the little potential that many of these players had would be enough to get the A's to the playoffs.
• Some of these players included Nick Swisher, Tim Hudson, Scott Hatteberg, and Miguel Tejada.
• These players shocked the league and became some of the leagues top players.

BILLY BEANE'S TACTICS

• Nobody thought Beane could pull these stunts off, but he proved them wrong.
• The A's had the third smallest payroll in the league, so he couldn't obtain huge players like the Yankees or Dodgers who had huge payrolls.
• He tied in young prospects with worn out veterans and helped them gel together as a unit.

THE MAGICAL SEASON

• In the story, Lewis thinks of the team as the underdogs.
• The A's had not been relevant in the league in the years before 2002 but that season changed everything.
• Some big moments of the season that are described in the story are the team's record 20 game winning streak, the trading of their star player Jason Giambi and recovering from that, and the team's playoff berth.

ABOUT THE BOOK

• The main idea of the book is to show people how Billy Beane basically changed the way of management and made it work.
• It also shows how much can happen when a team comes together as one and all players have their minds set on one goal, in this stories case, the goal is making the playoffs.

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• I recommend this book to baseball fans and sports fans.
• If you do not know much about baseball It will be difficult to read.
• A strength of the book is the passion, it talks about how passionate and dedicated this team was as a whole.

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• My favorite part in the book is when Scott Hatteberg, an underlooked player by the league, hit a walk-off home run to give the Oakland Athletics their 20th straight win in a crucial part of the season.
• At this part, Lewis said he had never had more goosebumps in his life after that homerun.
• Home Run video: http://youtu.be/Kg1kaYhadNY

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• Overall, the book left an impression of willingness on me. It showed how one team could go from being irrelevant to the talk of the league. It also showed that when you set your mind on a goal and work for that goal, your reward can be great.

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