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Here are some customer reviews of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game : Michael Lewis is a great author, and really goes inside a war room in baseball. I love books about sports, and i sometimes aspire to be a baseball GM, and such. Yet i don't believe the Lews portrays many characters correctly. For example Grady Fuson (the A's old Scouting Director) drafted the likes of great pros like: Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Eric Chavez. Lewis gives him absolutely no credit. Also Assistant GM Paul DePodesta has said that Lewis can over dramatize some of the things they talked about, (like the importance of stats). Lewis also doesnt state that the A's drafted some guys too high, because they couldn't afford the best guys on the market. With all that said Moneyball is a very good read, and takes you right to the GM's office Of a great franchise As a fantasy baseball devotee and a regular reader of Rob Neyer's columns on espn.com, I was excited to see how a non-specialist, Lewis, would react to the quirks of the baseball world. Lewis's reaction is the defining baseball book of this generation. Lewis masterfully weaves together A's GM Billy Beane's personal story and conversion to statistical analysis with theory and reasoning behind that analysis. Lewis also does a superlative job describing the other side: the baseball old timers who distain number-crunching and instead look for intangibles when scouting ballplayers. Why look into how well the hitter controls the strike zone if you can simply see if he has "the Good Face". Imagine an accountant eschewing numbers to see if a company just looked right, just felt right in her gut; well, that's how baseball did, and mostly still does, operate. Not some esoteric tome, but a terrifically engrossing and informative book. I think even my mom would like it. it's always interesting to see someone deconstruct anything and put it back together in a way that makes you see things totally differently than conventional wisdom. The story fo the 2002 A's does that. The one unanswerable question I had that Lewis never answered was-what happens when EVERYONE in baseball adopts something closer to Beane's sicientific approach? Will his present advantage disappear or will he adjust his approach again? That's a relatively minor quibble. This is a great read. I would only note while the Mets are now a mess, Kazmir, the high school pitcher that Beane passed on, is having a great season. We'll see. Michael Lewis attempts to address what should be the wildly anomalous winning of the bargain-basement Oakland A's. While it is an open secret that Billy Beane relies on new-wave objective analysis, his past, his motivations, and the extent to which he uses it was not widely known. Lewis takes an adoring look at the A's organization, Billy Beane, the growth of sabermetrics, and baseball as he recounts a meandering tale that brought us the current edition of the A's. Michael Lewis in unabashed in his admiration for Beane, and spares little time to give Beane's critics voice. (Even then, he does so in the weakest form, by quoting the less-than-geniuslike Joe Morgan, and even then giving Billy Beane the last word) Many reviewers have chosen to take Beane to task for the A's lack of postseason success, which is not relevant to this book. Instead Lewis tells a story charmingly and brimming with lightweight, character-revealing anecdotes. Lewis's prose is very down-to-earth, and he conveys ideas with tremendous clarity, and especially excels at introducing new concepts, contrasting them well with the previous line of thought. Moneyball is a fun read that gives a terrific look inside the front offices of baseball that is very accessible to the casual reader. While the author's perspective does color the tale, this does not alter the fact that the book is very enjoyable and even worth a reread. Great, great book -- but beware of the wrong impression that you might get from the dust-cover write-up! I actually bought the book based on a misunderstanding; from the dust-cover, I swore this was a novel, a writer's fantasy about "what if" a baseball team were put together in a non-traditional way, by people who throw away the tired old assumptions and proceed on the basis of truth. But it turns out that this is no fantasy; it has actually occurred -- this book is about the actual Oakland A's of recent years. And, it's so good that I didn't at all resent the misunderstanding that the book's blurb gave me. If you are already a keen student of the "new analysis" of baseball (a la Bill James, John Thorn, Pete Palmer etc.), you'll enjoy this confirmation of what you pride yourself on knowing; if not, you'll have the wonderful adventure of getting a steep learning curve on the science of baseball and how for years and years the "old boys network" has failed to see the forest for the trees. Also, you'll laugh an awful lot, and your lexicon will gain some new catch phrases; my personal favorite is, "Put a Milo on him."

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