Nerd Power

Wow folks, I just looked at our main page and if you've been away from hifi for a while, make sure you skip down and catch the earlier posts by oneway and our newest addition, the general. To round out our recent posts about pieces of media we recommend you consume ASAP, I will bring you another book review. Oneway always seems to generate mad comment love whenever he talks about sports. Usually, I have nothing of merit to add to these discussions, and so I sit idly by and watch his discussion thread grow and grow. Sniff. But Fear Not, hifi-ers, I have my own sports topic today! For today, I will tell you why you should read Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Yes, I read a book about sports. For real.


Actually, it's not just a book about sports, but a book about how nerd power can own traditional baseball wisdom to win a ton of games in the pros. Here's the deal. The book centers on the Oakland As. If you go look at the standings for the Athletics at the end of the 2001-2004 seasons, you will see essentially one of the best overall records of any baseball franchise over that period of time. Then, if you look at their total payroll over the equivalent period of time, you will see that they were paying their players about 1/3 to 1/4 of what the top teams were paying. And yet, the As were winning just as many, if not more, than these teams full of big name stars with huge paychecks. How is this possible? Michael Lewis tells us, in under three hundred pages, that the fiendish application of nerdery to both the process of acquiring players and the way to play games in the pros is responsible for this impressive feat.

In short, it turns out that most of the popular baseball statistics (team batting average, for example) are not correlated very well to number of wins. On base percentage, however, definitely is, because it is exactly 1 minus the percentage of times a guy makes an out. So, when you are searching for a player to add to the offensive capability of your team, you want to maximize on base percentage for the money you spend, instead of way overpaying for a guy who swings for the fences everytime and can't draw a walk. If this type of thing sounds interesting to you, there's only about two dozen more examples given in the book, so I hope that will satiate you. Here's another fun fact: most, if not all, baseball 'trick' plays are, probabilistically speaking, a bad idea. Here I'm referring to stealing bases, sacrifice flies, sacrifice bunts - all the little tricks that, when they end up scoring a run, make everyone say, "Mmmm, that manager knows his stuff." Why are they a bad idea? Because it turns out that making an out is such a detrimental event for the offense that you should always take any and all actions that minimizes the possibility that you could get an out. So says a bunch of baseball nerds, anyway.

And that's the real story that Lewis tells. The Oakland A's are the story of a team where the baseball nerds, who shunned conventional wisdom at every turn, finally broke in to the office of the GM and started running the show. The edition I read actually had an afterword where Lewis tells of the incredible backlash his book got from a lot of owners and MLB execs. It's worth a read, especially if you like baseball, math, nerds, athletes, and any combination thereof.