Moneyball Book Report

691 Words2 Pages

Money plays a big role in every aspect of life. It can either make life easier or much harder. Michael Lewis explains how a baseball team is run in his book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Lewis relates how money is used by the Oakland A’s in comparison to the other teams that have more money than them. Billy Beane the general manager of the Oakland A’s has to field a good baseball team with a very small salary. The Oakland A’s lack of wealth affects the way that the team can spend their money and have to find ways to still be successful against the teams with higher salaries.
Billy Beane believes his way of evaluating players is changing the game of baseball. The first thing that Billy did was hire a man named Paul Depodesta …show more content…

Compared to other teams, the Oakland A’s had about half the salary to work with. “The average big league salary was $2.3 million. The average A's opening day salary was a bit less than $1.5 million.”(Lewis 87) This mean that they couldn’t afford to get big league stars in their prime and couldn’t even afford average priced players. “The poor team was forced to find bargains: young players and whatever older guys the market had undervalued.”(Lewis 87) The Oakland A’s had to look for players that they thought had value for a cheap price. To obtain these players and actually make the deals work, Billy had to be smart in the way he approached other …show more content…

During the 2002 season, the Oakland A’s went on a 20 game win streak and finished with the best record in their division. This came after they traded away most of their star players and still found away to win with their low cost players. The A’s had to use statistics to “find players that are very important but not highly valued in the marketplace”. (Lewis) Most people never believed this strategy would ever work and were surprised that it turned out the way it did. Now that the A’s have found a new way to have success with a low budget, other organizations will most likely try to follow this approach in the

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