As a young man, Billy Beane was the typical kid who seemed to have been born to play sports. He occupied the most important position on the high school football team and was the leading scorer on the basketball team. One day, playing baseball, he left a scene for history. As he batted, the opponents stood a little further back to try to catch the ball. It was a field without fences, which allowed them to back up to more or less the height of where the parking lot of a real stadium would be located. He again threw the ball over the rivals, to the delight of the crowd. Beane was also the typical kid for whom everyone, especially scouts, predicted a successful future. He was a good student, handsome, tall, athletic and had a lot of charisma. The main baseball teams in the United States were interested in him. There was only one small detail that could ruin his future: his performance data had plummeted in recent seasons. Maybe it was the pressure of knowing that he was so watched and desired. In reality, the reason didn’t matter. The image that Beane had projected for years took all the spotlight. Nobody paid attention to statistics, so nobody could predict the fiasco of his sports career. However, Beane was destined to change baseball history. And to do it through the science of statistics.
moneyball(Peninsula) is the book in which Michael Lewis tells the story of Beane who, aware of the situation, asked his team, the Oakland Athletics, to leave the roster and join the scouting team. He did it to change baseball. His proposal—making decisions based on data, something that sounds very logical but was not very common—represented a profound shake-up in the way we understood the game. Beane became a successful manager. This book draws a fascinating profile of that boy who, indeed, was destined to enter baseball history. Of course, for reasons that no scout was able to see.
