Micheal Lewis begins Moneyball by describing the early life of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane. Billy was a natural born athlete, and had he most success during his teen years playing baseball. He pitched his first high school game as a freshman, recording a shutout victory, and went on to become a monstrous hitter throughout his four year career. He was drafted in the first round of the Major League Baseball draft by the New York Mets, but when he entered the team’s farm system his obvious flaws started to show. Billy was a perfectionist, and couldn’t stand getting out whenever he hit, which is something all players must come to deal with. Instead of focusing on improving after he made mistakes, Billy would become enraged and lose his confidence, which only lead to him making more mistakes than before. He played a few games in the major leagues, but he was never able to become the superstar everyone expected him to be. He chose to stop playing and enter the front offices in the 1990 season, switching from the playing side to the business side in order to reach more success.
Micheal Lewis then moves on from the life of Billy Beane to discuss the current problem that faced major league baseball scouting. Most scouts were retired or failed players, and did their job by traveling for countless hours to watch and evaluate high school and college players. They then made their own judgments, and evaluated whether or not a player should be drafted. During Oakland’s 2002 draft, Billy Beane, now the manager of the A’s, started to change the current state of major league scouting. He realized from his own failure that judging a player solely on potential is a bad thing, because it is not a sure outcome. Billy chose instead to focus on actual statistics, ignoring most of his scouts’ suggestions. Billy thought that if a player in college had been able to put up certain numbers, this was a better indication of success than any intuitions or feelings a scout could have on a player. By implementing this new process, Billy would change the way business was done in baseball.
Lewis’s first chapter focused solely on the life of Billy Beane, and therefore did not integrate any of the business ideas from class. The second chapter, however, integrated different concepts within its content. The first topic contained within the book was groupthink, and this was seen through the process of scouting done by Oakland’s scouts. Each scout would give a subjective opinion of their players, based solely on intuition, and other members always accepted these observations as truth. This led to far too many untalented payers being drafted, because as Billy himself proved, not all “good looking” athletes will prove to be successful. Instead, by using years of accumulated statistics, Billy was able to better gauge a player’s worth. Accepting business as usual in order to avoid conflict, even when the group is wrong, is definitely an example of groupthink.
Lewis also touched upon the team performance curve in the second chapter. Instead of focusing on team needs and deficiencies, the scouts only focused upon the best players possible. Billy instead chose to look at his team, and then find out what parts are missing. Billy was trying to create a high-performing team, or trying to fit pieces together to make a team who was better as a whole then the sum of its parts. By worrying bout specific needs, and also taking into account team chemistry, Billy was taking the correct steps in creating as high performing team.
The first section of Moneyball laid the framework for the rest of the book, and introduced concepts that are pivotal to the book’s later plot. By thinking outside the box, and by having the extra knowledge of being a failed player himself, Billy Beane had all of the tools to change major league baseball. That is exactly what he will end up doing.
(Section 1 = Chapters 1-3, Pages 1-63)
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