Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

1590 Words4 Pages

The process that led the Oakland Athletics baseball team to a record-breaking 20-game winning streak, known as ‘moneyball’, is similar and dissimilar in the thoughts and ideas of both Neil Postman and Nicholas Carr. In 2003, Michael Lewis wrote a book called Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game that describes the process used by the Oakland Athletics professional baseball team to lead them to a 20-game winning streak, and nearly win the World Series. Inside the book, Billy Beane (the general manager of the team) and the Oakland Athletics are faced with the paradigm of financial inequity. Beane is forced to manage a substandard team based on a budget that a budget that is nearly one third of his primary competitors. In a desperate attempt to lead the team to victory, Beane went above and beyond the constraints of his budget, and employed the system of sabermetrics, a mathematic approach mainstreamed by Bill James in the 1980’s to find objective knowledge about players (Birnbaum, A Guide to Sabermetric Research). Beane used sabermetrics to develop his team, instead of the superseded system of using scouts, giving him the ability to value the players he purchased (often cheaply due to the misvalued system) for his roster based on simple values including on-base percentage and slugging percentage (Wolfe et al., 2007). The process by Beane nearly changed the game of professional baseball, however was not accepted by baseball experts immediately, and still to this day some professional teams remain mismanaged. In the remainder of this essay, I will explore the similarities and differences between Neil Postman’s ideas and concepts on the values of television, the epistemology of television, and the negative changing in public ...

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...internet and other technology are accurate in appearance to ‘moneyball’ because it is true that this technology will rule its user in that perspective.

Works Cited

Birnbaum, Phil. "SABR." A Guide to Sabermetric Research. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2013. .
Carr, Nicholas G.. The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
Cross, Dax. "Moneyball." Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management 8.1 (2009): 107-8. ProQuest. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.
Lewis, Michael. Moneyball: the art of winning an unfair game. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Print.
Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to death: public discourse in the age of.. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.
Wolfe, Richard, et al. "Moneyball: A Business Perspective." International Journal of Sport Finance 2.4 (2007): 249-62.ProQuest. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

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