A CITIZEN'S BLOG

Just a quick update for this afternoon: I've been tearing my way through Moneyball these last few days. It is a terrific book: very readable, very insightful. Judging the book strictly by its prose, I'm impressed by Lewis' skill as a writer. The key to understanding and enjoying this story is to get a sense of the insider's joy of building a baseball team, and I get that when I read Moneyball. DePodesta and Beane's not-so-silent joy at being able to thumb their nose at the baseball establishment comes through, and I think that Lewis breaks down the strategies that the A's employ fairly well: as someone who thought that sabremetics was all about OBP (now I follow stats like ISO, OPS, and I'm working at understanding GPA), I understand it a little more now ... but I've barely scratched the surface.

The chapter on Bill James alone was worth the $11 bucks ... when I read about James rage about fielding stats in his 1977 abstract, I could imagine how Beane felt reading James books for the first time because it was how I felt at that moment: someone opened my eyes to looking at something in an utterly new light. It is, I imagine, a little like how people felt to stand in the presence of Lau-Tzo or Jesus Christ or Siddhartha: to be on the receiving end of wisdom from someone who maybe hasn’t figured it all out, but whose understanding of what is important is a quantum leap ahead of yours. I never considered, never wondered, about whether the way I was looking at something was right, whether there was another way ...

So yeah, I'm in awe.