Lewis goes into some detail on how Bean manages to field competitive teams almost every year under dire fiscal constraints. This makes him a sort of anti-Steinbrenner. Because Oakland is a small-market team, Bean must use his brain to tease out the players who can help his team, at a reasonable cost. Lewis’ focus is on Billy Bean, the GM of the Oakland Athletics.

This is one of the best baseball books I have ever read, and that is saying something. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era ( Liar's Poker, The New New Thing), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. But the most interesting character is Beane himself.

Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. Given this information and a tight budget, Beane defied tradition and his own scouting department to build winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans. But Beane and his staff, buoyed by massive amounts of carefully interpreted statistical data, believed that wins could be had by more affordable methods such as hitters with high on-base percentage and pitchers who get lots of ground outs. Conventional wisdom long held that big name, highly athletic hitters and young pitchers with rocket arms were the ticket to success.

Billy Beane, general manager of MLB's Oakland A's and protagonist of Michael Lewis's Moneyball, had a problem: how to win in the Major Leagues with a budget that's smaller than that of nearly every other team.

Moneyball by Michael Lewis