The Art of Winning An Unfair Game
I’m not going to lie, I read this book mostly just because I really like the film, but it turns out I actually took away a huge amount from it. I did have to stop reading fairly often to Google baseball terms, though, because I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about at times.
This book isn’t really about baseball, though. Well, of course it’s about baseball, but it’s not about baseball. It’s really about innovation and finding new ways to do things that have been done the same way for years. I took away a very timely lesson to question everything and work hard to take assumptions for what they are: someone assuming they know the best way of doing things without having tried any other way.
Key highlight: “If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.” p98
“The difference in Billy wasn’t what had happened to him, but what hadn’t. He had a life he hadn’t led, and he knew it. He just hoped nobody else noticed.” p15
“People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn’t.” p18
“That Erik had never played even high school ball was, in Billy Beane’s mind, a point in his favor. At least he hasn’t learned the wrong lessons. Billy had played pro ball, and regarded it as an experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well. “A reformed alcoholic,” is how he described himself.” p24
“A person willing to rethink everything he learned, or thought he had learned, playing baseball.” p24
“Foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success.” p33
“That was the moment when the scouts realized just how far Billy Beane was willing to go to push his supposedly rational and objective view of things.” p35
“‘You take a guy high no one else likes and it makes you uncomfortable. But I mean, really, who gives a fuck where guys are taken? Remember Zito? Everyone said we were nuts to take Zito with the ninth pick of the draft. And we knew everyone was going to say that. One fucking month later it’s clear we kicked everyone’s ass. Nobody remembers that now. But understand, when we stop trying to figure out the perception of guys, we’ve done better.'” p39
“The Mets scouting department had badly misjudged Billy’s nature. They had set him up to fail.” p44
“He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success?” p55
“The new, outsider’s view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field.” p62
“It is because baseball statistics, unlike the statistics in any other area, have acquired the powers of language. —Bill James, 1985 Baseball Abstract” p64
“Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them.” p65
“After all, wrote James, ‘you have to do something right to get an error; even if the ball is hit right at you, then you were standing in the right place to begin with.'” p67
“Fielding statistics made sense only as numbers, not as language. Language, not numbers, is what interested him.” p67
“‘When the numbers acquire the significance of language.’ he later wrote, ‘they acquire the power to do all of the things which language can do: to become fiction and drama and poetry.'” p67
“But the details of the thing didn’t matter. What mattered was James’s ability to light a torch in a dark chamber and throw a new light on a dusty problem. He made you think.” p69
“What got counted was often simply what was easiest to count.” p70
“A hitter should be measured by his success in that which he is trying to do, and that which he is trying to do is create runs. It is startling, when you think about it, how much confusion there is about this.” p76
“‘The people who run baseball are surrounded by people trying to give them advice,’ said James. ‘So they’ve built very effective walls to keep out anything.’ p85
“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.” p90
“Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be.” p98
“‘What you don’t do,’ said Billy, ‘is what the Yankees do. If we do what the Yankees do, we lose every time, because they’re doing it with three times more money than we are.’ p119
“Highly trained mathematicians and statisticians and scientists who had abandoned whatever they were doing at Harvard or Stanford or MIT to make a killing on Wall Street. The fantastic sums of money hauled in by the sophisticated traders transformed the culture on Wall Street, and made quantitative analysis, as opposed to gut feel, the respectable way to go about making bets in the market.” p190
“Bill James’s work had been all about challenging the traditional understanding of the game, by questioning the meaning of its statistics.” p133
“His coach was creating an alternative scale on which Hatty could judge his performance. He might be an absolute D but on Wash’s curve he felt like a B, and rising. “He knew that what looked like a routine play wasn’t a routine play for me,” said Hatty. Wash was helping him to fool himself, to make him feel better than he was, until he actually became better than he was.” p168
“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo.” p193
“The power of an imagination can arise from what it refuses to foresee.” p224