“Billy Beane and the Art of Finding What Everyone Else Missed”
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Title: Moneyball
Author: Michael Lewis
Category: Startups & Entrepreneurship, Career Growth, Motivation & Self-Improvement, Culture & Society
How does a baseball team with a forty-million-dollar payroll win exactly as many games as the Yankees, who spent more than three times that? Sam and Sophie open Moneyball with that question, and it turns out the answer has almost nothing to do with baseball.
They walk through Michael Lewis's story of Billy Beane, the first-round draft pick who failed because everyone trusted their eyes instead of the evidence, and who then built a system immune to the thing that fooled them. Bill James, the night watchman writing about statistics in the seventies, gets his due, along with the stats he exposed as noise: batting average, RBIs, and the market's blind spot around on-base percentage. Paul DePodesta, Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford, and Kevin Youkilis all make an appearance as the players everyone else threw away. The pair also sit with the uncomfortable parts, the trades, the human cost, and the twenty-game win streak that ended in a first-round playoff exit.
If you've ever watched a confident pitch get funded over a better one, or seen the person who looks the part get promoted, this episode is for you. The takeaway: the biggest edge isn't money or talent, it's the willingness to see the world as it actually is.
Moneyball by Michael Lewis. If you want the full written summary, the whole library is on 7minutebooks.com/app — over 6,000 fiction and nonfiction titles you can read or listen to in any language, with infographics on many titles. Unlimited access from $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year, or $19.99 lifetime.
Chapters
00:00A Forty Million Dollar Roster00:56Billy Beane And The Failed Prospect01:29Bill James And The Stats That Lie02:18On Base Percentage As Market Edge02:49The Rejects Everyone Threw Away04:35Twenty Wins, Then A First-Round Exit
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