This review is not for you if you:
a) Like baseball for its intricacies
b) Like the Oakland A’s

Feel free to stop reading now if you met any of the above criteria.

My first experience with this book, buying it, was a bad one. It was among the recommended industry reading, straight from my CEO, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I looked all over the business section and wandered the store noticing a few other titles that looked way more interesting including the infamous “Handbook for the Limbless” and the bestseller “The Romance of Cement.” When I finally found it it was in the Baseball section. Who knew that bookstores had baseball sections? Certainly not me. At this point that I knew this book was a bad idea. Baseball is, after all, the most boring sport ever invented. The only thing that could possibly be worse than sitting through an entire baseball game is READING about a baseball game.

Nevertheless, I had a plane ride home and needed to kill the time somehow.

300 pages later I can summarize the book in 4 sentences.

Statistics are a better indication of quality than isolated observations, which is why baseball scouting is flawed. Nobody in MLB wants to pay attention to statistics because they either aren’t running a business or they’re too stuck in their ways to let anything like a few measly numbers get in the way of their decisions. This creates market inefficiencies where players with good statistics are undervalued just because they don’t look good, and these inefficiencies can be exploited. Oh, and Billy Beane is the shit.

That was the book. Don’t bother reading it.


Obviously the important part here for my industry is that market inefficiencies can be detected through statistical analysis. That’s all well and good, except the analysis is only mentioned as abstract revelations that Ivy league graduates experience. Hardly revolutionary. Next up is Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, which looks more useful already, and I’ve just seen the cover.