Book Review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

I've blogged before about what a sports addict I am, and that baseball was my first love, so it will come as no surprise that I thoroughly enjoyed Moneyball by Michael Lewis when I read it earlier this summer. Moneyball seeks to answer the baseball question of disparity; that is, why is it that a team like the Oakland A's with a payroll of $71 million can compete against, and even triumph over, a team like the New York Yankees with their bloated payroll of some $207 million. Good question, though, for the record, it looks like Oakland is going to come up short this year as we head toward September (sorry, Seth!).

And so l liked it for the baseball, but I loved it for the system. Because Moneyball is really about a process, created and nurtured by A's management, by which an outspent team triumphs over the "big boys". Put succinctly, the A's system is less concerned with the "feel" a scout would have after watching a prospective player than about, well, numbers and statistics, particularly those related to plate discipline. Fascinating. And revolutionary. Here's a quote that sums it up: "scoring runs was, in the new view, less an art or a talent than a process. If you made the process a routine--if you got every player doing his part on the production line--you could pay a lot less for runs than the going rate."

This is a new season for me in ministry. For the first Fall since 1995, I'm technically off campus; that is, I am purely supervising staff this year for the first time. And it's a bit freaky to be honest (I'm calling it "ministry menopause," or is it "minipause?"). And yet the thing that not staffing an outreach table, or making fliers, or filling out forms, has allowed me to do is a whole lot of systematizing. And I love it. If I am an artist at all, it's in the area of creating and articulating systems that help make life and ministry work for myself and others. My sorta joke lately has been that I'm on a mission to "make the intuitive intentional." Kinda like Billy Beane and the rest of the A's front office.

Bottom line: if you are interested in a look inside the major league front office, or if, like me, you want to see what systematizing looks like, I highly recommend Moneyball. And, by the way, for a review of another Michael Lewis book, The Blind Side, check out what Jeremy has to say here.