It is incomprehensible that more than twenty years had to pass before a Spanish publisher finally dared to translate ‘Moneyball’. Especially because the book was made into a film, with Brad Pitt as the protagonist, because the film was included in the Oscars and because the author of the book is Michael Lewis (Louisiana, 1960), the same one who signed ‘The Big Short’, one one of the best titles to understand the financial crash of 2008 and the origin of another successful film. It’s okay that ‘Moneyball’ is a non-fiction book, and it is already known that the reportage genre sells poorly around here; Well, the sport that is covered is baseball, very American… but this is what the best non-fiction is about: making an apparently foreign topic become exciting. ‘Moneyball’, in this sense, is a magnificent book. Trained as a financial journalist and contributor to such famous firms as ‘The New Yorker’ or ‘Vanity Fair’, Lewis came to this story when he realized that there was a team with a small budget. competing with the best. Like when Sevilla dared to look Real Madrid or Barcelona in the eyes in national football, but in baseball. Why do teams win? How could the Oakland Athletics, one of the poorest in the league, win so many games? Lewis found the answer in the statistics, and specifically in the figure of Billy Beane, a young promise who remained an average player and who was recycled as general manager of the Oakland team. In this position he made the revolution: “Seeing baseball from an objective point of view, something that was not a compendium of subjective opinions,” in his own words. The way to avoid repeating the mistake that longtime scouts made with him was to hand over all of a team’s sports planning to statistics. ‘Moneyball’ Author Michael Lewis Translation David Paradela Editorial Peninsula, 2025 Number of pages 400 Price 20, 90 euros’Moneyball. The art of winning against everything is an account of this paradigm shift, which consists of trusting a team’s entire sports planning to statistics. If the computer shows that one type of play has more impact on victory than others, you bet on that one, and it doesn’t matter what the coach thinks. The same with signings. On computers, baseball becomes a collection of derivatives: “A parallel world in which players could be evaluated better than in the real world,” Lewis writes. “Whatever happens in a baseball game, it has happened thousands of times before.” Over time, this logic implemented at the beginning of the century was extended, also successfully, to other teams, and to other sports such as basketball, but at first there were obvious reservations. There still are. Lewis dedicates an exemplary chronicle to the biography of this idea: Billy Beane’s beginnings as a player, his frustrated career, his first statistical approaches to the game, the decisive bet of a general manager, his reluctance, the conversion of chubby players into stars. , Oakland’s winning record… Good old new journalism.
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