Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game Quotes
"Anyone who cares about baseball must read it."
"This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame."
"An extraordinary job of reporting and writing."
"He can think, joke, characterize, write for average readers and write for powerful decision makers."
"Engaging, informative and deliciously contrarian."
"The raw disparities meant that only the rich teams could afford the best players."
"In professional baseball it still matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it."
"The least you could spend on a twenty-five-man team was $5 million."
"A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about the possibilities—and the limits—of reason in human affairs."
"The story is about professional baseball and the people who play it."
"He’d laugh at me. There was no question that Billy was the best in the game."
"Every change he made was aimed more at preventing embarrassment than at achieving success."
"Inside the batter’s box he struggled to adapt."
"Inside a batter’s box he had to be perfectly still."
"Inside baseball, among the older men, that was the general consensus: Billy Beane’s failure was not physical but mental."
"What matters isn't whether I just struck out. What matters is that I behave impeccably when I compete."
"If you never did it, it wasn’t there to begin with."
"Nobody says, ‘I quit as a player. I want to be an advance scout.’"
"You have $40 million to spend on twenty-five baseball players. Your opponent has already spent $126 million on its own twenty-five players, and holds perhaps another $100 million in reserve. What do you do with your forty million to avoid humiliating defeat?"
"It’s not what happened, it’s how our guy approached it."
"We don’t get the guys who are perfect. There has to be something wrong with them for them to get to us."
"Baseball is a war of attrition, and what’s being attrited is pitchers’ arms."
"The important thing is not to recreate the individual. The important thing is to recreate the aggregate."
"What gets me really excited about a guy is when he has warts, and everyone knows he has warts, and the warts just don’t matter."
"If we win ninety-five games and don’t make the play-offs, we’re fine with that."
"The variance between the best and worst fielders on the outcome of a game is a lot smaller than the variance between the best hitters and the worst hitters."
"The thing that Bill James did that we try to do, is that he asked the question why."
"What we want to see is: at an age of physical decline does the skill maintain its level, even when a player no longer has the physical ability to exploit it?"
"Justice isn’t one man, Paul says. He’s a type: an aging slugger of a particular sort."
"Much of his power was now gone. His new Oakland teammates witnessed his dissipation up close."
"The players were simply aware that some higher power guided their actions."
"The A’s front office didn’t care. They sought only to milk the last few ounces of superior on-base percentage out of David Justice before he expired."
"You must desperately need to see what you cannot bear to see."
"The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired."
"Mecir’s strange delivery...put an unusually violent spin on his screwball."
"The Oakland A’s are baseball’s answer to the Island of Misfit Toys."
"Trading players wasn’t any different from trading stocks and bonds. A trader with better information could make a killing."
"His constant chatter was a way of keeping tabs on the body of information critical to his trading success."
"In all of this Billy Beane was bound to fail a lot more than he succeeded: but he didn’t mind! The failure wasn’t public; the success it led to was."
"The only question was: how much could he get for him?"
"The good news is you’ve got Rincon. The bad news is you gotta release Magnante."
"You can judge a pitcher’s performance objectively, by what he had accomplished."
"If he had those identical stats in Triple-A but he threw ninety-four, there is no way they’d have traded him."
"They either keep everything or get rid of everything, and they rarely do the latter."
"Pitchers were like writers in another way, too: their output was harder than it should have been to predict."
"He has zero self-confidence. The only way I can explain it is that I’m not the guy who throws ninety-five miles an hour."
"I'm a believer, too. I just happen to believe in the power of the ground ball."
"If you’re playing away, you just pretend they are cheering for you."
"Relievers are like volatile stocks. They’re the one asset you need to watch closely, and trade for quick profits."
"Every form of strength covers one weakness and creates another, and therefore every form of strength is also a form of weakness and every weakness a strength."
"The balance of strategies always favors the team which is behind."
"Psychology tends to pull the winners down and push the losers upwards."
"People who want very badly to win, and to be seen to have won, enjoy a tactical advantage over people who don’t."
"My shit doesn’t work in the play-offs. My job is to get us to the play-offs. What happens after that is fucking luck."
"Base-stealing. That’s the one thing everyone points to that we do. Or don’t. So when we lose, that’s why."
"The baseball season is structured to mock reason."