Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. What these numbers prove is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Lewis first looks to all the logical places-the front offices of major league teams, the coaches, the minds of brilliant players-but discovers the real jackpot is a cache of numbers?numbers!?collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers, and physics professors. In a quest to discover the answer, Michael Lewis delivers not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). How did one of the poorest teams in baseball win so many games? Just before the 2002 season opens, the Oakland Athletics must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players and is written off by just about everyone-but then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. One of GQ's 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century Michael Lewis’s instant classic may be “the most influential book on sports ever written” (People), but “you need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of thoughts about it” (Janet Maslin, New York Times).
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