Moneyball Study Guide

Michael Lewis studied art history at Princeton, and later worked for an art dealer. In 1985, he received an M.A. in economics from the London School of Economics, and afterwards worked for an investment firm. In the late 1980s, Lewis became a financial journalist. In 1989, he published his first book, Liar’s Poker, about the history of mortgage-backed bonds. Since the 90s, Lewis has written articles for a variety of different publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and Slate. His other books include The Blind Side (2006), The Big Short (2010), Flash Boys (2014), and, most recently, The Undoing Project (2016), all of which explore a little-understood sector of statistics or economics. Lewis lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and three children.

While Moneyball doesn’t discuss many historical events, one important cultural event to which it alludes is the rise of the era of personal computers. Beginning in the 1970s, computers changed from an esoteric technology, available only to scientists and professional researchers, to a relatively affordable technology, available to much of the American populace. As a result of the rise of personal computing, average Americans had access to previously unavailable quantities of baseball statistics and could research these statistics on their own time. The growing availability of the Internet in the 1990s further accelerated the process by which average sports fans could study the mathematics and statistics of the game and draw their own conclusions about it.

Moneyball bears comparison with several other nonfiction books published in the 2000s, which applied statistics and esoteric math to unlikely fields of human endeavor. Books of this kind include Freakanomics (2005) by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, The Tipping Point (2000) by Malcolm Gladwell, and The Black Swan (2007) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Moneyball also praises the baseball journalism of Bill James, who, for many years, self-published an annual Bill James Baseball Abstract, and who is often credited with pioneering a scientific, statistics-heavy approach to baseball.