Before I get to my thoughts on this book which took me far too long to add to my reading stack, I want to talk about how awesome it is to get books for Christmas. I walked away with six things to read. That should, unfortunately, hold me through Easter at least. I wish I could read faster because I bought one interesting book after Christmas and have found a couple of more since.

One of the best parts of my Christmas bounty belies my support of local businesses, but is still really cool. My wife got me three books for my Kindle, but took advantage of the program which allows someone to purchase them as a gift and not show on on the device until Christmas Day. She gave me a note telling me about this, I went to my e-mail and clicked a button to download each book. Very cool.

I do wish it were a little more seamless – yeah, this is me complaining about the magic of books appearing on a wireless electronic device – so they just appeared the next time I turned on my wireless, but it’s not a big deal. I still try to support local bookstores and libraries when I can, but this experience was pretty fun.

One of those Kindle books was Moneyball, something I had talked about reading a bunch of times, but never got around to it. I had hoped to read it at the beach last summer, but the library didn’t have any copies available for the week I traveled. My nephew brought his copy, but I was already buried in my stack of books and didn’t pick up Michael Lewis’ book .

When I saw the movie recently, I knew I needed to change this. Luckily, my wife pays attention to me when I talk about things like this. When I tried to choose which book I would tackle first, I knew I had to knock this off my list once and for all. What a great decision.

I really get into the analytic aspect of sports. This comes from hours upon hours of playing Strat-o-Matic sports and trying to figure things out. While I generally loathe sports talk, I do enjoy the bits I can find where the announcers really examine what happens on the field instead of just yelling.

So I can relate to the quest Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta went on to find a better way of evaluating players. As someone who has, during my days as a reporter, suffered the glare of pro athletes because they think you’re not worthy to ask them certain questions, I can understand the motivation “outsiders” have when they want to prove the establishment wrong. As someone who watched the way Earl Weaver managed growing up, I wondered why more people didn’t choose their own path.

The book did a great job getting into the details of how and why the whole “moneyball” approach came about and actually worked. It also showed how dangerous emotion can be in athletic decisions, something we have known forever but don’t heed often enough.  This sounds silly now, but it’s easy to see why this book had such a huge impact. Not only did it cut to the heart of many of baseball’s problems, but Lewis wrote it in such an engaging and readable style that people had to pay attention.

Unless you’re an idiot like Joe Morgan or stubborn fool like Peter Angelos.

The Oakland A’s may have not won a World Series in the early days of Beane’s strategy, but his outlook undeniably changed baseball. His critics point to Oakland’s declining success since the early 2000s, but a lot of that is because other teams have caught on and the market correction made it harder for the A’s to get the bargains they wanted.

Just take a look at the way Beane analyzed the 2002 amateur draft, a topic the book covers in great detail (and was understandably lost in the movie version). Maybe he just got lucky, but his perfect 20 and resulting picks have an amazing success rate. Jeremy Brown, the primary poster child for the strategy, may not have made an impact at the major league level, but he did continue to get on base at a pretty solid rate in the minors. He just didn’t seem to adjust as the pitching got better, but the things Beane and Depodesta saw in the big guy certainly did play out.

Billy Beane never professed to get everything right. He just said that other people who said they got things right may not see the whole picture. Since most people have started to adopt his approach in some way or another, their criticisms of how he did it don’t carry much weight with me. I just hope the next time someone writes a groundbreaking book about how someone has changed an entire sport, I don’t wait eight years to get in on the action.