MoneyballANDStumbling on Wins

Michael Lewis          W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. (movie tie-in edition)
 &
David J. Berri and Martin B. Schmidt          FT Press, 2010.


 3.5 / 5.0 

 2.0 / 5.0 

I decided to review these books together since Stumbling on Wins and other books in the sports economics genre are being published on the coattails of Moneyball's success.

Before I read SoW, I would have characterized Moneyball as an economics book with a few stories thrown in. After finding SoW wears that mantle perfectly, I began to see what makes Moneyball a different and much better read.

Professional sports are about money. This is not really news and it is not surprising when both books admit this up front. What is startling and what the two books reveal is that the people holding that money make decisions based on almost anything but solid, economic logic. SoW covers or I should say, uncovers the NBA, NFL, NHL and NCAA. (It also has a short chapter on MLB which is basically a summary of Michael Lewis' Moneyball). Lewis' book focuses on Major League Baseball and specifically the Oakland A's. Both books explore the inefficiencies of professional sports. How they do it, though, makes all the difference.

SoW was written by two economists and contains insights about the decision making of coaches, managers and general managers around the different leagues. They point out, with page after page of tables full of data, how NBA coaches are generally the same quality, how it's hard to choose a franchise player for your NFL team and how Martin Brodeur just isn't exceptional. They even include appendices to explain all their various formulas. This is well documented stuff! I feel asleep several times reading this book.

The difference in the two is story. SoW tries to have stories. They go something like this: you remember 'X' and how in year 'Y' he did 'Z'? Well, N^g*H/g+j shows why that happened. With Moneyball we get the life of never-was baseball star turned all-the-rage baseball GM Billy Beane. We get the drool-inducing Nick Swisher, the big butted catcher Jeremy Brown, and  the old crotchety scouts duking it out with the Ivy-league spreadsheet wizards. In SoW we get the formulas that show people make decisions with their intuition instead of their cognition. In Moneyball we see the struggle between guts and brains turn into fun and wins in a West coast locker room full of misfits. It makes all the difference.