Michael Lewis
Michael Lewis
Michael Monroe Lewisis an American non-fiction author and financial journalist. His bestselling books include Liar's Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Panic, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, and Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009. His most recent book, Flash Boys, which looked at the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 October 1960
CityNew Orleans, LA
CountryUnited States of America
It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.
Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.
There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.
There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?
The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.
The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.
Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
The sheer quantity of brain power that hurled itself voluntarily and quixotically into the search for new baseball knowledge was either exhilarating or depressing, depending on how you felt about baseball. The same intellectual resources might have cured the common cold, or put a man on Pluto.
Some coaches believed they could judge a player's performance simply by watching it. In this they were deeply mistaken. The naked eye was an inadequate tool for learning what you needed to know to evaluate baseball players and baseball games. Think about it. One absolutely cannot tell, by watching, the difference between a .300 hitter and a .275 hitter. The difference is one hit every two weeks. The difference between a good hitter and an average hitter is simply not visible-it is a matter of record
People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.
Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.
Bruce and I both put $50 in a bank account. That's how we started the company.
The A's are held to the standard of the Yankees in a funny kind of way. That if they don't win the World Series it is regarded as a failure.
What we've seen since the beginning of January is that the futures market is increasing the possibility of an oil price spike before the end of the year.