Salary caps and sabermetrics do not seem suited for the silver screen but Moneyball entertained an audience for a couple of hours and recounted a reasonably true story. After star free agents Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane enters the 2001 off-season wondering how to win an unfair game. For two years, the Athletics had made the playoffs but lost to the New York Yankees, a team with almost four times the financial resources. Unlike Michael Lewis’ book – which accurately describes the Oakland front office and the philosophy which had been in …
Prequel to the Big Short
Before he wrote The Big Short and Moneyball, before Sandra Bulloch saw The Blind Side, Michael Lewis published Liar’s Poker, a sometimes cynical, mostly thankful, and somewhat prescient account of his three years at Salomon Brothers. Having read Lewis’ book about the recent financial meltdown, I could not help but wonder “doesn’t anyone learn from experience?” as I saw eerie similarities in a book written two decades earlier. Based on this book, traders at Salomon Brothers seemed supercilious, short-sighted, and superficial. They may have made a great deal of money in the past but very little time was devoted to …
The Big Short
When people think they know more than they actually do, the potential for massive mistakes multiplies. Or, as outlined in The Big Short by Michael Lewis, there is a potential for absolutely astronomical errors. Following the mantra that “Greed is Good,” Wall Street banks create securities out of thin air and sell them to others who can neither calculate risk correctly nor price it appropriately. Some firms take positions against what they are selling to their customers as conflicts of interest abound. The oversight of ratings agencies and the United States Treasury is entirely absent. Incompetence and ignorance are mixed …
Basketball≠Moneyball?
A friend asked me to comment on this article, which was published by Michael Lewis in the New York Times. It is related to this article, published on by Howard Bryant on ESPN.com. The first article discusses how teams use statistics to assess performances. There are definitely methods to evaluate effectiveness beyond points, rebounds, steals, blocks, and assists. Plus/Minus, Player Efficiency Ratings, Points-Created, and Win-Shares all offer a more balanced approach. Billy Beane decided to eschew batting average in favour of on-base plus slugging percentage and other statistics, which was catalogued in Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball. Given the success that …
The Blind Side
Michael Lewis’ latest novel, The Blind Side, is part-sport, part-economics, part-psychology, and part-sociology. While writing an article about his high school baseball coach that was published as the novella Coach, he re-connected with teammate Sean Tuohy, who was adopting a 6-5, 350 pound offensive lineman who played left guard for the Briarcrest Christian School football team that Tuohy coached. That student-athlete, Michael Oher, became a living example of how sport and money have become intertwined while the rich and poor and black and white have grown apart. At the beginning of the book, Oher is a marginal student and physical …