The deep secrets of winning baseball

During the 1980’s Bill James produced annual volumes of a series he called his Baseball Abstract. Well-written, occasionally funny, microscopic analyses of players, teams, and baseball statistics, the series provided the grounds for revolutionizing the evaluation of players and baseball strategy. Yet the books seemed to produce remarkably little impact on the real world of professional baseball. (I am indebted to Rocket Man for helping me decipher the gist of each year’s volume during the ’80s; I simply couldn’t retain what I read each night.)
Now selling at a bookstore near you is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. I haven’t read the book, but Mark Gerson’s entertaining review of the book in the current issue of the Weekly Standard suggests that the wisdom of Bill James is slowly seeping into professional baseball: “Home run.”