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In the 2002 season, the nation's lowest-salaried Major League Baseball team put together a 20-game winning streak, setting a new American League record. The team began that same season with 11 losses in row. What happened between is the stuff of "Moneyball," a smart, intense and moving film that isn't so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics.

I walked in knowing what the movie was about, but unprepared for its intelligence and depth. It centers on the character of the Oakland Athletics' general manager Billy Beane ( Brad Pitt ), who after a bad start as a MLB player, moved over to management and was driven by his hatred of losing. In his previous season, he'd taken the A's to the World Series, only to have them lose and see their best three players hired away by richer teams offering much bigger salaries.

Faced with rebuilding the team at bargain basement prices, Beane became persuaded by the theories of Peter Brand ( Jonah Hill ), a nerdy recent Yale graduate who crunched numbers to arrive at a strict cost-benefit analysis of baseball players.

He persuaded Beane that he should hire based on key performance statistics that pointed to undervalued players. Together, they assembled a team that seemed foolhardy at first, but during the course of an agonizing season, proved itself the biggest bargain in baseball.

"Peter Brand" is based on people described in the 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis . Jonah Hill's performance is understated and fascinating; a pudgy kid who has never played a baseball game in his life, Peter has analyzed decades of baseball stats to prove that game-winning qualities are not always the ones veteran scouts look for. He's shy and quiet, advancing his theories tentatively but with firm certainty; he's an amusing contrast with the team's grizzled, tobacco-chewing scouts — who are looking for all the wrong things, Brand argues.

Pitt's Billy Beane is an inward and lonely man, recovering from a failed marriage and doting on his daughter, Casey ( Kerris Dorsey ). He's so driven, he can't bear to watch a game in the stadium, and sometimes drives aimlessly while listening to it on the radio. He's fully aware that if he follows his theories for the full season and they fail, that will make him unemployable. He faces fierce opposition from his bullet-headed team manager, Art Howe ( Philip Seymour Hoffman ), who feels his experience is being insulted by a manager mesmerized by some half-baked Ivy League theorist.

The director is Bennett Miller , who also directed Hoffman in the title role of the radically different " Capote ." "Moneyball" is not a traditional sports movie, and indeed should be just as gripping for non-sports fans. It's not a series of Big Games. When it goes to the field, it's for well-chosen crucial moments. Its essence is in terse, brainy dialogue by the two accomplished screenwriters Aaron Sorkin (" The Social Network ") and Steven Zaillian (" Gangs of New York "). As in "The Social Network," abstract discussions reflect deep emotional conflicts. There are a lot of laughs, but only one or two are inspired by lines intended to be funny. Instead, our laughter comes from recognition, an awareness of irony, an appreciation of perfect zingers — and, best of all, insights into human nature.

This is really a movie about business. None of the individual players have major roles. The drama all happens in the mind of a general manager and his numbers guy. They bet against tradition and in favor of numerical analysis. That goes against a century of baseball history, although for all of those years, fans have thumbed through their baseball almanacs and issued mind-numbing statistical theories on talk shows. What the numbers crunchers demonstrated is that a computer can assemble a team better than human instinct.

That's melancholy, but then this is a melancholy movie. Pitt has some soul-baring scenes with Jonah Hill in which he wonders what it all means, anyway. It doesn't matter if you have a 20-game winning streak. All that matters is that you win the last game of the season. Even the players are merely inventory, and there are dramatic moments here of players being traded or moved down to the minors. Baseball is a business. Only we fans love it as a game.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Moneyball (2011)

Rated PG-13 for some strong language

133 minutes

Robin Wright as Sharon

Kerris Dorsey as Casey

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Art Howe

Chris Pratt as Scott

Stephen Bishop as David Justice

Brad Pitt as Billy Beane

Jonah Hill as Peter Brand

Directed by

• Bennett Miller
• Aaron Sorkin
• Steven Zaillian

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Commentary and Critiques for the New “Moneyball” Movie

The impending release on Friday, September 23, 2011, of the Moneyball movie , based on the 2003 book of the same name by author Michael Lewis, seems to be one of the most anticipated baseball films in years. The controversial chronicling of the Oakland A’s under general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt in the movie) was called “the single most influential baseball book ever” by SABR member Rob Neyer. The story of the Beane front office and its reliance on outside-the-box statistical analysis and other sabermetric tools has drawn even greater scrutiny among baseball fans who discuss every day the best ways to evaluate player and team performances.

James is still asking relevant questions today at billjamesonline.com , and so are legions of his disciples such as Rob Neyer, baseball editor at SB Nation (who detailed his personal connections to the Moneyball story Friday); Phil Birnbaum, who edits the SABR Statistical Analysis Committee newsletter, “By the Numbers”, and writes at Sabermetric Research ; and all the great writers at Baseball Analysts , Baseball Prospectus , Beyond the Box Score , FanGraphs , The Book , The Hardball Times and other sites. See our SABR Blog Roll page for more sites focusing on sabermetrics and other baseball research.

Want a primer on sabermetrics? Check out the FanGraphs Library for down-to-earth explanations of advanced metrics such as wOBA (weighted on-base average), FIP (fielding-independent pitching) and WAR (wins above replacement), written by Steve Slowinski. SABR members can also read cutting-edge articles on statistical analysis in every issue of the Baseball Research Journal , such as “The Many Flavors of DIPS: A History and Overview” , by Dan Basco and Michael Davies. 

As Moneyball premieres nationwide, we’re linking to various interviews and reviews we think you’ll find interesting as you get set to watch the film.

Members of the Halsey Hall Chapter in the Twin Cities — where we’ll be for SABR 42 next summer — watched Moneyball together on Friday night in Roseville, Minnesota. Here’s a photo of their group .

Former A’s designated hitter Scott Hatteberg , who hit the game-ending home run in Oakland’s record-setting 20th consecutive win on September 4, 2002, one of the climatic scenes in the film, weighs in on his portrayal by actor Chris Pratt at BaseballProspectus.com :

“It was just surreal watching someone playing me in a movie. You wonder what you’re going to look like once the movie is finished, but Chris was great. He’s a right-handed hitter and I hit left-handed, but he worked at it and wound up having a pretty good lefty swing. He was able to mimic my bow-legged walk and he did a great job of playing an unsure, slew-footed guy trying to learn how to play first base, which is exactly what I was when I came to the A’s. It was pretty ugly at first, and scenes in the movie where I keep misplaying balls are not exaggerated.”

Former A’s pitching coach Rick Peterson , now an advisor at Bloomberg Sports, talks about how more teams have embraced technology at The Big Lead :

“It’s amazing how quickly technology has advance the game, almost like what people were doing with the first big bulky cell phones and looking at where we are today with smart phones. What we have today is so user friendly that players can adapt very quickly, because technology is part of their life. They understand, they link data with video and as a result things can be done so much quicker in terms of player analysis. It is not much different from the business world overall, where now technology drives everything. We may have been the first club in, but now even what we were doing then pales in comparison to what teams can do today.”

Dan Szymborski , editor-in-chief at Baseball Think Factory and the inventor of the ZIPS fielding projection system, is interviewed by SABR member Graham Womack at Baseball Past and Present :

“I know Keith Law [of ESPN.com] wasn’t too thrilled with it, but my stance on it is: This is it. This is the sabermetric movie. There’s not going to be another one, so even if it’s not completely faithful, if there’s dramatic license and all that, this is a sabermetrics movie, so we might as well enjoy it. It’s not like they’re going to have The Bill James Story or any of these guys. I mean, they’re great guys, but none of us are going to have movies except for this. And essentially, one of the most notorious/famous users of statistics, Billy Beane, I mean he’s played by Brad Pitt, in a movie, about sabermetrics. This is it, guys.”

Looking back at Moneyball , the book

Speaking of Keith Law, the former Blue Jays analyst’s negative review of Moneyball (“an absolute mess of a film”) caused a kerfuffle around the blogosphere last week when author Michael Lewis responded to his claims that the story overexaggerated Law’s bias against traditional scouting. But, as the pseudonymous writer The Common Man at The Platoon Advantage points out , sabermetrics has evolved quite a bit since the Moneyball book first came out:

“It was published eight years ago, in 2003, which probably means the interviews Lewis did to write it were conducted in 2002. That’s practically a lifetime when it comes to baseball and the statistical revolution. Statheads in both baseball’s front offices and in the online writing community have grown significantly since those bad old days where scouts were denigrated, spreadsheets worshipped as golden idols, and on-base percentage was the only thing that mattered. … [Law has] seen that good scouting has incredible value to an organization and can be used in tandem with numbers and figures to get a complete picture of a player or an organization. Those who reject either stats or scouting as useless are dinosaurs who can’t help but be lapped by their more flexible rivals. What’s amazing is that Lewis’ rigidity is completely counter to the thesis that most of us seem to take from his seminal work in Moneyball , for organizations to zig when others zag, to find undervalued resources, and to exploit every advantage over a competitor in order to maintain their competitive advantage.  

Justin Bopp at Beyond the Box Score also warns of taking Beane’s approach in Moneyball as sabermetric gospel now that the book is eight years old:

“When Moneyball was released, on base percentage still wasn’t that widely used to describe players conversationally, now … I’m pretty sure most of us think about players as a triple slash. .300/.400/.500. That’s a great player. But it’s not just us that changed the way we think, the big money clubs took notice and changed what they valued as well. Naturally, the market on “guys that get on base” shrank and prices went up. What remains, I believe, is a ghost of an idea victim to the teams with more money to see it through. If Moneyball was the launching point of low salary clubs competing using under-valued skill sets, then the sabermetric revolution has been the launching point to ensure that those that have both money and brains remain at the top of the standings throughout. I’m not sure if the book or even the concept of undervalued talent is still relevant, honestly.

Joe Sheehan at Sports Illustrated writes that the most lasting legacy of Moneyball is that people who haven’t played professional baseball now feel they can make a contribution within front offices:

It’s because of Moneyball and the ideas within that every team has statistical analysts, many drawn from the ranks of Prospectus alums, many my own friends and former colleagues. Keith Law went to the Blue Jays and came back to media. Woolner and Fox were contributors to the surprising early success this year of the Indians and Pirates, respectively. Chaim Bloom and James Click are in the Rays’ front office. Outside of Prospectus, there’s Mitchell Lichtman and Ron Shandler and “Tom Tango” and many other smart guys whose intelligence about the game we love has been tapped because of the path blazed by DePodesta, who himself advanced to GM of the Dodgers and helped build division winners in Los Angeles before being scapegoated by an owner desperate to curry favor with the craven local media.

Over at Baseball Nation, Rob Neyer has posted links to several other well-written profiles of the A’s, Beane, Bill James and Moneyball that are worth your time.

Reviews of Moneyball , the film

Here are some more reviews of Moneyball , which premieres today (Friday, September 23):  

Aaron Gleeman at Hardball Talk :

“I’ve read Michael Lewis’ book twice and consider it some of the best, most important baseball writing of all time, but I was never quite sure how exactly it could be turned into a compelling narrative film. And I’m still not sure, but I do know that it was definitely an enjoyable two hours. As a hardcore baseball fan who paid close attention to Billy Beane and the A’s during the period portrayed in the film there were a lot of specifics that stood out as questionable, particularly in terms of the movie’s time lines and exaggerated portrayals of certain characters (although the book is guilty of the latter as well). However, what the movie lacked in historical accuracy it made up for in witty dialogue, likable characters, and a surprising amount of humor.”

David Wade at The Hardball Times :

Since so many viewers will bring a tremendous amount of subject material knowledge into the theater with them—sort of like a professor specializing in colonial American history sitting down to watch The Patriot —they’re going to have some issues with the film. … It’s a fair adaptation of the book, and I suppose that means those who found Lewis’ borderline deification of A’s general manager Billy Beane aggravating in the text shouldn’t be surprised if they come away with the same feeling from the movie.

Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times :

“ Moneyball is not a traditional sports movie, and indeed should be just as gripping for non-sports fans. It’s not a series of Big Games. When it goes to the field, it’s for well-chosen crucial moments. … There are a lot of laughs, but only one or two are inspired by lines intended to be funny. Instead, our laughter comes from recognition, an awareness of irony, an appreciation of perfect zingers — and, best of all, insights into human nature. This is really a movie about business. None of the individual players have major roles. The drama all happens in the mind of a general manager and his numbers guy.”

Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated :

“Authenticity and entertainment don’t often go well together. And this, I think, was the great challenge of Moneyball — perhaps even the unwinnable challenge. They were making a movie largely about baseball statistics, for crying out loud, but they were making it with a star-studded Hollywood cast (Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt and Robin Wright, who is in the movie for about 48 seconds and got considerably less screen time than the Rincon deal), a terrific director (Bennett Miller, who did Capote), and an incredible writing team (Aaron Sorkin wrote “The Social Network” and Steven Zaillian wrote “Schindler’s List” among others). They were making a Brad Pitt movie without a love interest, a baseball movie without a climactic home run, a buddy movie about on-base percentage and a big Hollywood movie about a general manager who has never led his team to the World Series. … I have to admit, seeing it was one of the strangest movie experiences of my life.”

Author and SABR member Ron Kaplan has also posted many newspaper reviews of Moneyball on his site, “Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf”.

For more reviews by SABR members, click here .

— Compiled by Jacob Pomrenke

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The 10 Most Underrated Sci-Fi Mysteries of the 21st Century, Ranked

Sean connery's most underrated performance is in this gritty neo-noir thriller, the 10 best anime movies of the '80s, ranked.

[ This review is a re-print of my review from the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival ]

The joy one gets from going to a baseball game is an intangible. You can keep the foul ball you caught in the stands or the souvenir cap you got at the gate, but there's no quantifying the thrill of seeing a walk-off home-run or watching a player make a diving catch or seeing a pitcher strike out the batter with bases loaded. Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) presented an anathema to the intangible by trying to quantify every play and every player. The uproar against his plan was tremendous and oblivious. The game had already been quantified in dollars, and the A's didn't have much of those. What they did have was a willingness to rethink an unfair business to so they could have a shot at the championship. Bennett Miller's adaptation of Michael Lewis' Moneyball takes the interesting ideas presented in the book and transforms them into a funny, dramatic, and captivating tale that can hold competing ideas simultaneously.

In 2001, the A's reached the American League Division Series but were defeated by the New York Yankees. The A's had a payroll of $38 million to New York's $114 million. The A's also had star players Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen, all of who went into free agency at the end of the season and would garner a price tag out of the Atheletics' budget. Unable to get more money and desperate to win, Beane discovers Yale economics graduate Peter Brandt (Jonah Hill) and learns that every team in baseball is wasting their cash. Too much has been placed on intangibles like looks, a good swing, and deceptive statistics like runs-batted-in and even home runs. On-Base Percentage is everything because runs generate wins and wins are everything.

Unable to compete under conventional means and with nothing to lose except his job and his reputation, Beane takes a chance on statistics-based-baseball (popularly known as Sabermetrics). Beane also has a personal reason in this radical concept since he was a former baseball prodigy who looked like a hall-of-famer and instead flamed out. Given a false sense of his own worth, Beane wants to see value on paper and never again fall for the same deceptions. As Beane and Brandt's new strategy struggles in the face of opposition from manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), skeptical scouts, and the ire of every single sports pundit, the two risk everything on players who have tweaked nerves, funny pitch delivery, and old legs.

Moneyball skillfully plays with the question of how baseball can remain fun if it's boiled down to a science. If everything is just a statistic, and the statistics celebrating walks while ruling out staples like base-stealing and bunting, then how much is left for us to enjoy? Doesn't science remove the poetry of a game when a batter's stance and poise is irrelevant when compared to how many walks he draws? Those questions may bother a fan, but Billy Beane needs to win not just for his career but to change the game in way he never could as a player. Moneyball is a sports underdog story presented in a more thoughtful manner than simply "Must win championship."

Miller does a tremendous job taking complicated ideas and delivers them in an easily-accessible drama. Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin's script distills the ideas and bullet points of Lewis' book and turns them into charming quips and shorthand that will work for baseball fans and non-fans alike. More impressive is that Miller doesn't rely on graphics or playful visual aids to explain the stats and why they matter. Sharp, succinct dialogue and some close-ups on computer monitors is all he needs to make his point. There's enough confidence in the story, the themes, the humor, and the performances that big visual flourishes like numbers running across the screen or expensive animated graphics are unnecessary. Moneyball is only frustrating when it betrays its self-assured tone and drags in the middle when the story drives home the point that the baseball establishment thinks Beane is a lunatic, and a cloying relationship between Beane and his daughter where she writes him a song to cheer him up. It certainly doesn't need a character at the end summing up the result of Beane's experiment.

But these shortcomings aren't to the greater detriment of the picture. Moneyball keeps cool even when it comes to its complicated climax and the A's are going for the longest winning-streak in major league history. It's an unexpected crystallization of how statistics don't kill our enjoyment of baseball. If Beane and Brandt were truly heartless stat-hounds, the streak would be meaningless to them as would a championship beyond increased revenues to buy more players. Beane may be able to fool himself that he doesn't care about championship rings or win-streaks or anything beyond proving his point, but he's as excited as the rest of us when he watches Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), a washed-up catcher turned first basemen that every other team had given up on, comes to the plate.

Science may beat out superstition but that doesn't mean it destroys awe or excitement. Sure, "Casey at the Bat" would lose some of its poetic power if "Mighty Casey has struck out" was changed to "Mighty Casey struck out because he didn't realize he was statistically more likely to hit pitches that were up-and-in than down-and-away." But intangibles can't be destroyed by statistics. Does an Athletics fan feel less joy if a game-winning home run comes off the bat of Scott Hatteberg rather than a Jason Giambi? Is a strikeout any less of a victory if it comes off the arm of Chad Bradford rather than Jason Isringhausen? Science doesn't remove mystique and it doesn't diminish a victory. It just means you don't write off a hitter if he has an unattractive girlfriend and you certainly don't write off Moneyball because you think you don't like sports movies. It's much more than another underdog story (although I don't have the stats to prove it).

• Entertainment

Moneyball Review

25 Nov 2011

133 minutes

There are many marks that a great sports movie has to hit. They’re not even really clichés, just essential parts without which the movie will not work. There must be an underdog for whom to root. There must be at least one game in which it seems like the central team will lose everything, but then they claw it back. Similarly, there must be a game in which they seem to have things sewn up and then it all goes wrong. There must be a cocky player who gets knocked down to size. There must be a bit of a speech in the locker room. You could take those out for originality’s sake, but your film will be less satisfying for it. Moneyball has all these things, but what makes it particularly interesting is that it largely lacks something on which most sports movies rely: sport.

Moneyball isn’t a movie about what happens on the pitch; it’s about what happens off it. It’s about an attempt not to win the big prize, but to change everything, to leave behind not a packed trophy cabinet but a legacy. Brad Pitt is Billy Beane (a name so aw-shucks trite that it can only have been real), the general manager of the Oakland A’s, a team with a history of never quite making history. With a comparatively tiny budget, he keeps losing his best players and can’t afford to buy more. But in the middle of a failed negotiation to buy someone cheap from another team, he happens across owlish young analyst Peter Brand (a smartly underplaying Jonah Hill) who calculates the value of players not according to their ability to catch/run/hit a ball three states, but on their ability to just get on base and therefore increase the likelihood of runs. With Brand’s intricate formulas and big charts, the pair set to piecing together a team of unfancied players who have various defects but enough complementary skills to make a great team, even if they are not a team of great players. They are the broken biscuits of baseball.

We don’t really get to know any of these team members especially well, because they don’t really matter. We meet one, to establish that Beane’s little experiment is changing some lives for the better, but their personal triumphs aren’t important, to the point that we barely see them play. What is important is whether Beane and Brand’s gamble is working, whether they can prove to the numerous old men of the game — shown in a number of excellently cranky scenes of Pitt around the table with his ancient advisors — that new thinking can work. That’s not really the stuff of sports movie glory. How can you have the catharsis of the win without getting right into the game? But that comes from Beane, a former player who never fulfilled his potential, finding another way to leave his mark. It’s a movie about second chances and showing that your obvious skills are not necessarily your greatest gifts.

Making stats not just interesting but exciting is a hugely difficult task — there are few things duller than graphs and PowerPoints. You don’t punch the air because a formula turned out to be correct. But the script, by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, digs into the emotion and determination of the two men. Sorkin can whittle a line like few other writers but he can tend towards making his characters talk like absolutely everybody’s listening. In Moneyball it’s dialled down; the wit more throwaway than Sorkin is usually given to. It lightens the whole film, and the very best moments are not defined by their dialogue but their flow. The film’s stand-out scene comes as Beane negotiates — almost bluffs — his way through a deal across three different clubs and three different phones. He starts out with absolutely nothing, but by knowing when to speak and when to shut up he comes out on top. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Beane and why he’s the team you will to win through the film: he will battle his way out of every corner, flinging out charm and bravado until he gets his way. You’re cheering him to victory in the dying seconds.

Pitt has stuck with this movie through several directors (Steven Soderbergh and Devil Wears Prada director David Frankel both came close to making it) and several years of studio foot-shuffling. His persistence has paid dividends with what will likely be one of his most enduring roles. His almost goofy charm keeps Beane from being unsympathetically cocky, always a risk with characters with such a dick-waving job. The direction of Bennett Miller (Capote) is efficient and judicious rather than dazzling but lets the innate quality of his constituent parts shine. He’s headed a complicated movie about the science of sport and made what is, for all its lack of action on the diamond, the most uplifting, exciting sports movie since Friday Night Lights.

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Michael Lewis

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In the 1980s, there was a tremendously talented high school baseball player named Billy Beane . Talent scouts from professional baseball teams would come to watch Billy’s high school games and they told him that soon he’d be a world-class player. When Billy graduated, he was offered a contract with the Mets; after some uncertainty, he signed.

But after Billy became a player for the Mets, he seemed to lose his talent. Overshadowed by his teammates, Billy became easily rattled. He lacked the focus necessary to succeed in pro baseball. Fed up with playing, Billy became a talent scout for the Oakland A’s and he eventually rose to become the general manager of the team. As general manager, Billy used a mathematical strategy for drafting and acquiring players, which would revolutionize the sport. Before 2002, the Oakland A’s, and some other teams, had used a limited mathematical approach to team management—however, 2002 marked the year when the Oakland A’s used the mathematical approach to a degree almost never seen before.

Around the same time that Billy was playing for the Mets, the baseball world was going through a series of changes. Baseball teams were becoming highly profitable, so that certain successful teams, such as the New York Yankees, had so much money that they could draft the most expensive and, often, the most talented players. At the same time, the 1980s marked the dawn of the sabermetrics era. A baseball fan named Bill James pioneered the idea that traditional sports statistics, such as batting averages, didn’t measure what they were supposed to measure, and instead painted an inaccurate picture of the sport. James argued that by studying statistical information closely, general managers could assemble a team of athletes who, contrary to traditional measures, would play a steady, consistent, disciplined game, and ultimately perform better than flashier, more obviously gifted ballplayers. In spite of James’s brilliance, his ideas didn’t really catch on with major league franchises, partly because baseball is a traditionalist sport, partly because of the anti-intellectual bias in baseball, and partly because coaches and managers didn’t want outsiders interfering with their actions.

As general of the Oakland A’s, one of the poorest teams in Major League Baseball, Billy Beane was unusual in that he’d seen first-hand why traditional recruitment strategies didn’t work. Billy himself had been a top prospect for the Mets, but he hadn’t lived up to his promise. In 2002, Billy made the decision to reform the player acquisition process. Instead of doing what most general managers do—listening to their team of talent scouts—Billy worked closely with his assistant, a statistics-minded man named Paul DePodesta . Paul argued that most baseball scouts were biased in favor of what they could see with their own eyes. He further argued that, by analyzing statistics about a player’s walks, on-base average (i.e., probability of getting on base, and not making an out, in any given at-bat), and other obscure information, general managers could acquire talented players whom other franchises didn’t think were worth anything. In so doing, Paul realized, the Oakland A’s could assemble one of the best teams in the league for much less money.

In 2002, Billy alienated his talent scouts by hiring a group of players whom other teams had largely ignored. One such player was Jeremy Brown , a heavy slow-moving fielder with an impressive on-base average. Billy and Paul supported drafting Jeremy, along with other unglamorous ballplayers whom the scouts had dismissed. In all, the Oakland A’s were able to draft more than a dozen of their top picks for the year—unheard of in Major League Baseball.

Billy applies sabermetrics to many different aspects of baseball management, not just the draft. Throughout the first half of the 2002 season, during which the Oakland A’s don’t do particularly well, he tries to “recreate” Jason Giambi , a talented player whom he was forced to let go after the 2001 season because the A’s could no longer afford him. Instead of trying to find another player with Giambi’s abilities, Billy focuses on “recreating the aggregate”—in other words, finding multiple players who, when put together, can match Giambi’s statistics as a baseman and a hitter. Billy uses techniques that Paul DePodesta has borrowed from the world of Wall Street, in effect treating Giambi as a set of statistics that can be matched with a bundle of “derivatives” taken from other players. One of the players Billy acquires to replace Giambi, an older player named David Justice , isn’t much of a hitter any longer, but he’s excellent at getting walks—therefore, he contributes to his team’s victory, albeit in a fairly unglamorous way.

Another player that Billy has acquired for the 2002 season is Scott Hatteberg . Hatteberg was already in the twilight of his career before he came to the Oakland A’s, and a bad accident had left him with almost no strength in his right arm. Nevertheless, Billy hires him because of his high on-base percentage and consistent hitting, playing him as a first baseman in order to get him at-bats.

Throughout the 2002 season, Billy continues trading players to other teams in the hopes of maximizing his own team’s success. He cleverly negotiates with multiple general managers of other franchises to acquire a talented player named Ricardo Rincon . To pay for Rincon, Beane pushes a veteran player, Mike Magnante , out of the big-league team for good—a piece of news that Magnante takes with quiet, weary acceptance.

Another important player whom the A’s have acquired for the 2002 season is the pitcher Chad Bradford . Bradford has had some ups and downs as a player, but Billy acquires him because he recognizes that Chad is a smart pitcher with good endurance. Chad is a textbook example of the A’s new approach to winning baseball: he looks nothing like a pro athlete, and he’s not particularly hard-throwing as a pitcher, but he has a wild, unconventional delivery that induces batters to hit mostly ground balls. This is an advantage because, statistically speaking, grounders are less likely to result in doubles, triples, or home runs.

In the second half of the 2002 season, the A’s win twenty straight games, a league record. They qualify for the playoffs , but lose against a far inferior team, the Minnesota Twins. Nevertheless, Billy and Paul have proven that general managers can use sabermetrics and economic thinking to create a powerful team. Other general managers, managers, and coaches come together and claim that Billy and Paul’s success is a fluke. However, Billy is offered a contract to manage the Boston Red Sox—the highest-paying contract in baseball history—which suggests that the Major League Baseball world recognizes his talents. After much thought, Billy turns down the contract, claiming that, as a high school player, he made a big mistake by signing with the Mets, and he will never again make a decision that’s just about money. He remains general manager of the Oakland A’s with Paul at his side.

In the Epilogue, Jeremy Brown, playing in a big-league training camp, hits a home run without realizing it—perhaps symbolizing the Oakland A’s unlikely path to victory.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Book Review — Literary Analysis Of Moneyball: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game By Michael Lewis

Literary Analysis of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

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Works Cited:

• Coelho, P. (1988). The Alchemist. HarperOne.
• Coelho, P. (1997). Interview with Paulo Coelho. Retrieved from https://www.wired.com/1997/12/coelho/
• Dorji, S. (2017). An overview of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 7(10), 632-634.
• Galván, J. (2013). Revisiting The Alchemist : A pilgrimage in search of inspiration. Literacy Information and Computer Education Journal, 4(1), 241-244.
• Lao, J. (2019). The Alchemist’s impact on life and leadership. The Business and Management Review, 10(4), 26-32.
• Latham, J. R. (2018). The archetypal hero's journey in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. Humanities Bulletin, 1(1), 1-9.
• Murthy, K. S. R. (2010). Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: A metaphysical perspective. Indian Journal of Applied Research, 3(4), 24-25.
• Panksepp, J. (2004). Affective neuroscience and The Alchemist: The centrality of emotional feeling to human nature. Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 6(2), 163-166.
• Perricone, R. (2011). The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Oprah's Book Club. Retrieved from https://www.oprah.com/book/the-alchemist-by-paulo-coelho
• Wan, Y. (2016). The spiritual journey in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature, 5(6), 94-101.

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Michael Lewis

Lewis was in the room with the A's top management as they spent the summer of 2002 adding and subtracting players and he provides outstanding play-by-play. In the June player draft, Beane acquired nearly every prospect he coveted (few of whom were coveted by other teams) and at the July trading deadline he engaged in a tense battle of nerves to acquire a lefty reliever. Besides being one of the most insider accounts ever written about baseball, Moneyball is populated with fascinating characters. We meet Jeremy Brown, an overweight college catcher who most teams project to be a 15th round draft pick (Beane takes him in the first). Sidearm pitcher Chad Bradford is plucked from the White Sox triple-A club to be a key set-up man and catcher Scott Hatteberg is rebuilt as a first baseman. But the most interesting character is Beane himself. A speedy athletic can't-miss prospect who somehow missed, Beane reinvents himself as a front-office guru, relying on players completely unlike, say, Billy Beane. Lewis, one of the top nonfiction writers of his era ( Liar's Poker , The New New Thing ), offers highly accessible explanations of baseball stats and his roadmap of Beane's economic approach makes Moneyball an appealing reading experience for business people and sports fans alike. --John Moe

317 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

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It would seem to have almost nothing to do with their biceps muscles or fast-twitch fibers or even their vision, which, for most baseball players is largely the same. It would seem to have much more to do with the neural signals that impel our every movement. “It’s like saying people who can speak French very well have a very dexterous tongue,” John Krakauer, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “It would be the wrong place to assign the credit.”

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Written by Timothy Sexton

Moneyball is one of the greatest baseball books ever written. It has everything: a tragic hero straight out of ancient Greek drama, a classic story of tradition clashing with change, underdogs overachieving and overachievers coming undone, wild winning streaks and totally unexpected upsets and even the crazy guy who turns out to have been right all along. Not to mention baseball, baseball, baseball. There is just one thing wrong with Moneyball: it thinks it is a story about baseball in 2002.

If the story which is at the center of Moneyball —the amazing 2002 season of the Oakland A’s as they become the first team to put the sabermetrics theories of Bill James into actual practice—had been capable of taking place before the advent of statistical data analyzed on a computer capable of holding one’s lap—say around the closing of the 1960’s at the latest—it would be a story about baseball. Taking place in the 21st century, however, Major League Baseball is no longer just a popular game but spectacle entertainment. And that fact changes everything, including why “moneyball” will almost likely never really take over the process of building teams inside the General Manager’s office.

To engage an egregiously overused metaphor, what led to the narrative which is tracked inside the pages of this book is truly a perfect storm. It is a story of the right team hiring the General Manager who hired the right economist who graduated Harvard at the right time. Oh, and there is also the thunderous lighting strike that ignites the whole thing in the form of free agent Jason Giambi deciding to leave the A’s for the big money in Yankee Stadium.

If Billy Beane had been hired the Giants across the bay, Moneyball likely would never have been written. If Paul DePodesta had been hired by the A’s without Beane as GM, Moneyball would not have been written. If both Beane and DePodesta had both gone to work together for nearly any other team in the league, Moneyball probably would not have been written. Everything came together in a way that one would be tempted to say defied all statistical odds were it not for the fact that the entire book is about defying statistical odds. And yet, there is a part of what is admittedly a successful implementation of moneyball—if not entirely so—that seems curiously lacking in the tale.

Everybody in the book loves the game of baseball to the point that it becomes something purer that it really is. One gets the distinct feeling that it would be entirely possible to build a team within a pure fictionally constructed simulacrum of the league using the sabermetrics approach of James and very likely produce a more dominant team than most gamers do when playing out an entire season on an Xbox or Playstation. As anyone who has played a baseball game against the computer on those consoles knows, it is very easy to dominate team and individual statistics. In reality, not much difference likely existence between AI if building a team in a video game and building a team in that fictional construct of “moneyball.” What really unifies them is the one particularly important element which is missing from both.

Major League Baseball is not pure and decisions are made about who to sign and who to play which are based more on how many butts are in the seats than how many hits are in the box score. Imagine playing a baseball video game on the console of your choice in which your lineup was not entirely of your own choosing and which you were forced to insert a player into that lineup who is having a less impressive season than his backup? The star goes into a slump and suddenly his batting average is .225 while his backup has caught fire, knocking out fifteen homers in the last ten games. Which one are you going to start? No-brainer, right? Except that you can’t start the backup because the AI mandates that as the higher-paid gate attraction, the underperforming star must start. This situation is merely a replication of the reality of post- Catfish Hunter professional baseball. Whereas the game used to be such that a backup on fire gets the nod over the star in a slump, economics has changed the paradigm to where thirty-million-dollar player in a slump gets priority over the two-million-dollar hot hand.

This is the aspect of moneyball that is missing from Moneyball. Billy Beane and his team are playing the game of baseball as it existed before the game became spectacle; before it became perfectly acceptable to put a player on the field one-hundred-fifty games a year even if he’s not actually the best player in his position on the team. Baseball owners do not look kindly upon losing, but they look even less kindly upon fans staying home to watch the game on TV because they know the superstar is going to be sitting on the bench all night. The great irony of Moneyball is that it tells a story that is far more about the effects of the ball on the game than the effects of money on the game. That it is a story that hasn’t been relevant since the early 1970’s.

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Moneyball study guide contains a biography of Michael Lewis, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Developing Leadership and Management: Case Study on Moneyball

This essay about the film “Moneyball” explores innovative leadership and management strategies in the context of professional sports. It follows Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, as he revolutionizes player evaluation using data analytics, challenging traditional methods. Beane’s resilience, adaptability, and strategic partnerships with analytics experts exemplify effective leadership principles. The film illustrates the importance of innovative thinking, overcoming resistance to change, and managing strategic partnerships in achieving success. Beyond baseball, “Moneyball” offers valuable insights into leadership, analytics-driven decision-making, and organizational change applicable across various industries.

How it works

The 2011 film “Moneyball,” based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same name, serves as an excellent case study for exploring innovative leadership and management strategies in the face of adversity and limited resources. The story follows Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, as he attempts to assemble a competitive team despite a significantly lower budget than larger market teams. Beane’s approach, driven by data analytics, fundamentally challenges traditional methods of player valuation and team building in Major League Baseball (MLB).

At its core, “Moneyball” illustrates the power of innovative thinking in leadership and management. Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, is faced with the challenge of having only a fraction of the budget of baseball giants like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Traditional scouting methods would not suffice to build a winning team within these financial constraints. Beane’s solution? Leveraging underutilized statistical data to evaluate players differently from his competitors. This method, known as sabermetrics, prioritizes on-base percentage and other statistics over more traditional metrics like batting average and RBIs. Beane’s strategy is a departure from the norm, highlighting his role as a transformative leader willing to take calculated risks.

Beane’s leadership style in “Moneyball” is characterized by resilience and adaptability—qualities essential for any leader facing change or resistance. Throughout the film, he encounters significant skepticism and opposition from his own scouting team and other stakeholders in the Athletics organization. They are entrenched in the traditional ways of doing things and view Beane’s reliance on statistics and algorithms as impersonal and flawed. However, Beane’s confidence in his vision allows him to challenge the status quo and persist with his strategy despite these challenges. His approach demonstrates an important leadership principle: the courage to pursue a vision, even when it goes against conventional wisdom.

Moreover, the collaboration between Beane and Peter Brand, a young Yale economics graduate portrayed by Jonah Hill, emphasizes the importance of strategic partnerships in leadership. Brand brings the technical expertise in analytics that Beane needs, while Beane provides the leadership and managerial acumen to apply these insights effectively. Their partnership is a testament to the potential of combining diverse skills and perspectives to innovate and solve problems. This aspect of the “Moneyball” story illustrates how effective leadership often involves recognizing one’s limitations and complementing them with the strengths of others.

Finally, “Moneyball” is a study in managing change and overcoming resistance. Beane’s innovative methods disrupt not only his team but also the broader baseball community. His success forces other teams to reconsider their approaches, leading to widespread changes in how players are valued and teams are constructed in MLB. This outcome highlights a key aspect of leadership: the impact of a leader’s vision and methods can extend far beyond their immediate organizational context, influencing industry standards and practices.

In conclusion, “Moneyball” provides rich insights into leadership and management within the framework of professional sports but has implications far beyond. Billy Beane’s story is a compelling example of how innovative thinking, resilience in the face of resistance, strategic partnerships, and effective change management can coalesce to overcome limitations and achieve success. For leaders and managers in any field, “Moneyball” underscores the importance of analytics in decision-making, the courage to challenge outdated methodologies, and the ability to inspire and implement profound organizational change. Through this lens, Beane’s journey is not just about baseball—it’s about redefining what is possible with the resources at hand.

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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

According to Lewis, how is baseball like derivatives traded in the financial markets? Is this comparison accurate, in your view? Why or why not?

One part of the story Lewis tells has to do with the rise of personal computers in the late 1970s and 1980s. Analyses of baseball statistics really took off once people had access to PCs. What’s another industry that the growth of PCs affected in a big way? Describe what it was and explain the effect PCs had.

Why doesn’t sabermetrics always work? What are some factors that get in the way? Think of what the author covers in the book and anything else not addressed. The events took place 20 years ago now. Has anything changed? Has the sabermetrics method gotten more or less effective? Why?

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Moneyball Review

Essay by review   •  February 26, 2011  •  Book/Movie Report  •  1,922 Words (8 Pages)  •  3,042 Views

Essay Preview: Moneyball Review

In Major League Baseball the general belief is that the more a team spends on their payroll the more games they will win. With the absence of a salary cap baseball may seam unfair to the smaller market teams who can't bare the salary costs that the larger market teams can. In Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Lewis depicts just how the Oakland Athletics have been winning in an unfair game for almost a decade. The A's are a small market team that doesn't have nearly the amount of money at their disposal that their competitors in the American League do. However this past season the A's won their fourth American League West championship in the last seven years while having the lowest payroll in their division. In the 2006 season Oakland had a salary of just over 62 million and still finished with a better record then the Boston Red Sox whose payroll was double that of the A's.

Based on the economic model developed in our textbook on pages 168-170, the Oakland A's aren't supposed to field a competitive team year after year because the author Rodney Fort says that a large market team will always win more then a small market team. Fort argues that with the existence of large and small market teams there is revenue imbalance because the large market team brings in more revenue then the small market team. Revenue imbalance then causes competitive imbalance because the large market team will buy more talent then the small market team and winning percentage is described as a function of talent. As a result of buying more talent, the large market team will have a higher payroll so not only does revenue imbalance cause competitive imbalance but it also causes payroll imbalance.

One might say that this explanation is valid when assessing major league baseball because of teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox who among others are large market teams who win and because of small market teams like The Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Kansas City Royals who always lose. However The Oakland A's and General Manager Billy Beane disprove the theory from our textbook because they are a small market team that accumulates one of the highest winning percentages year after year. This is because author Rodney Fort is half right in his hypothesis. Revenue imbalance does for the most part drive payroll imbalance but revenue imbalance does not entirely drive competitive imbalance. Just because a team has a low payroll as a result of being in a small market does not necessarily mean that they have no chance of competing. In addition to Oakland, teams with small payrolls have still been competitive in the recent past. In 2003 The Florida Marlins won the World Series with a payroll of 48 million which was one of the lowest in the league and the Minnesota Twins like the Oakland A's have been consistently competitive in the AL over the last 5 or 6 years despite being in a small market.

The A's recent success is attributed to the innovative approach taken by Billy Beane in assembling a baseball team with a very limited amount of financial resources. Billy Beane has built a successful ball club because he has found an efficient and cost effective way of measuring baseball talent thus essentially creating a loophole in this unfair game because winning percentage is a result of talent not payroll. Every Year there are high priced talented free agents who seek huge contracts that Oakland can't afford. Under conventional wisdom these players are depicted as being extremely talented and therefore valuable to a team because of statistics such as RBI's and batting average and the ability of that player to perform in the clutch. Since Billy Beane can't afford these players he has gone about acquiring players in a much more different fashion. Beane uses sabermetrics in determining the true value of a player. Sabermetrics is the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball through objective evidence developed by Bill James. Sabermetrics puts less emphasis on things such as batting average and more emphasis on OBS (on base plus slugging). Saberemtrics is the foundation of Beanes whole organizational philosophy, he tries to get players that take pitches, get on base, walk, and hit for extra base hits. Beane doesn't believe in steals because it's too risky or the sacrifice bunt because it's conceding an out. These beliefs are from Bill James formula "runs created". James measures "runs created" as (hits + walks) X Total Bases / (at bats + walks). This formula proved that conventional wisdom about how to measure offense was wrong because there was not enough emphasis on walks and extra base hits and too much value on expensive but not as important statistics such as batting average and stolen bases. (Lewis pg.77-78) Billy Beane has made a livelihood by concentrating on these important but less expensive statistics as a means of competing against bigger market teams.

The 2001 offseason was a critical time for the A's front office. Center fielder Johnny Damon, first baseman Jason Giambi, and closer Jason Isringhausen were all free agents and the A's knew there was no way that they could afford to keep them. Beane believes that effective closers were overpriced in the free agent market because he thinks that saves are an overrated statistic. (Lewis pgs.125-126) So when replacing the hole left by Jason Isringhausen's departure Beane traded away a solid prospect in Eric Hinske to pick up an effective but less expensive reliever in Billy Koch from Toronto. This is an example of a tactic used by Beane which he calls "selling the closer" in which his closer would pile up a large amount of saves and then when he was up for free agency a team would either pick him up and therefore have to give a first round compensation pick to the A's or they would trade for him. (Lewis pg.125) Isringhausen's replacement Koch saved 44 games for the A's in 2002. The next year Beane did the same thing as Koch was traded to Chicago in exchange for a number of players including Keith Foulke. Foulke accumulated 43 saves in the 2003 season which earned him a free agent contract with the Red Sox and yet another compensation pick for the A's.

When replacing Damon and Giambi, Beane set out to replace their OBP because it was in their eyes very important but didn't cost that much (Lewis pg.141-142). In doing this he averaged out Giambi and Damon's OBP along with another player they were losing DH Olmedo Saenz. The average was .364. So Beane went out and picked up three players that could fill those three positions and

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Moneyball by Michael Lewis, Essay Example

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Moneyball by Michael Lewis is a story of how one baseball team set itself up to win despite the overwhelming odds against them. The Oakland A’s had one of the smallest budgets of any of the major league baseball teams. Oakland General Manager Billy Beane and his right-hand man, Harvard Graduate Paul DePodesta never played baseball a day in his life, decided to find a new method to scout talent. They created a sabermetrics that created a method to crush an abundant amount of data in efforts to make a smarter and stronger team without having to recruit the rock stars who come with the hefty price tags. The book creates a phenomenon on how it can take what is considered to be America’s favorite pastime and changes the strategy and logic that separates the selection from the instinct. College and Universities weigh too heavily on data that does not show the true capabilities of the students. Admissions should create a matrix that can measure the future potential of the students over weighing their past accomplishments.

The University of California has a very strict minimum admission requirements. One’s dream to be able to attend UC can quickly be diminished by the strict application process. Even if one meets the strict minimum academic standards for admission, it does not mean that they will be accepted. The admission into this university is highly competitive and often requires the students to meet far more demanding standards. It is difficult for students of this age to foresee their desire to attend this university early on, and it can pose issues for their complying with the admission requirements. By no means does this mean the student is not qualified, it just means the university fails to see the potential is students who develop their educational values later in life.

It is extremely discouraging to understand the matrix in which the university judges their applicants, and their inability to provide situational provisions. As a young applicant coming from a family in need, there was no option but to work during the high school years. Anyone who has had to juggle work and school can attest to the difficulties that inevitably arise. There is far less time to participate in extra-curricular activities and to focus on studying to achieve the highest grades. However, there is a lot to be said about a student who takes on the responsibility of helping their family at such a young age. The University of California would have been lucky to have a student who is willing to work so hard, and personal circumstances should have been taken into consideration in the application process.

The University of California does not mandate the SATs; however, they are recommended due to the competitive nature of the university. The admission requirements states:

The SAT Subject Tests are not required for admission. Students may submit scores if they wish to showcase academic mastery, just as scores on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests show ability and subject mastery. Competitive majors on some campuses may recommend particular SAT Subject Tests to demonstrate subject proficiency (University of California, np)

The dependencies on standardized test scores pose a significant disadvantage to some, primarily minorities. The tests are intended to measure competencies based on a standardized expectation; however, not all have the ability to excel in the areas highlighted in the SAT and ACT.

The dependency on standardized tests for admission is similar to many of the MLB teams discussed in Moneyball. “Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather than to pick a strategy that is most efficient,” Said Palmer. “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move” (Lewis). Perhaps using standardized testing is a practice that is setting the University of California at a substantial disadvantage. “Nonverbal (or figural) reasoning abilities are less important and show lower correlations with school achievement. Nonverbal reasoning tests do not identify the same students as tests of verbal or quantitative reasoning abilities” (Lohman, 2005). The very basis for which the tests use to determine personal ranking does not provide adequate data for basing a decision upon. However, it is safe to offer a concession to the fact that some testing is needed if nothing more than to determine competency for college.

Another determinant is one’s high school GPA. The University of California has determined the minimum GPA as the following:

In order to be considered for admission, applicants must have earned a minimum GPA of 3.0 (3.4 for nonresidents) in all “a-g” courses completed in grades 10 and 11, with no grade lower than a C. We award extra grade points for grades received in approved honors-level courses to a maximum of eight semesters, including no more than four semesters taken in the 10th grade (University of California, np).

With the personal schedule that was required, during the 11th and 12th grade year keeping a GPA above a 3.0 proved to be very difficult. In addition to working 25 hours and attending school full time, there were also many family obligations that took away from valuable studying time. The hours of responsibilities put in each week was far greater than what it would have taken to uphold a high GPA.

Personally, it is believed that these factors should be taken into consideration in the application process. An individual who takes family obligations as a priority, especially as a teenager, is a young adult that will take their education seriously. They will provide a vast amount of information to their classmates and create a diverse environment that is vital to a university’s success. It is much like the situation that Billy Beane faced when he was building his team. He chose to ignore the ‘success’ ratings that the majority of the MLB teams were using and found success by looking at other factors of the players. UC could benefit by rating ‘success’ on different factors than the majority of the high-ranking universities.

Student’s high school GPA’s only tell so much. Although the profile of students’ reasoning abilities and other aptitudes can usefully inform how to teach students (Lohman & Hagen, 2001), what to teach is best guided by what students know and can do. What a student possess is far more than their high school grades. How they handle, their own personal battles shows far more important than their grade point average. “The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired” (Lewis). Everyone loves the story of an underdog, however if an underdog is not given a chance to try, they will never succeed. Again, it is an important concession that grades are a factor in determining acceptance to a university; however, it should not be definitive.

Lastly, the University of California has mandated that a high school diploma or equivalent is necessary for admission. They state that:

If students do not have a high school diploma, we will accept the Certificate of Proficiency awarded by the State Board of Education upon successful completion of the California High School Proficiency Examination. We’ll also accept proficiency examinations from other states, and the General Education Development (GED) Certificate, in place of a diploma (University of California, np).

The expectations of the university to mandate the high school or equivalent completion seems to be a valid requirement. It is the only requirement that seems reasonable in the admission process. If a student has not completed the high school level of education, or equivalent, the likelihood they will succeed in higher education is minimal.

For many, their dreams begin with their college endeavor. It is the first step in their independence and their preparation for the future they are dreaming of. Personally, it seems almost discriminative to base the expectations for success on a standardized system. Lewis showed many instances where perception proved to be inaccurate. “Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get things that other people would never need to say” (Lewis). The ideals that we all embrace at times proves to be misleading.

The University of California may be misleading their perception of the applicants by setting a minimal expectation for admission. Personally, having been challenged by the system in which they rate their applicants, one would advise the university that they are missing good, quality students. Perhaps having a recommend expectation for their applicants would allow them to consider the personal factors in which each student is applying. An applicant who worked to support their family while in high school shows a lot about the character of the student. Despite their obstacles in high school, no one could deny that they are hard working. It is just one example of many that should be considered when determining a college applicant.

Admissions should create a matrix that can measure the future potential of the students over weighing their past accomplishments. The book Moneyball provided a basis for which true success can be determined outside the realms of standardized factors. The University of California is a dream for many; myself included. One can do everything right and still not comply with the minimum standards to attend the University. It is understood that the University needs to screen applicants to keep the status of the university in high ranking. However, each individual students has their own story, their own responsibilities, and they all want a shot at a successful future. Despite not attending the University of my choice, it did not prevent my personal educational endeavors. With hard work and determination, in May, a Bachelors degree will now be on a list of personal accomplishments. Deny an application based on the admission requirements inevitably denies the University of quality students that they are overlooking with their predetermined standards. The University of California needs to take inspiration from the novel Moneyball and see that there if far more to an individual than simple statistics.

Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. W. W. Norton & Company. 2004. Print.

Lohman, D. F. The role of nonverbal ability tests in identifying students for participation in programs for the academically gifted. Gifted Child Quarterly , 49, 111–138. 2005. Print.

Lohman, D. F., & Hagen, E. P. Cognitive Abilities Test (Form 6): Interpretive guide for teachers and counselors. Itasca, IL: Riverside. 2001. Print.

University of California. Minimum Admission Requirements. 2015. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

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Everyone Wants a Piece of Kafka, a Writer Who Refused to Be Claimed

A hundred years after Kafka’s death, people and nations are still fighting over his legacy.

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By Benjamin Balint

Benjamin Balint is the author of “Kafka’s Last Trial” and, most recently, “Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History,” winner of the National Jewish Book Award in biography.

In his novella “The Prague Orgy,” Philip Roth has a Czech writer say: “When I studied Kafka, the fate of his books in the hands of the Kafkologists seemed to me to be more grotesque than the fate of Josef K.” Just as Franz Kafka’s prose both demands and evades interpretation, something about his legacy has both solicited and resisted claims of ownership.

Despite his astonishing clairvoyance about the impersonal cruelty of the bureaucratic state and the profound alienation of contemporary life, Kafka could not have foreseen how many admirers would read and misread his enigmatic fictions after his death, nor how many would-be heirs would seek to appropriate him as their own in the century since.

Competing claims began to swirl almost as soon as Kafka died of tuberculosis, 100 years ago this June, a month short of his 41st birthday. Max Brod — close friend, betrayer of Kafka’s last instruction to burn his manuscripts, heavy-handed editor of his diaries and unfinished novels, and author of the first Kafka biography — depicted him as a modern-day “saint” whose stories and parables “are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.”

Among other religious readers of the novels Brod published (“The Trial” in 1925, “The Castle” in 1926 and “Amerika” in 1927), Kafka’s first English translators, Edwin and Willa Muir, presented him as an allegorist of Christian grace. (In German, “Die Verwandlung,” the title of Kafka’s tale of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis into an insect, also connotes “transfiguration.”)

As early as 1947, Edmund Wilson warned that all this deification threatened to “oversaturate and stupefy” Kafka’s readers. Still, the Kafka craze continued to swell. In the 1960s, existentialists interpreted Kafka as an angst-ridden precursor who stared into the abyss of absurdity and asked — as Josef K. does in the penultimate paragraph of “The Trial” — “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen?” Simone de Beauvoir said that Kafka “revealed to us our own problems, confronted by a world without God and where nonetheless our salvation was at stake.”

Psychoanalysts claimed the author of stories like “In the Penal Colony” and “A Hunger Artist” as a neurotic herald of the uncanny or a self-tortured “poet of shame and guilt” (as the subtitle of Saul Friedländer’s biography has it). Modernists adopted Kafka not as a patient to be diagnosed but as the writer who most acutely perceived the bewildering breakdown of received ideas in our society. “Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs,” W.H. Auden said, “Kafka is the first one would think of.”

Others pulled Kafka into this or that political cause, most bizarrely when he was fashioned into a weapon of the Cold War. In a speech in Moscow in 1962, Jean-Paul Sartre cautioned against the “militarization” of culture, likening Kafka to a “grenade in the library” or a cartload of dynamite shunted between East and West. “A true cultural competition,” Sartre said, “raises the following pacifist challenge: To whom, us or you, does Kafka belong; that is to say, who understands him best?”

Soviet critics enlisted Kafka as an ally of the dignified individual bravely clashing with the capitalist system, while anti-communist dissidents turned him into an adversary of the bureaucratic terror practiced by authoritarian regimes. In 1954, long before the writer’s name became a ubiquitous adjectival cliché, Arthur Koestler disparaged the Moscow show trials as “Kafka-esque.” Two years later, as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising, the Marxist literary critic György Lukács was arrested in Budapest, held in a Romanian castle and deprived of the right to know the charges, much less to rebut them. “So Kafka was a realist after all!” he declared.

A more recent chapter in the story of Kafka’s contentious afterlife involves those who attempted to connect a national “we” to his name. Beginning in 2007, a nine-year custody battle was waged in Israeli courts over the manuscripts by Kafka that Brod had narrowly rescued from the Nazi occupation of Prague. The case could be read as a commentary on a single question: Does this writer — a member of a Jewish minority within a German-speaking minority within a Czech minority within a heterogeneous Austro-Hungarian Empire — belong to German literature or to the state that regards itself as the representative of Jews everywhere?

On one side was the National Library of Israel, which recruited Kafka as a Jewish writer, despite his ambivalence toward Zionism. Israel saw itself as the rightful home to the cultural products of diaspora, the appropriate ending place for a story begun elsewhere. On the other side, lawyers for the German Literature Archive in Marbach argued that Kafka’s manuscripts belonged in Germany because his language was German — “the purest German prose of the century,” Hannah Arendt said.

When I attended the Israeli Supreme Court hearing on the case in the summer of 2016, one thing seemed beyond doubt: Germany’s claim on a writer whose family was decimated in the Shoah had become entangled with the country’s attempt to overcome its shame. Perhaps some Germans hoped that the act of claiming Kafka — as a Jewish guardian of German prose, and as a Jew fortunate enough to die before he could fall victim to the Nazis — would serve that overcoming. Here lay a potent irony: The writer who raised self-condemnation to an art would be used as an instrument of self-exculpation, of effacing, rather than facing up to, the past. (The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the National Library .)

The Palestinian undergraduates with whom I read Kafka were not preoccupied with questions of cultural ownership. When we read “The Trial” in a course I taught at a Bard College program in East Jerusalem, the students were riveted from the opening line: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

One student compared the book to Mustafa Khalifa’s “ The Shell ,” a novel (published here in 2023) based on the author’s 13-year imprisonment without trial in Syria. Another found in Josef K.’s futile pursuit of justice a new vocabulary with which to express her family’s decades-long legal efforts to stave off eviction from the home they had lived in since the early 1950s, a two-bedroom apartment in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Since the property had belonged to a Jewish charitable trust before Israel’s creation in 1948, the state argued that ownership should revert to the charity’s trustees.

Like the trial over Kafka’s manuscripts, the family’s appeals would eventually be heard by the Supreme Court. “In ‘The Trial,’” my student said, “you can never obtain an acquittal. So also with us: We can only hope to postpone the eviction, to postpone, to postpone, to postpone.” For these young readers, Kafka conjured a world not surreal but superreal .

It struck me then that the readers who come closest to the essence of Kafka’s singular vision are those who recognize the irony of taking a proprietary attitude toward a writer so faithful to his own non-belonging, and so careful to set his characters — antagonists against authorities divine, political and paternal — in no particular time or place. In a letter to his fiancée Felice Bauer, Kafka writes of his “infinite yearning for independence and freedom in all things.” Despite his deep feeling for Yiddish theater and for the Hebrew language, that yearning unmoored him from any kind of collective belonging and untethered his imagination to sail beyond any national canon, “obedient,” in his words, “to its own laws of motion.”

We can only wonder whether the spectacle of a century’s warring over his artistic legacy would have amused this least possessive of writers. “Everything I possess is directed against me,” Kafka confessed to Brod, “and what is directed against me is no longer in my possession.”

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John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

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Green Chemistry

A review on sustainable iron oxide nanoparticles: syntheses and applications in organic catalysis and environmental remediation.

* Corresponding authors

a Department of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai-Marathwada Campus, Jalna 431213, Maharashtra, India E-mail: [email protected]

b Regional Centre of Advanced Technologies and Materials, Czech Advanced Technology and Research Institute, (CATRIN), Palacký University Olomouc, Šlechtitelů 27, 779 00 Olomouc, Czech Republic E-mail: [email protected]

c Centre for Energy and Environmental Technologies (CEET), Nanotechnology Centre, VŠB–Technical University of Ostrava, 17. listopadu 2172/15, 708 00 Ostrava-Poruba, Czech Republic E-mail: [email protected]

Iron oxide nanoparticles have been intensively investigated owing to their huge potential as diagnostic, therapeutic, and drug-carrier agents in biomedicine, sorbents in environmental technologies, sensors of various inorganic and organic/biological substances, energy-generating and storing materials, and in assorted biotechnological and industrial processes involving microbiology, pigment industry, recording and magnetic media or (bio)catalysis. An eminent interest in exploring the realm of iron oxides is driven by their chemical and structural diversity, high abundance, low cost, non-toxicity, and broad portfolio of chemical procedures enabling their syntheses with desirable physicochemical features. The current review article centers its attention on the contemporary advancements in the field of catalysis and environmental technologies employing iron oxides in various chemical forms ( e.g. , hematite, magnetite, maghemite), sizes (∼10–100 nm), morphology characteristics ( e.g. , globular, needle-like), and nano architecture ( e.g. , nanoparticles, nanocomposites, core–shell structures). In particular, the catalytic applications of iron oxides and their hybrids are emphasized regarding their efficiency and selectivity in the coupling, oxidation, reduction, alkylation reactions, and Fischer–Tropsch synthesis. The deployment of iron oxides and their nanocomposites in environmental and water treatment technologies is also deliberated with their roles as nanosorbents for heavy metals and organic pollutants, photocatalysts, and heterogeneous catalysts ( e.g. , hydrogen peroxide decomposition) for oxidative treatment of various contaminants. The associated challenges and potential progress in iron-oxide-based catalytic and environmental technologies are highlighted as well. Young chemists, researchers, and scientists could find this review useful in enhancing the usefulness of nano iron oxides in their investigations and developing sustainable methodologies.

• This article is part of the themed collection: 2024 Green Chemistry Reviews

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D. S. Chaudhari, R. P. Upadhyay, G. Y. Shinde, M. B. Gawande, J. Filip, R. S. Varma and R. Zbořil, Green Chem. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4GC01870B

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All Thing Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess - It all gets a bit too much in the end

Becca rothfeld’s collection is energetic and charmingly verbose, but her tendency to demystify everything wears thin.

Becca Rothfeld: Moments of clear insight and great beauty

Towards the end of All Things Are Too Small, Becca’s Rothfeld’s defence of maximalism, she reproduces a quotation that she has “so thoroughly digested and metabolised” that it is now an essential fixture of her “mental repertoire”.

“I love a demystified thing inordinately.”

Yes, I thought, that’s it. That’s the problem with this book: Rothfeld’s tendency towards such relentless demystification of her subjects that they’re pallid and lifeless by the time she’s through.

This is not true of all the essays in the collection. It opens promisingly and with astounding energy and vigour. Initially, one forgives Rothfeld’s immediately evident habit of making grand, inaccurate statements, such as: “Desire is as good a guide to truth as anything else.” If anything, her verbosity and inexactitude seem charming – she’s wrong because she’s passionate. Reading, I felt myself at a dinner table surrounded by voices stridently debating all manner of interesting things: literature, meaning, mindfulness, feminism, sex, sex and more sex (to give an idea of the topics of these essays).

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My God, though, did I want that dinner to end, so I could return somewhere peaceful and reflective, to cease the ringing in my ears of all this terribly intelligent demystifying. The humour, too, wears thin. Yes, it’s hilarious to mock the bourgeois aesthetic of Marie Kondo (I laughed aloud at “the declutterer dreams of a house without f**king or sh**ting”), but by the end of the collection, these knowing asides and the unremitting sarcasm made me feel like I was trying to converse with a surly, unimpressed teenager.

Also, Rothfeld’s attempts at love-writing made me physically cringe. At one point, she tells us that her husband loves reading so much, he does so in the shower. The impossible logistics of this image will never, I fear, cease to irritate me.

Yet, there are moments of clear insight, and of great beauty. Rothfeld’s capacious vocabulary left me stunned, and exquisite phrases such as “the gleaming purity of a history” almost made up for her agonising attempts at poeticism.

“The night was cool as mint. Behind him, the light from the streetlamp became butter melting. His voice was flat and nasal, mouthy as saltwater toffee.”

Ultimately, this collection’s great weakness is that these pieces have been gathered into a collection at all. I can see that, taken one at a time, Rothfeld’s tone would be pithy and gratifying, and these qualities would make up for her prolix, excessive demystification and broad, questionable statements. Alas, reading her thoughts over and over, all in a row, I grew frustrated, tired and harried. By the end, I wanted to leave the dinner party, to run out into the street, to regain the relief of a little mystery.

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