Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Moneyball:
1. Michael Lewis writes of Billy Beane, "it was hard to know which of Billy's qualities was most important to his team's success." What are those qualities? What kind of character is Beane? And what do you think most accounts for his success in remaking the A's?
2. Why does Billy Beane stop playing baseball, which seems to Lews an unimaginable decision. What explanation is offered? Why do you think Beane quit playing?
3. What does Lewis mean by the following passage...and what are baseball's "eternal themes?
The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profit—by ignoring them.
4. Follow-up to Question 3: Talk about the way Beane turns received wisdom on its head: his theory of selecting players. In his eyes, what makes a player valuable?
5. How has measuring each player's on-base percentage, for instance, revolutionized baseball strategy, at least in Oakland?
6. Are the geeks going to take over sports (as well as the rest of the world)—is their cutting-edge analytical data the future? Put another way—is Beane a "flash in the pan" as the New York Times reviewer wonders? Have Beane's methods truly redefined the way baseball is...and will be played?
7. What does the book's subtitle mean by "an unfair game"? Why "unfair"?
8. Follow-up to Question 7: Newsweek columnist George Will, an avid baseball fan, once proposed that teams pool financial resources so as to level the playing field between big media market teams and small market teams. How do you feel about his proposal? (Will, by the way, is a conservative in politics, despite his socialistic approach to sports.)
9. Who is Lewis referring to, and what does he mean, when he writes...
Baseball offered a comfortable seat to the polysyllabic wonders who quoted dead authors and blathered on about the poetry of motion. These people dignified the game, like a bow tie?
Lewis goes on to say that those polysyllabic wonders "were harmless. What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence." What was threatening about data?
10. Lewis gives us Beane-in-action as he trades players. What are some of the tactics Beane uses to outfox his opponents?
11. Who are some of the other characters Lewis describes? Bill James? Jeremy Brown? Any other vignettes you found particularly engaging?
12. In his review of Moneyball, Steve Forbes points out that the three players who formed the foundation of the A's success—Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder—were "the kind of players any GM would have taken." He also points out that other small-budget teams have had similar successes: Seattle Mariners and the Anaheim Angels (a mid-level budget) for instance. Does Forbes's arguments undermine the premise of Michael Lewis's book...and Beanes' analytical approach?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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