Top five sports books to read over the monsoons

2. Michael Lewis – Moneyball

Billy Beane had all the natural talent. He was fast, strong, had a great eye for the ball, but for whatever reason, he never fully succeeded as a professional baseball player. At the age of just 28, he quit playing baseball to find out that reason. To the astonishment of the hierarchy of the club, he swapped a place on the playing roster for a job as a scout for the Oakland Athletics and quickly progressed to General Manager. He then rewrote the laws of baseball.

Previously scouts, managers, and pundits across the country had focussed on genetic ability and average runs scored as a means to judge players. Beane tore up the script, and with Assistant GM Paul DePodesta, focussed on statistics that were undervalued in the game. He calculated that getting players on base was far more important than batting average. People scoffed when he assembled a roster of perceived nobodies on one of the lowest budgets in the league. They reached the playoffs.

Never mind the subsequent effect Moneyball has had on sport across the world, Michael Lewis’s account of Beane’s original success is enthralling. It has and will continue to inspire people to challenge old orthodoxies and fundamentally change the way we look at statistics.