There's an important discussion over at OldFishinghat about Billy Beane and sabermetrics. I only recently read "Moneyball" and it's a tremendous book. But having read "Liar's Poker" and "Trail Fever" and "The New New Thing" I wouldn't expect anything less from Michael Lewis. He is today's truly outstanding creative non-fiction writer. As he says at the beginning of the book, "I fell in love with a story." He makes his readers fall in love with the story, too.

But I kept thinking throughout the book that the A's recent success, particularly the last four seasons, while impressive, was statistically irrelevant. We're watching the revolution in sabermetrics and harnessing data and computing power to understand 'the game within the game' unfold before our eyes. But it will take some time to know just how powerful this new tool is. Paul DePodesta would surely understand, four seasons is too small a statistical sample.

Update: Lewis has a piece in the new SI and Jon Weisman does a nice job of parsing it. I've been getting Bill James books for Christmas since I was a kid, so Weisman is right that this was hardly uncommon knowledge to people who'd been reading James for years.