Michael Lewis
People who think they know what they are talking about when they talk about baseball include the announcers and all of the sports press - no matter how much evidence you present them to the contrary they will continue to think that what they think is right.Collection: Sports
The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.Collection: Sports
There are several insights at the heart of the A's system that I think are wonderful for baseball. One, that it's a team game. That no one player is going to make that much of a difference to your team, so for god's sake don't go blow a quarter of your budget on one guy.
I think that fans are always looking for someone to blame. Wouldn't it be nice if they looked in the mirror?
The sentimentality of baseball is very deeply rooted in the American baseball fan. It is the one sport that is transmitted from fathers to sons.
If you had to point to one thing that made it less likely that the Red Sox would win the World Series, I would say it was those people that go to Fenway Park to watch the games. And then the media around it.
The Red Sox are the local scapegoats. It's hard enough to play baseball without being the local scapegoat too.
Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I don't even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.
There has been this - and it's reflected in the broadcasts - this moronic use of statistics. Which has suggested to everyone who is intelligent the use of statistics is moronic.
The Red Sox are a curious thing because so much here is media driven. You can't go fire half your scouts here because they are all friends with the local reporters. Your life is going to hell in the papers.
Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture.
I don't think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.
The Oakland clubhouse is a wonderful place. A lot of these guys feel like rejects. They were rejects and they feel - they can tell you how baseball screwed up.
My judgement is not good when I am on a book tour. I am not thinking about it that much. What happens is I will go back home. I have a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old and a wife who is now taking care of them who is wondering where her husband is.
You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.
In Japan, mothers insist on achievement and accomplishment as a sign of love and respect. Thus to fail places children in a highly shamed situation.
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.Collection: Bible
Just because you've been successful and just because you've disrupted an environment, doesn't mean you're a role model or that you actually have anything to teach anybody. There's an awful lot of luck and accident in the world, and maybe you were just on the receiving end of that.Collection: Mean
We aren't natural statisticians. What we are is natural storytelling machines. And so what we do after we have the facts in hand is build a story to explain the facts.Collection: Hands
As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.Collection: Optimism
Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then 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.Collection: Pain
Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.Collection: Knowledge
We change for the good so long as good exists around us.Collection: Long
People don't like uncertainty, and their minds are tools for making sense of the world, even when the world is senseless.Collection: People
A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market.Collection: People
When something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable.Collection: People
A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.Collection: Believe
People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation.Collection: Successful
If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.Collection: Different
A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.Collection: People
In their leaders, advisers, and experts, people much prefer overconfidence, total certainty, to any kind of doubt.Collection: People
People dislike uncertainty so much that they will impose an order on it even when it doesn't exist.Collection: Order
When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.Collection: Writing
Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.Collection: Luck
All that was clear that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise.Collection: Smart
The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.Collection: People
Commitment, by its nature, frees us from ourselves and, while it stands us in opposition to some, it joins us with others similarly committed. Commitment moves us from the mirror trap of the self absorbed with the self to the freedom of a community of shared values.Collection: Moving
A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term.Collection: Confusing
The model used by Wall Street to price trillions of dollar's worth of derivatives thought of the financial world as an orderly, continuous process. But the world was not continuous; it changed discontinuously, and often by accident.Collection: Wall
Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly.Collection: Facts
Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.Collection: Sacrifice
There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?Collection: Baseball
If you're the kind of kid who thinks that all that's important in life is making money, Wall Street is probably still the place to go, especially now that Trump's elected.Collection: Wall
My characters are actually usually pretty smart and admirable.Collection: Smart
I was gonna put him on the bus...I got tired of him talking, it was time for him to go home.Collection: Home
Every form of strength is also a form of weakness.Collection: Weakness
It is far better to keep the enemy close, by bribing him with stock options, than to have him out in the wild, foraging.Collection: Enemy
Why pay $20 million to Harrison Ford? I dont even understand that. They think they have to do it... If someone puts a price on himself, that suggests he is irreplaceable, then he better find somewhere else to work.Collection: Thinking
It is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying to screw.Collection: Baseball