What was happening to capitalism should have happened to baseball: the technical man with his analytical magic should have risen to prominence in baseball management, just as he was rising to prominence on, say, Wall Street.

-Michael Lewis, Moneyball

America’s national pastime is a numbers game. Batting averages and strikeouts are the raw material for the grand narratives of the sport, separating timeless hall-of-famers from forgotten journeymen. Since Henry Chadwick popularized the box score way back in 1859, the game has been inseparable from its statistics. For fans, the history of baseball is a rhapsody of elegant numbers, the simplicity of which smooths out the game’s rougher edges: its century-long labor conflicts, its fraught race relations, the greedy self-dealing of owners and ball clubs. The attraction to baseball’s numbers points to an even deeper obsession, a truly American pastime: the fantasy of optimizing away every flaw, identifying and eliminating every inefficiency with statistics, number-crunching our way to success.

In July 2003, Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game hit bookshelves across the country to significant critical and popular acclaim. A bond-trader-turned-journalist, Lewis had already made a name for himself with his 1989 autobiographical bestseller Liar’s Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street. With Moneyball, Lewis shifted his attention to a different financial market, one not often considered under such terms: Major League Baseball.