One of the books I’ve most been looking forward to is Michael Lewis’ book on how the Oakland A’s baseball team is run, Moneyball. I’m a huge Lewis fan in general, and I’m a fan of baseball in general and the A’s in particular. Anyway, Lewis does a great job of explaining why the book is important in an interview with ESPN”s Rob Neyer:

This will sound strange but it is completely true: I was far more certain of the importance of the subject while working on this book than I was when I wrote Losers, which is about people running for President of the United States of America. I could talk a week without exhausting the argument, but the nub of my conviction was this: if professional baseball players, whose achievements are endlessly watched, discussed and analyzed by tens of millions of people, can be radically mis-valued, who can’t be? If such a putatively meritocratic culture as professional baseball can be so sloppy and inefficient, what can’t be?