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Aiming to find out if poorer baseball teams have a chance against rich teams that can afford the superstar players, Lewis takes an admiring look at the financially constrained Oakland A's and their general manager, Billy Beane. Despite their relatively small payroll, the A's win a lot of games. It seems that Beane, to the suspicion and disbelief of old baseball scouts who go by feel, is a student of a new kind of way of reading baseball statistics. Where traditionally body shape, foot speed and largely meaningless statistics like errors were taken into consideration, Beane follows Bill James, who argued that making runs and getting on bases were the only statistics that count toward winning. For me, knowing nothing of baseball from either standpoint, this was a fascinating look at a revolution in knowledge and the people smart enough to adapt to new ideas. The chapter on Bill James, the pioneer who, in a way, cracked the code of baseball stats to overturn traditionally held beliefs, was especially interesting.