The secrets of Moneyball, eight years later. “The young men had heaps of fun, working crazy hours and, to blow off steam, knocking golf balls around the office, playing football among the cubicles and celebrating big wins with postgame refreshments at Boston watering holes. Then one day in 2002, a best-selling writer by the name of Michael Lewis walked into the Red Sox offices and knocked the smile right off Epstein’s face. Lewis was working on a book about baseball’s nascent information age, but Epstein wanted nothing to do with him. ‘I can’t believe Billy is letting him write this book,’ he told his colleagues. Billy Beane, Oakland’s general manager, had granted Lewis access to his front-office operations, which meant revealing how the A’s were mining information from statistical analysis, a tool used extensively at the time by only the Athletics, Indians, Blue Jays and Red Sox. ‘He’s handing out the blueprint,’ Epstein told Hoyer.”

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