Moneyball by Michael Lewis
Published 2003 · 90,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Business & Self-Help, Nonfiction
How hard is Moneyball to read?
Moneyball scores 22 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Baseball terminology and basic statistics. Accessible to non-sports readers.
- Sentence structure: 28 out of 100
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- Statistical concepts grounded in specific baseball decisions and player stories.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Baseball statistics and business strategy woven into character-driven narrative.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Direct narrative journalism. Lewis follows the A's season chronologically.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- Baseball as metaphor for institutional change. Otherwise concrete.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- Lewis's journalistic detachment and the contrast between old and new thinking provide irony.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The A's season provides natural narrative arc and suspense.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Chronological narrative with explanatory digressions. Simple structure.
How Moneyball is regarded
Moneyball holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.