The Library of Congress recently released a list of 88 Books that Shaped America, which are part of a current exhibit at the Library. It’s a pretty good list of books (which had to either be written by an American or by somebody who became an American), and it’s hard to argue with most of them. However, it’s missing something big: sports. America is the most diverse and sports-loving country on Earth. Most countries focus on only one sport (usually soccer), but America has many sports, and it affects our language and culture. We ask for ballpark figures and play Monday morning quarterback. Something that is a certainty is a slam dunk. It’s one of the last few universal experiences: at a sporting event, nobody cares (or at least 99.9% of people don’t care) what party you vote for or what you do for a living.

That the LoC would so ignore this aspect of American life is disappointing, especially because there are plenty of good sports books out there that have shaped America. Jim Bouton’s Ball Four was one of the first books to openly tell things like they were and show the public’s heroes with all of their flaws. Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights highlighted the importance of football in small-town Texas, and later was made into a movie and TV series. Juiced was hardly a triumph of literary genius, but it can’t be denied that Canseco shaped not only baseball but America, leading to the government hearings and efforts by all sports (although people only cared about what baseball did) in trying to fight it.

However, if I could add in one sports book to the Library of Congress list, it would be Michael Lewis’ Moneyball.

(jump)

You see, Moneyball wasn’t, in the end, a tale about sabermetrics and how Billy Beane used it to build the 2002 Athletics’ lineup. It was really about how, after realizing that the usual ways wouldn’t work in his situation, he and the others in the A’s front office had to be willing to go against conventional wisdom and find assets that have been overlooked. It’s a lesson that applies in many other areas: other sports, business, politics and countless other areas also have long-time assumptions that mean that other ways of doing things are often ignored, even though they may be staring you right in the face if you look at the data.

This is where the influence of Moneyball comes from. Enter “moneyball” and “business” into Google, and you come across over 3.6 million websites. Looking up “moneyball” and “politics” brings you over a million results. “Moneyball” and “basketball” also brings over a million results, including the tale of Jim Crowley, who applied a Moneyball approach to women’s basketball at St. Bonaventure.

And Moneyball is a relatively recent book, with it now being a movie that was Oscar-nominated and likely to remain in print indefinitely, the influence of Moneyball may just be beginning.