Read Moneyball

Moneyball by Michael Lewis is about sabermetrics, the science of using statistics to actually figure out what's important in a baseball player, and then putting together a team based on undervalued skills. It's a great book, but unfortunately, it seems that by writing the book, Lewis has actually hurt the ability of the Oakland As to do what they were doing before: get great results with very little money.

From Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch

The first and easiest friends I made at college were football fans; a studious examination of a newspaper back page during the lunch hour of the first day in a new job usually provokes some kind of response. And yes, I am aware of the downside of this wonderful facility that men have: they become repressed, they fail in their relationships with women, their conversation is trivial and boorish, they find themselves unable to express their emotional needs, they cannot related to their children, and they die lonely and miserable. But you know, what the hell? If you can walk into a school full of eight hundred boys, most of them older, all of them bigger, without feeling intimidated, simply because you have a spare Jimmy Husband in your blazer pocket, then it seems like a trade-off worth making.