One of the things I remember from being a complete baseball illiterate and reading
Moneyball was trying to decode the rules and how the game is played based on the descriptions of statistics and surrounding context. I took it as a challenge to not look up a single term (these are obvious terms to someone who knows anything about baseball, mind you, like "get on base", "walk", and "strike out" – but completely foreign to me at the time).
It went fairly well, but I probably still wouldn't be able to actively follow a real game. If I at some point re-read Moneyball, I would probably want to get a primer on how baseball is played first.