Thanks to Brad Pitt just about everyone knows who Billy Beane is these days. Of course that also means that most people know about the strategy that he uses to construct the Oakland Athletics year after year: Moneyball. Unfortunately, knowing about something and truly understanding what that something is are two totally different things.
I’ve seen the idea of Moneyball misunderstood too many times. All types of people are guilty, from fans of other teams to the guys that get paid to talk on television about baseball. Many fans believe Moneyball is the idea of building the best roster possible using sabermetrics, but they’re wrong.
Yes, Billy’s Moneyball system uses sabermetrics, an analysis-driven way of viewing statistics to compare different players to each other, but so does every single other Major League Baseball team to some degree.
Moneyball is the idea of building the best roster possible, using sabermetrics, on a budget.
Moneyball.
I’m not sure why people tend to forget that part. Billy Beane isn’t handed $125 million in the offseason and told to go build a championship caliber roster. I couldn’t imagine how successful he would be in that type of situation, but his budget is a bit more modest. The average Oakland A’s payroll since 2010, according to baseballprospectus.com, is $64,511, 460. Compare that to the league average of $120,558,560, and you can see just how modest the budget Billy has to work with really is.
Unfortunately, this type of payroll doesn’t allow the A’s to sign the big name players, or even more unfortunately, re-sign current players that are due for large contracts. In my mind this is where the genius of Beane really sets in. This also is where things get a little touchy for many fans when it comes to how they feel about the GM. Billy, and the rest of the A’s front office, has a knack for acquiring under the radar players and young prospects, and cultivating them into All Stars. He squeezes as much out of them as he can while they’re still on undervalued contracts and then either trades them away or loses them to free agency.
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Mr. Beane has always been an ‘all in’ or ‘all out’ kind of GM. His roster is either built to compete for a championship or it’s in a rebuilding phase. In the past this usually goes in multi-year cycles. We gather prospects and unappreciated players, be non-competitive for a year or two, become competitive for a few years, then the team gets blown up and the cycle repeats. As Oakland fans we have learned to endure this. One, we didn’t really have a choice, and two, because sitting through the year or two of sub-par baseball always ended up being worth it when all of a sudden we were competing again. Even though we were used to it, it was draining as a fan, but it was something we just had to endure.
Not anymore.
This past offseason Billy did something that has never really been done before. He took a playoff team, completely deconstructed it, and rebuilt a new team that he completely expects to compete again this season. The multi-year rebuilding phase was shrunk down to a few months. Many A’s fans were upset at the end of an offseason that saw us lose 5 of out of our 7 All Stars, but I loved it.
I was sad to see the players that I’ve grown to love over the past 3 seasons get spread out across the country to different teams, but I love watching Billy work his magic. I don’t think anyone could argue that this was one of Billy’s more exciting winters. Not because of big name acquisitions, but because it was such a whirlwind. Beane knows exactly what he wants and what he doesn’t want, and he goes and gets what he wants. We question his moves, but he’s done the research, and more often than not we’re happy with the results. I think we ought to sit back and admire what he did this winter.
He accomplished a complete roster overhaul, using Moneyball, in one offseason, and it’s pretty remarkable.
Gone are the days of enduring 2-3 years in between competitive seasons. The time for the Oakland Athletics to win is now, and Billy Beane is doing everything he can to make that happen.
I don’t know about you, but I consider this to be a pretty exciting time to be a fan of the Oakland Athletics.