Billy Beane
Billy Beane
William Lamar "Billy" Beane IIIis an American former professional baseball player and current front office executive. He is the Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball. Prior to his front office career, he played in MLB as an outfielder between 1984 and 1989 for the New York Mets, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers, and Oakland Athletics. He joined the Athletics front office as a scout in 1990. He was named general...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBaseball Player
Date of Birth29 March 1962
CityOrlando, FL
CountryUnited States of America
The math works. Over the course of a season, there's some predictability to baseball. When you play 162 games, you eliminate a lot of random outcomes. There's so much data that you can predict: individual players' performances and also the odds that certain strategies will pay off.
I may not be as visible as I used to be, and by that I mean being in the clubhouse or on the field. But I'm just as invested as I've always been.
Smaller markets teams, when you hit bottom, you hit with a thud.
We can't do the same things the Yankees do. Given the economics, we'll lose.
I don't want a lot of guys like me who played the game. Quite frankly, I want blank canvases; I want people to come in with new ideas. I don't want the biases of their own experiences to be a part of their decision-making process.
I hate this idea that I've somehow become detached. It's like I can't win. I'd been hearing all these years that I was too hands-on: that I was the guy writing out the lineup card. Now, I'm not present enough. How is it possible to be a detached micromanager?
I just talked to a young lady, a freshman at Santa Barbara. She's taking a course, and 'Moneyball''s one of the required readings. This young lady could dream of one day becoming a general manager.
I've always been intellectually restless, but it is the building part of it that most interests me. It is the constructing of the team that is my favorite part. Anyone who is familiar with the history of the A's franchise, even dating back to Philadelphia, knows that every five or 10 years, you have to tear it apart and rebuild it.
Quite frankly, I can't get enough of soccer. I tell my jingoistic friends in the United States there's a reason why it is the world's No. 1 sport. The rest of the planet can't be wrong.
The idea that you can create a template that will work forever doesn't happen in any business. There's some really, really bright people in this business. You can't do the same thing the same way and be successful for a long period of time.
Trying to build a team over the course of the winter to put on the field is really just half the job. Because if your best players go down, it's not so much him going down as who you replace him with, which ultimately might have the biggest impact on how you end up finishing. So you want to have both a belt and suspenders for support.
Who wants to get really granular with sabermetrics when you're going to see a two-and-a-half-hour Brad Pitt movie? You don't go to the cinema for a maths lesson.
Why do people care about anything we do? We play in a crappy stadium, in a market that we share with another team, with one of the lowest payrolls in the game. Really, I'm not that interesting.
Yeah, six weeks I think is unrealistic to expect that he'll be in pitching shape.