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But the new owners adopt a very different approach. Taking this a step further, DePodesta calculates that the team will likely need to win 95 games to make the playoffs. The team’s 20th straight victory seems assured. As a scout, and eventually as GM, Billy will butt heads with the men who make up the scouting department. He was released or traded by numerous teams as a player, and Stanford University withdrew his athletic scholarship when he became ineligible to play. For the answer to this also lies in Billy and Paul’s data-driven, sabermetric approach to running the team. Although endowed with natural athletic ability and a keen understanding of baseball, he is unwilling to be patient with the game and is paralyzed by his fear of failure: a failure which he had been told throughout his young career he would never experience due to his talent. Sadly, his parents are soon swindled out of Billy’s signing bonus when they invest in a dubious real estate scheme. But this is part of the strategy. Selig, as owner of the cash-strapped Milwaukee Brewers, has his own self-interested reasons for spreading the money in baseball around more equitably. In it, he describes how baseball writers and commentators were reluctant to praise Beane for his success. This gives the drafting team enormous leverage in the contract negotiation process, enabling savvy drafters to get good players for a fraction of what they would cost on the free agent market. But because he has never played, he is unbiased and unattached to baseball’s customary way of doing things and open to new approaches to the game. This is where the Oakland A’s came in. Chapter 1 In the 1980s, there was a tremendously talented high school baseball player named Billy Beane. The A's were not physically or athletically inferior to other teams; instead, they were at a financial disadvantage. The A’s bring in Scott Hatteberg, David Justice, and Jeremy Giambi (Jason’s younger brother). Billy has keenly observed that players who are drafted directly out of high school have a demonstrably worse track record in the majors than college players. To win 95 games, they will need to have a net run differential of approximately +135. That night, the largest crowd ever for an Oakland regular season game gathers at Network Associates Coliseum to watch the A’s try to make history against the hapless Kansas City Royals. Beane assembles a winning team on a shoestring budget, by using an analytical and scientific approach to evaluate each player’s contributions. The 2002 draft is a key moment for the Oakland A’s, giving them the opportunity to replenish a 2001 roster than had been depleted through trades and free agent poachings from other teams. Thus, Billy is able to trade them off for more than they’re worth or let them walk away in free agency and allow another team to overpay them. In 1999, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig convenes a blue ribbon commission to examine the wealth inequality in major league baseball, exploring possible solutions to this “problem,” including revenue-sharing and player salary caps. Their new mantra is to reduce costs as much as possible, and that means cutting team payroll to the bone. One of the many lessons I learnt from reading Moneyball was just how resistant people in baseball were to the changes that the Oakland Athletics were making. He begins criticizing the performances of individual players and calling into question the decisions of manager Art Howe, with whom he frequently clashes (Howe also resents Billy’s micromanaging of the A’s and feels he lacks the on-field deference customarily granted to managers). But the new owners adopt a very different approach. The style of play for the Athletics was more team-oriented, with the emphasis on producing base runners rather than just getting hits. No one on the team is treated as irreplaceable. The A’s, instead, select players using a process of rational, scientific, data-based analysis, which is better at predicting their likelihood of succeeding in the major leagues. As the draft unfolds, Billy and his staff can’t believe their good fortune. After signing on to this modern-day form of indentured servitude, Billy is assigned to one of the Mets’ minor league affiliates. And by the time Billy Beane is at the helm of the Oakland A’s, the team’s ownership has stressed profitability above all else. Beane was also an especially talented pitcher and batter, and he even had “the Good Face.” (Lewis explains that some scouts believed that the structure of a player’s face revealed both his character and his “future in pro ball.”) Beane was a phenomenal athlete, but all the scouts missed several important clues, such as the abrupt drop in Beane’s batting average during his senior year. The 2002 iteration of the team goes on to a 103-59 record, good for first place in the American League West Division and second overall in the league, despite having what appears to be an inferior roster. Beane was a successful general manager, in part because he eagerly embraced a sabermetrics approach to baseball. The trade deadline is a moment of reckoning for every team in the major leagues, when they must take stock and determine whether they are still in contention for the playoffs or whether they should begin planning for next season.

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