THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE GAME – STORY OF BILLY BEANE

“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”

― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

SPOILER ALERT- if you seen or read Moneyball, then go ahead but if you have not then I warn you that there are spoilers ahead. In case you are not interested in reading this amazing book or watching the Brad Pitt masterpiece then go ahead, read this and I am sure that you will be interested in this economic masterpiece.

So who is Mr. Billy Beane, well if you ask in a professional sense then he is currently a front office executive. Which means that he is face of a business organization, which one should be your question. Well there’s a team called The Oakland Athletics which competes in Major League Baseball under AL-WEST Division. Mr. Beane is currently the Vice-President and minority owner of this team. But in case you are interested in knowing why are we discussing Mr. Beane then I will tell you that he is the man who changed the world of sports.

HOW???

Well to answer this question I’ll have to move step by step.

Scouting and Sports

Scouting has been a traditional way of picking up talented players by teams. The Scouts hunt for the entire year and look for young talents who can possibly make their way to the top. They take them in, then polish their talent and then make them roster ready. Scouts also look out the possible transfer aspects from other teams.

But there’s a difference between scouting for young players and the ones who are already trained. Young guys are cheap and vulnerable, scouts hunt them like scavengers and take them in at tender ages sometimes as young as 7-8 years old. These guys give their everything to make it to the top and in some cases they do. In case everything is Hunky-Dory but what happens if this situation does not pan out the way it is supposed to do. Then these players are succumbed to the fear of their declining performance, they are pressurized by the administration which makes them take performance enhancing drugs and still if they are unable to perform they are demoted and finally FIRED. Since these guys never got time to polish their other skillsets, their educational qualifications are usually no more than high school level and they lack corporate attitude all this makes them unemployable in any other industry. Hence they look out for odd jobs in sports industry itself, some even become janitors and dry cleaners for players. IN SHORT scouting though effective does not boast a very comprehensive success rate, to quote Brad Pitt from Moneyball-

“You don't have a crystal ball. You can't look at a kid and predict his future any more than I can. I've sat at those tables and listened to you tell those parents "When I know, I know. And when it comes to your son. I know." And you don't. You don't.”

Billy Beane -The Beginning.

Billy Beane was a star in high school baseball circuit of America. The summers of 1980 saw multiple teams running in to sign Beane as their first pick in the upcoming MLB draft. Beane on the other hand was also offered a full scholarship to Stanford University and a place on their football and baseball teams. The dilemma of choosing between sports and scholarship demoted Beane in the draft.

But the New York Mets kept persuading him and his parents to start professional baseball. Finally Billy accepted the $125000 offer from the Mets and started a career in professional baseball. But as fate would have it this decision didn’t pan out they way it was supposed to. Beane was a failure in professional baseball. He was continuously traded to different teams until he landed in Oakland in 1989. That’s when Billy decided to give up professional baseball and start scouting young talents. A decision that changed his life forever.

A Fresh Start and Sabermetrics

Under Beane and the then owner Mr. Hass Oakland appeared in three continuous editions of the world series. Still Beane developed a distaste for traditional methods of scouting. He wanted a more accurate way of predicting whether or not a player has chance to make it big in baseball world. And he got that.

After Hass the team was taken over by Scott and Hoffman who ordered the then GM Alderson to slash payrolls of players. So Alderson decided to value the players according to the principles of sabermetrics. Sabermetrics was a mathematical approach to value players. It followed the idea of not focussing on how big a player is or how talented he is instead it focussed on investment for buying wins and chronologically runs. The sabermetrics data for baseball mainly focussed on the players ON BASE PERCENTAGE or OBP. Billy was inspired by this idea and hence decided to apply it in a full fledged form.

“The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”

― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Sabermetrics and Player Evaluation

So this is story of a guy named Bill James. James was no mathematician, although he had a degree in economics but mainly he was a crazy baseball fan. As a person who never got any experience in conventional journalism or mathematics James was free in every way to analyse the game his way. While serving as a security guard for Stokely-Van Camp’s Pork and Beans Co. James wrote unusual articles for sports magazines. Articles with queer titles like, “ Which pitchers and catchers allow runners to steal the most bases?". His articles although unusual attracted readers.

He then published a set of twelve books mainly focussed on baseball statistics and player evaluation. This method was later called sabermetrics. The entire objective was to bring each player’s value to one single number know as the On Base Percentage or The OBP. More is the player’s OBP more should be his value. Initially although rejected by the baseball community the method attracted some forward thinking individuals like Billy. And so Oakland became the flag bearers for statistical player evaluation.

The Unfair Game

The opening scene of Moneyball shows two numbers $ 114,457,768 V/S $39,722,689. This was the evaluation of two teams who were competing in the knockout contest of ALDS. The New York Yankees was clearly the favourites not because they were better by virtue of the game but because they were almost they were three times more costly than their opponents Oakland Athletics. An unfair game.

Billy took over as the GM of the Athletics in 1997, since then it was the same story every year- he bought players, helped them grow and then used to loose them to richer teams. As Billy himself says in Moneyball-

Billy Beane: There are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then, there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us.

He felt that replacing players each year was too much too ask. It was as if Oakland had become an organ donation centre for teams like The Yankees. The beginning of 2002 season witnessed similar fates Oakland superstars like Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi and Olmedo were taken by teams like The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees on payrolls as high as 15 million dollars per year. Billy felt that replacing these guys was like replacing your heart and kidneys, you cannot do THAT!!!!

The Solution and Moneyball

SO Billy decided to apply sabermetrics in full throttle. He came up with this idea where he would recreate the players he had lost in aggregate rather than replacing them. How??

By equating their OBP’s. He bought in players like Scott Hatterberg and Chad Bradford who were undervalued in baseball but had high OBP’s. He created an entire roster out of pure mathematics.

But this was not well received among the baseball community. Billy was treated like a sore thumb in this bunch of front office bearers who were not willing to adapt. And to add to his problems his team started the 2002 season with a series of humiliating losses, this plumed to the bottom of AL-WEST.

Comeback And The Streak

But soon the analysis showed results. With a few carefully devised trading moves they started winning their games and climbed up the AL ladder. Soon this occasional wins season turned into an entire winning streak. A homerun from Scott Hatterberg the same player who was released from half the organisations in baseball due non-repairable nerve marked the 20th continuous win for the Athletics, a record never achieved in 100 years of American League baseball. This also put a full stop at all the accusations that were thrown at Beane.

The first person through the wall always gets bloody, Beane was that guy. And hence began a new age in baseball. Boston offered Billy an amount of 12.5 million dollars to become their GM, but he politely declined. According to him-

 “I made one decision in my life based on money and I swore I would never do it again.”

But the Red Sox applied Billy’s method and just after two years won their first ever world series.

Sabermetrics has also been applied in NBA and Soccer. It has changed the world of sports forever. And there is one and only one ma behind this revolution …….

BILLY BEANE ….

“People in both fields operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.”

― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game