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Billy Beane Research Paper

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Billy Beane Research Paper
As the Oakland A’s enter the 2002 baseball season they are faced with trying to

create a championship team with less money than anyone else in the league. To do this

Billy Beane not only took some risks and put everything on the line but he fought many

battles along the way.

The Oakland A’s are under new owners in 2002 and they cut Billy’s budget down

for recruiting. “On the long cafeteria table in front of Billy sat an invisible cash register,

and inside it the $9.4 million his owner had given him to sign perhaps as many as thirty-

five players. The A's seven first-round picks alone, paid what their equivalents had

received the year before, would cost him more than $11 million” (Lewis 100). $9.4

million seems like a lot of money
…show more content…
Billy wanted

guys who were matured and he also wanted guys whose stats showed the proof of their

success. Billy didn’t care about batting average; he cared about on base percentage and

walks. He wanted players who were patient and smart hitters. He showed his

determination to have these oddball players when he put Jeremy Brown in the 1 st round

draft for the A’s. Until Billy suggested Brown no one was even considering Brown at all.

To the older scouts he was “a bad body catcher” (Lewis 33). Billy looked at Browns

performance and not is physique. He had 300 hits and two hundred walks and that’s all

Billy cared about.

Billy Bean showed tremendous belief in sabermetrics. For him it was finally a

way to make sense of baseball and recruit not with the eyes but with stats. He focused on

on-base percentage, walks, age of player, and hits. His method for picking what he

thought was the best option was looking at long-term statistics of a player. He mostly

ignored the old ways of thinking about baseball and adopted a new system that would not

only save money but also make the A’s

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