Billy Beane
What is Billy Beane known for in Major League Baseball?
What book and movie chronicled Billy Beane’s work with the Oakland Athletics?
What was the key strategy Billy Beane used to improve the Oakland Athletics?
Billy Beane (born March 29, 1962, Orlando, Florida, U.S.) is a Major League Baseball (MLB) executive who helped revolutionize the sport by challenging longtime ways to measure players’ performance during his time as general manager of the Oakland Athletics (A’s). He became a celebrity after his work was chronicled in Michael Lewis’s best-selling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), which was turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt as Beane.
Early life
Beane was born in Florida but grew up in San Diego and learned baseball from his father, a career naval officer. By the time he was 14, he already towered six inches over his dad and demonstrated elite athletic talent. In high school, Beane was the quarterback on the football team and the best scorer on the basketball team. Scouts came to watch him play baseball, and in one particularly memorable game, he hit three triples—each drive longer than the one before it.
Beane wanted to attend college at Stanford University, where the college planned to have him replace quarterback John Elway. But when the New York Mets chose him in the first round of the 1980 draft, he turned down Stanford’s offer of a combined football and baseball scholarship to turn pro.
Beane made his major league debut with the Mets at the end of the 1984 season, appearing in five games that year. Over the next five seasons, he bounced between the majors and minors. His disappointing career ended in 1989, when he was just 27. He finished with a lifetime MLB batting average of .219, having played with the Mets, the Minnesota Twins, the Detroit Tigers, and the A’s.
From scout to visionary executive
After retiring, Beane became a scout for the A’s and then a deputy to general manager Sandy Alderson, before succeeding him as GM in October 1997. It didn’t take Beane long to reverse the team’s fortunes. In 1998, his first year as GM, the A’s had their sixth straight losing record and finished in last place in their division. The next season they improved to 87–75. By 2000 they were American League (AL) West Division champs.
Under Beane’s leadership, the team emphasized statistics such as on-base percentage (OBP) over the more traditional stats of batting average and RBI (runs batted in). Because the A’s were a small-market team with a limited payroll, they had to be willing to bypass expensive players and instead find undervalued players. One such challenge came in 2001. That year, superstar Jason Giambi helped lead the team to 102 wins with a .342 batting average, 38 home runs, 120 RBI, and a league-best .660 slugging percentage. But after the season, he became a free agent and signed with the New York Yankees. Beane didn’t try to keep Giambi because he could be replaced with several cheaper players.
“He could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without, and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself,” Lewis wrote. Beane picked up a trio of players that nobody else wanted: outfielder David Justice, catcher Scott Hatteberg, and Giambi’s younger brother, Jeremy.
The Moneyball phenomenon
The A’s didn’t miss a beat the next year despite losing their best player in Giambi, winning 103 games in 2002. Justice and Hatteberg excelled in OBP, finishing first and second on the team with excellent .376 and .374 OBPs, respectively. (The 2011 movie version of Moneyball actually recreated this particular season of underdogs marching to the division title and winning 20 straight games along the way.) After the 2002 season, the Boston Red Sox reached an agreement to hire Beane as their new GM, but he wound up changing his mind and staying with Oakland. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game came out the next year, and it “became a must-read for both baseball and business aficionados,” ESPN’s Howard Bryant wrote. “Beane became the lead evangelist of a new baseball orthodoxy that emphasizes greater statistical analysis in the scouting and development of players.”
In the book, Lewis called Beane “a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way to return the favor.’’ The term moneyball has become a synonym for a team’s smart use of quantifiable information over outdated, old-school approaches. Not surprisingly, some in baseball’s old guard resented the book, and some people were even under the mistaken impression that Beane had written it. He has pointed out that Lewis sought him out for the project. When Lewis interviewed him, Beane was convinced that nobody in baseball would read the book.
The A’s made the playoffs four consecutive seasons from 2000 to 2003 but lost in the first round each time. They returned to the playoffs in 2006 and won a first-round playoff series against the Twins before losing the AL Championship Series to the Tigers. Oakland had another run in the early 2010s, making the playoffs in 2012, 2013, and 2014, but those teams also failed to make the World Series.
In 2015 David Forst took over as general manager, with Beane becoming executive vice president of baseball operations. The team made the playoffs in 2018, 2019, and 2020 but again fell short of the pennant. Beane became a senior adviser to team owner John Fisher in 2022, relinquishing day-to-day operations of the team to Forst.