Words matter. These are the best Billy Beane Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Smaller markets teams, when you hit bottom, you hit with a thud.
The bottom line is that any business should be a meritocracy. The best and brightest. Period.
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.
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.
In baseball, you can do something poorly and still get credit. A pitcher could throw a bad ball, the batter hit a screaming line drive, and an outfielder make a fantastic diving catch. Yet, when you look at historical databases, 80% of the time when a ball is struck with that trajectory and velocity, it is a hit.
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.
We’ve got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully that will help us be accurate with our player evaluation. For us, that’s our life blood.
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.
We try to create a situation where we’re the casino. It’s like how an actuary would set insurance rates. Predictability, predictability, predictability. What’s the path to least risk? What’s the greater chance of getting some return on this asset?
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.
We can’t do the same things the Yankees do. Given the economics, we’ll lose.
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.
