Billy Beane
American Baseball Executive (1962 - )
- || At The Bottom
1990 -- When the 1989 regular season ended, Billy Beane had been one of the least productive players on the best team in baseball. His Oakland Athletics would go on to win the World Series that year, but Beane had to watch it all on television, since he was left off the post-season roster. A decade before, Beane was among the top young prospects in the nation. He had a remarkable throwing arm, great speed, and an overall athleticism that made him a multi-sport star at his San Diego high school. The quarterback of the football team and the high scorer on the basketball team, Beane was a standout pitcher who could knock the stuffing out of a baseball. Everything came easy to Billy Beane, and major league scouts pegged him as one of the top picks in the 1980 draft. Selected by the New York Mets in the first round, Beane fizzled as a major leaguer. After several seasons in the minor leagues, he bounced around between four teams from 1984-1989, batting a meager. 219 in only 148 games -- not even a full season's worth of work over the course of six years. By the spring of 1990, it was clear that Billy Beane was finished as a major league player -- just another fading prospect who never lived up to his potential on the field.
- || At The Top
2002 -- Few baseball experts expected the Oakland Athletics to hold on to their American League Western Division title in 2002. Billy Beane had just watched his biggest star -- slugger Jason Giambi -- leave the team as a free agent and sign with the endlessly wealthy New York Yankees, whose overall payroll was more than double that of the Athletics. Beane's club had been a pleasant surprise in 2001, winning the division and nearly defeating the Yankees in the first round of the playoffs. But with less cash to spread around, the Athletics seemed unlikely to duplicate their quirky success from the year before. By early September, however, the team was on fire, winning 20 consecutive games -- a league record -- on their way to a season in which they tied the Yankees for the most regular season wins. Although Billy Beane's Athletics lost to the Minnesota Twins in the playoffs that year, his reputation as a successful general manager was secure. He and his team's success was the subject of the best-selling book Moneyball by Michael Lewis.
- || The Comeback
Truth be told, Billy Beane had never felt comfortable as a baseball player. After high school, he had really wanted to attend Stanford University and sit out the major league draft, but he went through with the draft and, under significant pressure from his parents, eventually signed a contract with the New York Mets. He loved the game, however, and wanted to remain a part of it even after his playing career tailed off. When he finally hung up his cleats, he asked the Oakland Athletics for a job as a scout -- a highly unusual career change for a former player, but one that satisfied the analytical side of Beane's personality. In 1993, he was promoted to assistant general manager, where he and the general manager began developing unusual statistical models to determine which players to draft and which players to sign on the free agent market. With a smaller payroll than teams like the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox, the Oakland Athletics could not afford to find the big-name stars. Instead, they used their scientific principles to locate players who were "undervalued" and could be signed to smaller, more affordable contracts. When Beane was appointed to the position of general manager in 1998, his methods brought the team in a positive direction. Beginning in 1999, the team began posted winning records, and in 2000 the Athletics made the playoffs for the first time since 1992, and they did it with one of the smallest payrolls in the entire league. The success that had eluded Beane as a player was now in his grasp as a general manager. Although he never truly enjoyed being a player, he realized that he could be useful in -- and that he could be excited by -- other aspects of a game he still loved. As a player, he had been trying to fulfill the expectations of others; as a general manager, he was pursuing goals on his own terms. And by rejecting the conventional wisdom that insists that championships can only be one with big-name talent, Beane discovered a different way to find value in players that slipped beneath the public radar.
