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Billy Beane, General Manager, Oakland A's
Michael Lewis Author, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
In conversation with Roy Eisenhardt, former President, Oakland A's
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Eisenhardt: On-base percentage is featured in the book, yet you're in the bottom third of teams in on-base percentages.
Beane: One challenge of being in Oakland is we have to reinvent ourselves every year. How would we look if we still had Jason Giambi? David Justice? Those guys we acquired under that philosophy. It is now a statistic that's being valued; we're having less of those players to choose from to replace the ones we've used. What's not important in my job is to champion having an on-base; what's most important is winning games. What this does is create opportunities in other areas for us to attack. In 1999 we were called a slow-pitch softball team - all we did was walk and hit homers. We're now one of the top defensive clubs with the number one pitching staff in baseball. While people are focused on what we're doing, we're trying to find the back door. In three or four years, there will be a change; we'll have a team that probably will look completely different statistically. But the aggregate wins and the bottom line is outscoring your opponents. We got a lot of publicity about the on-base because we could afford to attack winning games from that angle. Now that's a loophole that's closing up, so we have to find another one.
Eisenhardt: Michael, you talk about a lot of the minor leaguers who are drafted, and so the question is, is there another book that you have coming out of this?
Lewis: I plan to write a book but it's going to take so long to do that I hate to call it a sequel, but it's kind of a sequel. But a book about the kids they drafted in this book. I came in at a perfect season because the front office was, in a new way, imposing its philosophy on the scouting department and they went and drafted kids out college based on their performance statistics and an analysis of those much more than on what they looked like and whether they looked good and whether they could run fast and all the rest. And so there are all of these unlikely characters who get drafted. The star of the show is Jeremy Brown - a fat catcher from Alabama. They decide they're going to make Jeremy Brown a low first-round draft choice when Jeremy Brown thought that he was going to go in the 15th round. The scout who was assigned to call Jeremy Brown to tell him he was going to be a first-round draft choice - they felt very comfortable taking him in the first round because of his performance, but he didn't look right - said, I can't tell him all at once because it's going to shock him. So I watched him first call and say, "Think top ten rounds." And then he called him back and said, "Think top five rounds." And then he called him back and at last said, "We're going to make you the first-round draft choice of the Oakland A's tomorrow." And Jeremy Brown said, "I got to call you back." And he hung up the phone and called him back because he thought it was a crank call from his teammates at the University of Alabama. He didn't believe anyone would value him so highly. He's an extreme example but there's several of them like him whose views of themselves were changed by the Oakland A's view of them. I want to follow what happens to these kids and their careers, so there's a book that's going to be called Underdogs about what happens to them.
Eisenhardt: How can statistics measure a player's contribution to team dynamics and chemistry?
Beane: As a former player and as I guy that has been in a clubhouse of teams that have won, isn't it funny how teams that always win have great chemistry and teams that don't win have poor chemistry? We try and take care of the winning and assume the chemistry will take over, because we can measure the winning; the wake of winning is team chemistry.
