In Billy we trust!

The Oakland Athletics have the best record in the Major leagues. They have won the AL West two years in a row and are looking even better this year. In 2012, they won the division with a nail-biting series at the end to put the heavily favored Texas Rangers away after the Rangers had gotten all the way to the World Series the previous two years. Nobody, even in the Bay Area, knew any of the players on the A's roster at that time. It was perceived as an amazing run locally and a fluke nationally. Last year, the A's won the division a little more comfortably, but they were still an anonymous team nationally and the local fans had barely gotten used to these guys. The national media was a little confused as to what to make of this team. There were no superstars, but the pitching was deep and terrific and the team just kept winning and surprising everybody. They proved 2012 was no fluke and that they are legit. Of course, both seasons, they lost to the more celebrated, higher-payroll, star-studded Detroit Tigers team in the ALDS in a five game series though they won the division over the more celebrated, higher-payroll, star-studded Angels and the Rangers. They came into 2014 with decent expectations - even nationally, and have been better than expected.

The 2014 A's have broken through. And Billy Beane went all in last week when he traded for Jeff Samardzija, one of the most sought after pitchers on the trade block. He did mortgage the future a little bit by trading his can't miss shortstop prospect Addison Russell, but he signaled finally that he wants to win the World Series and he is right in the middle of the window to do it. It may not have been a coincidence that the trade came right after a sweep at Detroit, but it was a coup nonetheless. A's were not rumored to be in the running for Samardzija, but they scored him early and comfortably. Billy decided to fortify a starting rotation that has already looked stellar so far. You could tell he was a little concerned about some of these arms - some young and some retread, slowing down later in the season. So he infused some new star arms into to mix. The pitching is so strong that the guy he demoted to the minors to create roster space was Tommy Milone, who had just pitched 6 scoreless innings! Billy is clearly getting ready for late October and he may not be done wheeling and dealing. He knows that Detroit will be around and their stars - both power hitters and pitchers, have to be neutralized. He now has the pitching to compete in any series against anyone and I love it.

The A's have often added to their teams mid-season when they were in contention. But usually, it's a rental for the remainder of the season and mostly hitters or bullpen help. Billy has rarely added a star starting pitcher via a trade and this has been a pleasant surprise to the A's fans. Samardzija started for the A's right away and gave them a gem of a start to go with a win. So life is all good in Oakland right now. Between their best record in the league, consistent winning over the last three years, Cespedes' highlight reel throws to the plate, and now the Samardzija trade, they are not anonymous anymore. The league knows them well and they have six dudes in the all-star game. They will be the fancy pick to win it all, though the Angels are breathing down their neck for the division. Billy has always maintained, I might add rightfully so, that the MLB playoffs are a crapshoot. Given his low payroll, all he can do is get them there and the rest is just luck and a pitcher or two getting hot or cold at the right moment. But this year, he has decided to do something about the crapshoot. He wants to go in with a bevy of hot pitchers and increase his odds of one of theoe guys getting hot and shutting some fools down in October. Thats exactly what he is going for.

Moneyball is so year 2000, but this team the last three years has been Billy's masterpiece and more impressive than even those moneyball teams. The A's have the fourth lowest payroll in the league and have been out-performing the big money spenders as always. The moneyball concepts have been co-opted by every other team and is nothing unique anymore. So Billy has found other ways to exploit market inefficiencies - he had to. He is loaded with pitching as always and some great signings and trades are behind it.  But platooning is the specialty of this version of the A's - the new moneyball if you will. The A's matchup their hitters against pitchers and rotate them in and out. The lack of stars gives them more flexibility to do this. Not only does it help the team to platoon these guys, it also puts them in the best position to succeed. Just to illustrate the point, they sometimes start three catchers. Aside from pitcher Scott Kazmir, outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, and now Samardzija, the other A's all-stars are third baseman Josh Donaldson, catcher Derek Norris, first baseman/outfielder Brandon Moss, and closer Sean Doolittle. Thats an impressive list of no-name stars who get the job done. It's just a matter of time before this platooning approach becomes the new fad and A's front office dudes like David Forst and Farhan Zaidi get GM jobs elsewhere, but Billy is trying to win one before all that happens. All he needs is just one World Series ring to cement his legacy as one of the best GMs ever and I hope he gets it done this year.

Moneyball II

The Oakland A's swept their final series of the season against the big, bad Texas rangers yesterday and ended up at the top of the AL West standings - the only day the entire season they were at the top and not a bad day to be in that position. With a 55 million dollar payroll and a bunch of kids, they did the unimaginable against teams with twice or thrice their payroll. I don't think anybody except Billy Beane and I expected this! That's a shameless plug for myself, but I did expect this team to do better than what most people predicted. That was just based on my trust in Billy Beane's approach last off-season and had nothing do with my knowledge about these players. After all, apparently even Billy Beane didn't recognize some of these players when he crossed paths with them for the first time inside Oakland Coliseum. Of course, I would not have been surprised if they went 62-100 and finished last either because that's what the experts told us. It's a great story that the team came together and achieved this with a bunch of rookie starting pitchers. I can't remember any team succeeding at this level with so many rookie starting pitchers and pitching was and is their strength.

Billy Beane deserves all the credit for this team, even more than the original moneyball teams. He traded away kids to acquire even younger kids and accumulated so many quality arms. The pitching depth of the A's is quite impressive and I am sure most baseball fans around the country can't even name 2 or 3 of A's starters - even today, not just when the season started. All of their veteran pitchers are either hurt or suspended, but they still have enough depth to keep winning. Beane deserves a lot of credit because he seems to have acquired the right kind of arms. Pitching prospects are dime a dozen, but successful prospects who turn out to be good are rarer than you think. Beane seems to have found the prefect group and seem to be paying even less than a dime for his dozen. The baseball establishment is not on board with all things Billy because of the moneyball hype, but he earned this one the hard way. And his quote at the end of the season ain't bad either. “We set out to create a team whose future was better than its past,” Beane said. “In the process, we made a team for the present.” And this team looks good for the future too. America better get used to names like Yoenis Cespedes, Josh Reddick, Daniel Straily, AJ Griffin, Jarrod Parker and Tommy Milone. They are here to stay.

This team had no business even being one of the 2 wild cards according to most experts, but they ended up winning the division at the end, that too after trailing the Rangers by 13 games at one point in the season. Their gift for all this - a tough series starting on the road against the Detroit Tigers and Justin Verlander. They actually have a better record than Detroit, but they still have to start the series on the road because of the unique 2-3 format this year to squeeze some time for the extra wildcard games by cutting the travel day out of the old 2-2-1 format. This new format will be dangerous for all these higher seeds opening on the road, but especially for the A's since they have to face Verlander and Max Scherzer. But they will come back home and I am sure will make a series out of it. Speaking of the one-game wildcard series, the idea made no sense to me at first, but now I realize I missed the point. Of course nobody from MLB did a good job of explaining the logic behind it either at the start of the season. Now that I saw it work through the entire season, I get it and actually love it. It totally restores the prestige and value of winning the division, which the first wild card took away back in the day. In fact, that was Bob Costas' argument against the first wildcard for years. With the addition of the second wildcard, of course teams want to win the division just to avoid that dangerous one game elimination game. Texas and Oakland swapped places on the last day and are in completely different worlds right now. The wildcard world is not fun for the teams involved.

A's are now getting ready for the playoffs to deal with Verlander and Miguel Cabrera. Congrats to Miggy on the triple crown. It's a special achievement that clinches the AL MVP for him. Sorry Mike Trout.

Moneyball

I watch my share of movies, but am not a big movie guy. I don't think I have ever been as excited for a movie as I am for Moneyball. The movie is finally out, many years after the book and has actually gotten great reviews. This is the movie about the Oakland Athletics and Billy Beane, my favorite GM in the game. I read the Moneyball book years back and it was definitely a page-turner. I expect this movie to be equally good and hope it doesn't make me cry! I miss those Oakland teams and how good they were with those big 3 - Hudson, Mulder and Zito. They had a small payroll, actually very small. But they also had those pitchers and Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada and what appeared to be a very sturdy farm system. All of the big 3 and Chavez and Tejada were drafted by the A's and they also had Rich Harden and Joe Blanton coming up. And don't forget closer Houston Street, shortstop Bobby Crosby and outfielder Nick Swisher - all guys homegrown and pretty good. Beane always went out and made some great mid-season trades to rent players for the stretch run. And he would let him walk after the season and accumulate more draft picks for more moneyball picks.

The book explained that strategy among many others. It explained the A's love for walks, OPS and college players. It also explained why they thought high-school prospects are risky, bunts are bad, and defense is over-rated. It all made sense to the A's fans when the book came out because they were witnessing all this in real-time. The team was full of home-grown, young, cheap talent drafted by A's and they were winning big. The book credited all this to A's love for sabermetrics and A's trust in numbers and statistics. It also ridiculed traditional drafting techniques, scouts and old-school GMs and that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Fast forwarding to the here and now, many of those people are taking a lot of pleasure from the troubles Beane and the A's are in. Very surprisingly, all of Beane's magic seems to have evaporated. May be it's bad karma! The A's teams since 2007 have been bad, uninteresting and boring. They have really not even showcased any top, young talent to be stolen by the richer clubs. They seem to bring up young players, but none of them seem to really stick out. There was a lot of hope for their pitchers this year after last year's performance, but they seem to have all taken a step back.

The primary problem for Beane is that the entire league is now into sabermetrics and the Moneyball book is a big reason for this. Between the book and the championship success of the Boston Redsox - another moneyball team, the rest of the league seemed to have followed suit. Billy Beane was not the first or the only one to rely on stats back in the day, but the book promoted him as a genius and popularized the concepts. This has led to all the other teams following suit. Many scouts and GMs are upset with Beane because they were all offended by some of the scenes in the book. The primary criticism of Beane is that he never won anything big - the A's have not even been to the World Series under his watch. The other complaint is that the book (or the movie) doesn't give much credit to the top talent they had - the big 3 pitchers especially. Their point is, the top talent they had were all high on most people's draft boards, with or without moneyball and hence Beane can't take much credit for those. Most of the true "moneyball" picks on the other hand, have not done much in the big league. I used to wonder about that myself as the book spent entire chapters on certain players as if they were surefire diamonds in the rough that the A's and A's alone spotted. But I have not heard of those players at all since then. So the critics say the A's were successful because of Hudson, Zito and Mulder and not because of moneyball or Beane's genius.

As always, the truth is somewhere in-between. To be fair to Beane, he did pick most of those star players and they may not have been entirely moneyball picks, but I am sure Beane followed some of his drafting policies on them as well. Secondly, I think the whole point is how he was winning an unfair game and you can't dismiss all that just because he never won the big one. Boston did win big because they backed up the moneyball numbers with the most important numbers that matter - zeros on the paychecks making up that big payroll. Theo Epstein is also a moneyball guy and Beane actually recommended him when Boston was hiring after Beane turned that job down himself. I wonder if it was a bad decision on the part of Beane to have rejected that offer in retrospect. At that time, the theory was, Beane with those resources will be more scrutinized and will look less like a genius and of course, it was also going to be hard to handle that crazy east coast media and the RedSox pressures. But Theo erased the curse of the bambino and brought a championship to Boston. He will never have to pay for a drink again in Boston. If Beane had won that ring - no guarantee he would have, he would be an even bigger star just because of the name recognition. Epstein was just a kid back then and he earned his stripes with that ring. Beane on the other already had the stripes. The stripes would have only gotten brighter, thicker and deeper. Hope he doesn't regret that decision and end up going to Chicago where they are looking to hire a GM to erase their own curse and Beane is on the shortlist of candidates.

Beane does deserve credit for revolutionizing the game to some extent. He was one of the early adopters of sabermetrics and the moneyball idea has definitely "crossed the chasm" now. It's mainstream to the point the A's can't work the system anymore. Beane in some sense shot himself in the foot with the book and also his success in general. Most of his critics are just bitter and they are being sadistic in enjoying his recent struggles. Moneyball definitely had it's share of good ideas and he deserves credit for it. They have to learn to give the devil it's due. Sure, the book does mock the traditional scouts and the baseball hierarchy - sometimes unnecessarily, but thats just the arrogance that personifies the whole jock and sports culture. Beane is just an ex-jock and his critics should cut him some slack. He is now facing an uphill battle. All of his competitive advantage is gone as richer teams are doing what he is doing, but with a lot of cash that the A's don't have. He has also learned to incorporate more traditional techniques these days as he has realized pure moneyball can't do it alone. Plus, I am not even sure what the Oakland A's want these days as a franchise. They are dealing with stadium issues, potential moves etc. Sometimes I wonder if they are self-destructing for a reason - to force a move or a new stadium or something. That would be sinister, but thats all part of the business of sports. Whatever it is, I wish Beane the best of luck, I hope he stays with Oakland and I expect him to be back with a decent product on the field soon. It's time for him to re-invent himself and if anybody can do it, he sure can.

If Beane leaves the A's, there is always the option of hiring Brad Pitt as their next GM!