Trey Price

Mrs. Thomas
UWRT-1101
21 October 2014
The Man Who Changed Baseball: Billy Beane
Before the turn of the century, most General Managers of Major League Baseball teams
had a staff of scouts that helped them evaluate players and make decisions on who was worth
how much money and how good of a player they were. These scouts were trained to look for
things such as game power, raw power and the ability to hit for a high average. But the game
was about to change and this transition could have been predicted by those that know the studies
and works of the Sabermetrician Bill James. James was influential on the statistical side of
baseball, he began writing books in 1977. But nobody would take him seriously because he had
never even had a job in baseball before. So as intriguing as Bill James is, this piece isnt about
him, but instead it is about someone who had a job in baseball and had the power to use James
ideas when building a roster. This man is Billy Beane. Beane, the former first round pick by the
Mets and failed and failed Major League player became the Athletics General Manager in 1998.
I will explain Beanes tenure as GM with a visual, a tweet about him, an article about
sabermetrics and an academic article about the methods he uses.
The Visual
The Oakland Athletics have been one of the most successful franchises in baseball as
long as they have been around. But things became tougher for them lately with teams in big

markets such as the Yankees, Redsox and Dodgers being able to sustain payrolls twice the
amount of what they are able to afford. They struggled to the sense of having of having 6 straight
losing seasons from 1993-1998. Remember that Billy Beane became the GM in 1998. Then
starting in 1999 they were able to run off 8 straight seasons of above .500 baseball which
included winning 87 or more every year (out of 162 games). This is where the visual comes in.

This visual is meant to display how well of a GM Billy Beane is. It was constructed to show how
the higher the payroll, the higher the win percentage, except for the As. It demonstrates to
anyone that comes across it that they must be doing something different in Oakland and
whatever it is, its working. Graphs like these normally have logical appeal to the audience and
this one is no different.
The Tweet
This tweet was created on October 1st, 2014 at 5:15 AM. This tweet is 139 characters
which is 1 short of the maximum amount allowed on twitter. Joel Sherman constructed this
tweet. Joel follows 137 people and has over 80 thousand followers. But who is Joel Sherman?
Sherman is a baseball columnist for the New York Post and a MLB Network Insider. So it is safe
to say he has a voice that people will listen to. He starts this tweet off strong with an indirect
quote of Billy Beane. Then he goes into using logic and statistics to say he somewhat disagrees
with Beane. The usage of a rhetorical question is meant to make the reader believe that 14 games
isnt a small sample size, but compared to a 162 game season, 14 games is still a small sample
size. It seems as if Sherman doesnt actually agree with his indirect quote of Beane, even though

he says mainly agree after the quote.

The Article
Sabermetrics: Are New Age Numbers in Baseball Replacing Common Sense? is what I
say as I read the name of the article. It was written by Lou Capetta, a writer for the well-known
sports website Bleacher Report. Capetta is from New York and his writing experiences include
various articles for Bleacher Report and a memoir of his sports life called The Sport of Life.
This particular article was published on March 31st, 2012, which would have been a couple of
days before Opening Day of baseball season for that year. Publishing it on this date would allow
for the maximum amount of people to be interested in it because they are all excited and
prepared for the long season ahead. Releasing it later in the season would not garner as much
interest because some people may lose interest over the course of the 180 day season. Capetta
starts the article with giving the readers a glance into his life saying that I learned the great
game of baseball from my father, who learned it from his father, and I have since passed the
lessons of the game on to my son. He figures that most people reading this article can at least
somewhat relate to this as baseball is seen as a predominantly family oriented sport. Then he
brings up topics of controversy throughout baseball and it seems as if he sides with modern
baseball which basically means he believes there is room for some changes in and around the
game of baseball. He mentions problems that have already been changed including in-game
changes, changes to the postseason and the addition of four teams since 1993.
Capetta then introduces for the first time the word SABR or sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is
the empirical analysis of baseball statistics and this is the force behind the Oakland Athletics and
how the evaluate players. You can tell that he is somewhat against sabermetrics because he says
this vast array of new numbers and statistical categories can sometimes cross the line from

being very useful to replacing common sense. Capetta is trying to inform his readers about
sabermetrics and he is then hoping that they will either take his side against it or maybe, just
maybe, they will like the idea and read more into it. He continues to reiterate the fact that there
are a lot of statistics out there now and that most of them confuse him. I believe he is trying to
turn casual baseball fans against sabermetrics without giving them a formal in depth of
explanation of how much of an advantage they can give an organization. He goes about this with
emotional appeal by saying that the use of sabermetrics takes out the common sense and tradition
in baseball, which depending on who you ask is not true. He does all of this while using a variety
of short and long sentences.
The Academic Journal
This piece was written by a guy name Keith Hammonds. He received his AB degree from
Dartmouth in English and then went on to get his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Hammonds if the current chief operating officer at Solutions Journalism Network. He previous
worked for Ashoka, Fast Company and Business week. He begins this piece with a quick
synopsis of how Billy Beane runs the Oakland Athletics. He proceeds to go more in depth with
the situation and it seems as if he is well read in the subject of baseball and sabermetrics. He uses
quotes from Billy and it seems like he was interviewing him for this article. He uses repetition of
words such as genius when describing Beane. The various mentions of words such as
mathematics, statistics and economics are also repetitive as he is trying to explain how Billy
Beane is different from most General Managers. This article was posted in May of 2003 and the
interview that he is quoting Beane from was in March as he mentions that it was during Spring
Training. Hammonds proceeds to use specific events to explain how the Oakland Athletics
operate and run their team like a business. They buy low on guys and sell high on them and

repeat this process as they do not have a large budget to work with. This appeals to me in a
logical sense as he uses statistics and names to prove his point instead of giving me a vague
description as Lou Capetta did in the article from Bleacher Report. Hammonds keeps the piece
flowing well and goes well from topic to topic as he hits a lot of major points. He finishes the
article up with a visual comparing several MLB teams in a couple of categories. This is logical
appeal again as he uses statistics to reiterate his previous points about Billy Beane and the
Oakland Athletics.