Brad Pitt stars in new baseball drama “Moneyball” as Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane – best known as the person who changed the game of baseball by creating a unique method for judging players.
Fixing inefficiencies in the way players were evaluated.
Billy Beane III is a former Major League Baseball player and the current general manager and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics.
After a mediocre career as a profession baseball player, Beane became GM for the Oakland A’s in 1998. Due to his team’s success despite its low player payroll, Beane was the subject of author Michael Lewis’s 2003 best-selling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. The book discusses Beane’s methods as the GM of the A’s and how he used sabermetric principles to run his team in a cost-effective way. According to the book, this allowed him to be successful despite his financial constraints. The book and Beane’s methods have influenced the way many in baseball think about the game of baseball, including other teams and even players. Beane took a more quantitative approach than his predecessor’s use of sabermetric principles.
Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective, empirical evidence, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity, rather than industry activity such as attendance. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who is one of its pioneers and is often considered its most prominent advocate and public face.
Sabermetrics is concerned both with determining the value of a player or team in past seasons and with trying to predict the value of a player or team in the future. While many areas of study are still in development, it has yielded a number of interesting insights into the game of baseball and in the area of performance measurement.