To all those who are criticising our spendings & comparing us to Spurs, a true story: Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane is upset by his teams loss to the New York Yankees in the 2001 postseason. With the impending departure of star players Johnny Damon , Jason Giambi , and Jason Isringhausen to free agency, Beane attempts to devise a strategy for assembling a competitive team for 2002 but struggles to overcome Oaklands limited payroll. During a visit to the Cleveland Indians , Beane meets Peter Brand, a young Yale economics graduate with radical ideas about how to assess players value. Sensing opportunity, Beane hires Brand as the Athletics assistant general manager. The teams scouts are first dismissive of and then hostile towards Brands non-traditional sabermetric approach to scouting players. Brand assembles a team of undervalued players with far more potential than the As hamstrung finances would otherwise allow. Despite vehement objections from the scouts, Beane supports Brands theory and hires the players he selected, such as unorthodox submarine pitcher Chad Bradford. Early in the season, the Athletics fare poorly, leading critics within and outside the team to dismiss the new method as a dismal failure. Beane convinces the owner to stay the course, and eventually the teams record begins to improve. The Athletics go on to win 20 consecutive games, an American league record. However the Athletics fail to win the league due to poor performance in the first half of the season. Beane is later approached by the owner of the Boston Red Sox, John W Henry (present owner of Liverpool too) who realizes that the sabermetric model is the future of baseball, and offers to hire Beane as the general manager of the Red Sox. Beane passes up the opportunity to become the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, despite an offer of a $12.5 million salary, which would have made him the highest-paid general manager in sports history. He returns to Oakland to continue running the Athletics. In 2004, two years after adopting the sabermetric model, the Boston Red Sox win their first World Series since 1918.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 19:29:14 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015