Why does billy beane stay in oakland

Look at what happened. Turning it down meant that Theo Epstein was in charge. And we know the rest of the story. They had built the best organization in the game and they had this bright young man in Theo who had great ideas of how to build a baseball organization.

What superstition irrational belief did Billy Beane have? Billy Beane is taking a personal equity stake in one player.

Billy makes the deal for Ricardo Rincon, only giving up a minor league second baseman named Marshall McDougall. Yes, it is true that Fuson left the team in Is Brandon Beane related to Billy Beane? Actually, yes, Beane said. Casey completed her graduation from Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. When the movie Moneyball was adapted from the book, DePodesta did not approve of the way his character was portrayed.

DePodesta serves as the direct inspiration for the mastermind of the analytics approach at the center of the baseball drama. Most sports fans became familiar with the story through the movie Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Beane. However, that turns out not to be the end of the story. Beane went on to explain that part of decision to stay in Oakland was to remain close to his then-teenage daughter. Looking back, I knew what I was turning down. The broad: the future of the film industry.

The specific: his excitement over his new project, a film adaptation of "Moneyball," the Michael Lewis bestseller that catapulted Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane into the most outsized, polarizing and potentially wealthy general manager in baseball. Not long before his speech, Soderbergh received a message from an associate that the film -- less than five days away from the start of shooting -- had been canceled by the studio, Sony Pictures.

Variety already had the story. Just days earlier, Soderbergh had sent massive floral arrangements to the A's secretaries, thanking them for their hard work and support in making the movie a reality.

The women in the A's front office were aflutter with the power of Hollywood magic, thrilled as much by the size of the flowers as by Brad Pitt, the actor slated to play Beane in the movie. Moneyball the Movie was dead. As the news spread, the requisite prairie fire ensued. Several former A's, including manager Art Howe, hitting coach Thad Bosley and outfielder David Justice, had signed on to be available for up to two months of shooting in Los Angeles and Phoenix, playing themselves.

At Phoenix Municipal Stadium, the A's spring training home, a replica of Beane's Oakland office, the A's clubhouse, and the outfield walls of the A's home stadium, McAfee Coliseum, had already been designed. David Renetti, the A's stadium director in Oakland, got the call from his staff working with the production crew in Phoenix.

Take everything down, was the order from the studio, according to Renetti's people. It's over. Everyone, even the secretaries and administrative assistants, wondered what the news meant for them. Outside Oakland, the scoffs were loud and oddly self-satisfied, for parallel to the collapse of the movie was the current futility of Beane's real-life product, the A's.

Around certain quadrants of baseball, there is no shortage of enjoyment in the belief that the team's sub-. Since the A's were swept by Detroit in the American League Championship Series in , they've neither made the playoffs nor been a. Every winning club eventually loses, and there are nearly always plenty of reasons for it. But in Oakland's case, the glee over the A's tumble has not been directed at the players or their coaches, or even at the team's ownership.

Instead, the fingers seem to point to one person in particular: Beane, who in his 12th season as general manager is the face of the remarkable, massive and oftentimes unpopular cultural upheaval of the Moneyball revolution.

Well, they're the ones who've already lost. Since Beane took over in Oakland, how baseball players are evaluated -- and, perhaps even more importantly, who is hired to do the evaluating at the general manager level -- has never been the same.

In the process, Beane reached a level of stardom off the field that he never achieved as a player. For his singular, unapologetic iconoclasm in the face of the game's long tradition, Lewis lionized him six years ago in "Moneyball," which became a must-read for both baseball and business aficionados.

Beane became the lead evangelist of a new baseball orthodoxy that emphasizes greater statistical analysis in the scouting and development of players. The Moneyball way also diminishes the field manager's organizational influence while it increases the power and profile of the general manager position -- a job that was once largely invisible.

In the year history of Major League Baseball, the office of field manager has never held less power than it does now, in the wake of Moneyball. You wouldn't understand. Then the owners realized the dynamics of baseball -- of assessing risk -- were the same as the ones they faced in their outside businesses. If Beane didn't singlehandedly reinvent how hitting is evaluated, he almost certainly has become the face of the massive change in prioritizing how certain components of the craft are now compensated.

In the process, he also became a corporate sensation. Fortune CEOs suddenly were interested in him as that rare commodity: the athlete thinker. He may very well be the most influential figure in the game over the past 25 years, and some in the sport seem to have never forgiven him for it.

Now, he was about to be immortalized on the silver screen, portrayed by one of Hollywood's biggest stars. And it is in this spirit, as his team suffers in last place without a single. In his sparsely furnished, low-ceilinged office situated across the walkway from McAfee Coliseum, Beane is wearing the same pants he wore the day before.

He is 47 years old with a year-old daughter from his first marriage and -- at age 45 -- had twins with his second wife, Tara. He is gray at the temples, softer around the shoulders and middle, and fighting a bad knee that kept him in the A's training room for much of the spring in Arizona. He is still athletic and charismatic and opinionated; but, in his mind, he stands at a remove from his old fast-lane life or Brad Pitt's suntanned vitality.

Oh, jeez," Beane wrote in a text message recently. Can't I just live out my J. Salinger existence and just fade away?

Some element of the Moneyball legacy invariably produces a treatise on him and his theories, almost on a regular basis. On the good, the refined successes of the Boston Red Sox a well-financed team that adopted many of Beane's philosophies while enjoying virtually unlimited resources, unlike the A's provide evidence of Moneyball's obvious sustainability. Even Bill James -- who in the original screenplay is portrayed as an infallible, clear-eyed sage in a world of chaos whose wisdom went long ignored by the Establishment -- has pared back his once-sharp criticisms of traditional scouting and development methods now that he's worked on the inside with the Boston Red Sox since We tried to hire him, but what we've done since Theo [Epstein] took over is to take some of the quantitative analysis approaches and overlay them with the resource advantages of our market.

Both visions provide the opportunity to revive old tensions, and on this day in his office, Beane is fighting the demons his outsized evangelism has created. Not only does his Moneyball empire come with a crown he says he does not want; it's one he says he never wanted. I never solicited him in any way," Beane says. I didn't. I didn't ask them to do this movie. Do I have an ego? Who doesn't? That's why [White Sox GM] Kenny Williams is still one of the best guys running the game, because of his experience playing the game.

He's got a certain swagger. It's still a business, but it's also a testosterone business. One of his frustrations these days is that no one seems to believe him. No one believes that he wasn't in the least bit crestfallen when he heard that the Soderbergh movie had collapsed.

Beane became the de facto face of a revolution; his star power lunch with Warren Buffett, dinner with Brad Pitt, a video-game simulation in which he is the main character and the reach of the book catapulted him beyond his peers and created a new dialogue in the game. The question from those nonbelievers follows: What could baseball possibly have left for him? But what his critics really dislike him for is the perception that he didn't do much to discourage the idea that he is a visionary -- especially in a clannish industry that historically has demanded conformity over intellectualism and iconoclasm.

In the six years since the book was published, "Moneyball" hasn't benefited anyone in baseball more than Beane. Few general managers, if any, since Branch Rickey have ever owned a piece of a major league baseball team. His closest associates, primarily assistant GM David Forst, had been telling Beane for months that the "Moneyball" movie might be good for the entertainment world but it certainly would not be good for Beane himself.

Many scenes in the script were not particularly flattering, Forst reasoned, and the caricature would only further overshadow the real Billy Beane.

The fear: He would be taken less seriously. And Major League Baseball was uncomfortable with the womanizing elements of the Beane character in the original screenplay, considering the A's general manager has been married in real life since he took the job. His friend Brian Cashman, the general manager of the Yankees, read an original draft of the script and thought it undermined Beane's actual abilities.

A scene from pages of the original script, involving an exchange between Justice and Beane:. But go ahead. Tell them how to play baseball. Not me. The Yankees are paying half your salary. That's what they think of you. I want to milk the last ounce of baseball you have in you and you want to milk the last dollar.

After that we never have to see each other again. You think it was going to help me score chicks? I read in one scene I was at an Applebee's and ordered a mojito. I don't even know what's in a mojito. And herein lies a critical disconnect. Friends suggest Beane has expected the public to differentiate between the movie's fictional accounts and the book's nonfiction approach, an unrealistic position especially when the movie would use real names of real people. Really, I'm not that interesting.

The reason he's interesting, of course, is his influence in the evolution toward the greater use of qualitative analysis in baseball, which was under way as early as the mids. The Yankees were teaching their minor league prospects the value of taking pitches back then. John Hart, when he was general manager in Cleveland, began cultivating a new type of baseball assistant -- a well-educated, analytical mind that didn't require prior playing experience -- to be groomed for the next generation of executives.

And years before he took over in Oakland, Beane's predecessor and mentor, Alderson, was articulating a top-down front-office approach. Alderson concluded that the old-school, Casey Stengel paradigm -- in which the field manager was face of the front office and had the most say in which players played, were traded and drafted -- was fundamentally flawed.

Alderson was the first to begin referring to the manager not as the leader of the ballclub, but as a "middle manager. Beane expanded upon Alderson's positions, and developed a reputation for being a notoriously difficult boss for his field managers. Both are longtime baseball men -- Macha, now the Brewers' manager, is in his late 50s; Howe, who isn't coaching or managing this season, is in his mids -- and neither had the kind of personnel power in Oakland that managers enjoyed when those two were players.