When their fifth outfielder turned up looking for a desk job, the A’s front office didn’t know what to make of it. It was as unlikely as some successful politician quitting a campaign and saying he wanted to be a staffer, or a movie actor walking off the set and taking a job as key grip. None of the staff had played big league baseball and all of them wished they had. Most would have given their glove hands, or at least a few fingers, for a year in a big league uniform. The A’s general manager Sandy Alderson was maybe the most perplexed of all. “Nobody does that,” he said. “Nobody says, ‘I quit as a player. I want to be an advance scout.’” He hired Billy anyway. “I didn’t think there was much risk in making him an advance scout,” Alderson said, “because I didn’t think an advance scout did anything.” Chris Pittaro had gone into scouting after an injury ended his playing career. When Billy called to tell him what he’d done, Pittaro was incredulous. “When you’re in the game you always think something is going to break for you. No one gives up on that. I didn’t. I was forced to retire. Billy chose to retire. And that was something I couldn’t imagine.” In the end Billy Beane proved what he had been trying to say at least since he was seventeen years old: he didn’t want to play ball.
With that, he concluded his fruitless argument with his talent. He decided that his talent was beside the point: how could you call it talent if it didn’t lead to success? Baseball was a skill, or maybe it was a trick: whatever it was he hadn’t played it very well. In his own mind he ceased to be a guy who should have made it and became a guy upon whom had been heaped a lot of irrational hopes and dreams. He had reason to feel some distaste for baseball’s mystical nature. He would soon be handed a weapon to destroy it.
Sandy Alderson has a clear memory from earlier that spring of 1990, of Billy Beane taking batting practice. He didn’t know much about Billy and wondered what kind of player he was. “He was very undisciplined at the plate,” Alderson said. “Not a lot of power. I remember after I watched him very specifically asking: why is this guy even on the team?” Not that it mattered. Tony La Russa was the A’s manager and, in the great tradition of big-shot baseball managers, he paid only faint attention to what the GM had to say.
That was one of the many things about baseball Alderson was determined to change. When Billy came to work inside the A’s front office in 1993, he walked into the early stages of a fitful science experiment. When Alderson had been hired as the A’s general manager a decade earlier, he’d been a complete outsider to baseball. This was rare. Most GMs start out as scouts and rise up through the baseball establishment. Alderson was an expensively educated San Francisco lawyer (Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School) with no experience of the game, outside of a bit of time on school playing fields. He was also a former Marine Corps officer, and his self-presentation was much closer to “former Marine Corps officer” than “fancy-pants lawyer.” “Sandy didn’t know shit about baseball,” says Harvey Dorfman, the baseball psychologist Alderson more or less invented. “He was a neophyte. But he was a progressive thinker. And he wanted to understand how the game worked. He also had the capacity to instill fear in others.”
When Alderson entered the game he wanted to get his mind around it, and he did. He concluded that everything from on-field strategies to player evaluation was better conducted by scientific investigation hypotheses tested by analysis of historical statistical baseball data—than by reference to the collective wisdom of old baseball men. By analyzing baseball statistics you could see through a lot of baseball nonsense. For instance, when baseball managers talked about scoring runs, they tended to focus on team batting average, but if you ran the analysis you could see that the number of runs a team scored bore little relation to that team’s batting average. It correlated much more exactly with a team’s on-base and slugging percentages. A lot of the offensive tactics that made baseball managers famous—the bunt, the steal, the hit and run—could be proven to have been, in most situations, either pointless or self-defeating. “I figured out that managers do all this shit because it is safe,” said Alderson. “They don’t get criticized for it.” He wasn’t particularly facile with numbers, but he could understand them well enough to use their conclusions. “I couldn’t do a regressions analysis,” he said, “but I knew what one was. And the results of them made sense to me.”
Alderson hadn’t set out to reexamine the premises of professional baseball but he wound up doing it anyway. For a long stretch, his investigations were largely academic. “You have to remember,” he said, “that there wasn’t any evidence that any of this shit worked. And I had credibility problems. I didn’t have a baseball background.” The high payroll Oakland teams managed by Tony La Russa had done well enough in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Alderson felt he should “defer to success.” For more than a decade he could afford to do this. Since the late 1970s the A’s had been owned by Walter A. Haas, Jr., who was, by instinct, more of a philanthropist than a businessman. Haas viewed professional baseball ownership as a kind of public trust and spent money on it accordingly. In 1991, the Oakland A’s actually had the highest payroll in all of baseball. Haas was willing to lose millions to field a competitive team that would do Oakland proud, and he did. The A’s had gone to the World Series
