Oakland Athletics

Abstract

The Oakland Athletics, an American professional baseball team, plays in Major League Baseball's American League. In 2002, they had the third-lowest team salary in the league ($40 million), a staggering $80 million behind the highest-salaried team, the New York Yankees. With no sign of a change in available funds, the general manager, Billy Beane, sought a new way to get an advantage over the richer clubs. Beane, along with a mostly reluctant scouting team, chose a different approach to building a team: the goal was not to buy players, the goal was to buy wins; and to buy wins, the club needed to buy runs. The whole ethos of the team building was switched to focus on obtaining and nurturing players that, when combined, would best facilitate runs. Deploying this approach meant making some seemingly astonishing purchases.