How To Play Beane Ball

"I was up at 4:30 this morning, on the Net. I love going to Stetson University's site, or James Madison's, to see what their ball teams did last night. That's the fun part of this game -- that's the foundation. To me, that's why we're in this game -- because we love it at the grass roots, where it's still at its most pure."

William Lamar Beane -- Billy Beane -- the 41-year-old general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball club, perches his sandaled feet on the desk before him. He is a former ballplayer -- not a great one, but fair enough to have made it to the big leagues and stayed awhile -- and he still looks like a ballplayer. Both of his shoulders are shot, but he is tall and fit, with a sweep of brown hair over jock-rugged features.

Today is a great day to be a baseball guy. It's February in Phoenix, and the first morning of full-team workouts is taking place. Outside, the Arizona sun pokes past wispy clouds. It feels like spring. It smells like spring -- like freshly mowed grass. Warning-track gravel crunches underneath the spikes of coltish pitchers loping through their warm-ups in emerald jerseys. Sluggers grin when kids yell their names.

Spring training is an annual ritual celebrating the reemergence of hope -- and, hell, these days, there's nothing wrong with hope. But something else is going on here at the Papago Park Baseball Facility. For the Oakland A's, the start of the baseball season honors the careful admixture of mathematics and economics, of regression models and market analyses. Which is to say that for the Oakland A's, there is an air of certainty along with the scent of hope. Fans dotting the bleachers are witnessing the fine-tooling of a team that almost certainly will win a lot more games than it will lose this season. The statistics bear this out.

Just as surely, this season, Billy Beane will be called a genius again. He will be compared, as before, to Branch Rickey, legendary mastermind of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Some will predict his inevitable election into the Hall of Fame. Beane, it will be said, has changed baseball forever.

More accurately, Beane has discovered a way to succeed in a sport already changed. He has perfected a formula for competing and winning both on the field and in the books. Over the past decade, professional baseball has devolved into an increasingly dysfunctional, sharply divided game of big-time haves and small-time have-nots. A few big-market teams like the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers lever fat television contracts to acquire top talent at top salaries. Clubs in smaller cities, relegated to miserly budgets, scrap for what's left and hope -- there's that word again -- for the best. The big-market teams win and make money; the rest live hand-to-mouth.

Except for the Athletics. Bound to playing for a city of just 410,000 and to playing in the aging Network Associates Coliseum, the A's averaged just 26,787 fans per game in 2002. That put the A's at a dismal 18th in a league of 30 clubs. Oakland's player payroll this season will total $49 million, roughly one-third of what the Yankees spend on big-name talent.

"We can't do the same things the Yankees do," Beane says. "Given the economics, we'll lose." And yet, over the past five years, the A's have amassed a win-loss record of 456 wins and 353 losses, the second-best record in the American League -- trailing only, yes, those Yankees. What's more impressive is that in an industry notoriously oblivious to the profit imperative, the A's claim to have made money or broken even in five of the last six years. (Like most sports franchises, it doesn't release financial data.)

The Math Works

Billy Beane is a guy who knows how to do more with less. Winning with the A's is not just a matter of sticking to a budget, although he must do that. Beane thrives by relentlessly exploiting market mismatches -- by mining data that his rivals ignore and by scooping up assets that others have undervalued. His strategy is rooted not only in calculated opportunism, but also in a rock-hard "philosophy," as A's people like to call it, of how the game must be played today.

That philosophy is more than two decades in the making. It was born when a lawyer named Sandy Alderson took over the A's front office in 1982. Alderson never played baseball professionally, but he was a smart executive who grasped a few key truths. The first was this: In baseball, over the long run, statistics win out. And if you run your team by the numbers, you will win.

"The math works," Beane says. "Over the course of a season, there's some predictability to baseball. When you play 162 games, you eliminate a lot of random outcomes. There's so much data that you can predict individual players' performances and also the odds that certain strategies will pay off." The defining data for Alderson were on-base percentage -- how often a batter reaches base safely -- and total bases, which reflects that batter's ability to hit for power. The records clearly showed that, over time, those two statistics combined were the best predictor of the number of runs that a team would score.