How To Play Beane Ball

This wasn't quite rocket science, nor was it truly original. "The teams that win are the ones that get on base and drive the ball real far," says Chris Kahrl, an editor of the annual stat-laden tome Baseball Prospectus. "That's the way baseball has always been." But by the early 1980s, general managers were overlooking on-base percentage in favor of a fascination with batting averages and home runs. Alderson's brilliance lay in remaking his entire organization around a critical statistic that had fallen out of fashion. He sought out players who knew how to get on base: patient hitters who could push an at bat to 10 pitches, tire out the opposing pitcher, and come away with a walk or a base hit.

The reverse was mathematically true for pitching: Keep the opposing team's runners off of the bases, and it will score fewer runs. So the A's philosophy favors hurlers who throw strikes on the first pitch of each at bat rather than those who get behind the batter and have to throw more pitches. It favors fastballs over curves, because statistically, fastballs more often yield strikes. The object is to get batters out in three pitches or less -- because batters who last longer get more hits and walks, and because high pitch counts exhaust pitchers.

The A's forged a baseball operation where all of this doctrine was taught and enforced with almost fervent consistency at all levels of the organization. Young players on the A's lowest-level minor-league teams get the same harangues on plate discipline and control pitching as do the players in the majors. (It is said that you can't win an A's Player of the Month award at any level unless you've averaged at least one walk per 10 at bats.) The team's college scouts apply the same metrics to the kids whom they recommend drafting.

This degree of organizational discipline, baseball people say, is one reason that the Athletics' formula has been hard for other teams to replicate. It's one thing to understand quantitatively what wins ball games; it's another to apply that understanding across an organization of dozens of coaches and instructors and hundreds of players. "In most organizations, you have a lot of renegades who want to do their own thing," explains Keith Lieppmann, who has worn an A's uniform for 30 years and is now director of player development. "We've gotten through that. If people don't believe in the philosophy, they don't stay."

Hit 'Em Where They Ain't

The other reason why Beane's success isn't easily copied is less obvious. The metrics are surely important -- and such statistics as on-base percentage remain at the heart of what the A's do on the field. But what defines Beane's success is the relationship between those performance metrics and players' corresponding economic value. Is the marketplace missing something? Is there a value gap? And what will happen to that gap over time, since performance and market value rarely obey the same rules?

The truth: Billy Beane is an arbitrageur. "Exactly!" Beane lights up at the word. "Arbitrage. We don't use that word too much in baseball, but that's what it is. In a market where people are competing for scarce assets -- for us, it's players or, really, the things that players can do -- there's always going to be some inefficiency. We're always going to have to find that dark corner, the stone that hasn't been turned over."

Beane operates within windows of opportunity. That's all he can afford. Because compensation trails performance in baseball (as in most endeavors), he must find players on the rise, guys who haven't caught fire yet but who could. He'll keep them until the market catches up, at which point he can no longer compete.

The classic of the type was Matt Stairs. At 28, the beefy career minor-league outfielder was widely thought to be washed up when Beane signed him in 1996 for $130,000 a year. But Beane saw a disciplined, underused hitter -- and sure enough, over the next four years, Stairs pounded the ball. In 2000, though, Stairs's numbers dipped and his pay had soared to more than $3 million -- which is why, by the next season, Beane traded him to the Chicago Cubs for a pitcher.

"Essentially," says baseball analyst Kahrl, "the A's are in the commodity-management business. Knowing whether someone is a rising or a sinking commodity -- that's just a grown-up way of looking at things." Beane's method does, in fact, depend on his uncanny knack for creating options for the A's, on building an organization that is endlessly flexible.