Sometimes you forget how good Billy Beane is ...

[GullyFoyle]

Article:Billion-Dollor Billy Beane

1) That first graph is impressive.

2) "Billy Beane has been nothing less than the Babe Ruth of baseball GMs"

3) Reds are right in the middle.

I'm not sure if I'm totally kosher with being fans of two teams ... but I'll be happy if the A's go all the way, if the Reds are out of it.

[Chuckie]

I never forget. Especially considering the fact that our GM leaves me scratching my head quite often.

(Dammit Walt, it's YOUR fault I have dandruff.)

[westofyou]

"Billy Beane has been nothing less than the Babe Ruth of baseball GMs"

Maybe Henry Aaron, because Branch Rickey will always be the Babe Ruth of baseball GMs

[REDREAD]

I kind of question this

No one can get that lucky. If you’re expected to win 1,116 out of 2,364 games, winning 1,296 games instead may not look impossible, but that’s because our intuitions about these things are terrible. Excel’s binomial distribution function makes calculating such odds pretty easy:13 In this case they’re somewhere around one in 13 trillion — effectively zero.14

So he's saying the A's were expected to win 46.2% of their games, but won 54.8% and the odds of that happening are zero?
It's a good accomplishment, but that's a huge exaggeration (that it's impossible)
Especially because there's plenty of large market teams that "overpay for wins" which drives up the cost of a win.
Beane is a great GM, I just thought the article was a bit sloppy.

[PuffyPig]

I kind of question this


So he's saying the A's were expected to win 46.2% of their games, but won 54.8% and the odds of that happening are zero?
It's a good accomplishment, but that's a huge exaggeration (that it's impossible)
Especially because there's plenty of large market teams that "overpay for wins" which drives up the cost of a win.
Beane is a great GM, I just thought the article was a bit sloppy.

Youa re correct. I haven't read the article yet, but I'm sure I'll find that it's much easier to succeed on a wins per $1 spent by spending few dollars.

Field a team of replacement players, spend about $20M, and probably win 40 games or so. The best GM in the business.

[steig]

I do not know if we forgot how good Beane is but sometimes we forget to question if we are over valuing our own GM and players.