Billy Beane
Billy Beane
William Lamar "Billy" Beane IIIis an American former professional baseball player and current front office executive. He is the Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations and minority owner of the Oakland Athletics of Major League Baseball. Prior to his front office career, he played in MLB as an outfielder between 1984 and 1989 for the New York Mets, Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers, and Oakland Athletics. He joined the Athletics front office as a scout in 1990. He was named general...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBaseball Player
Date of Birth29 March 1962
CityOrlando, FL
CountryUnited States of America
We have four very good rookies, but at the risk of saying it before the season is over, it would be pretty tough to find an explanation for choosing somebody else.
Frank Thomas is a presence. Not only would he be our type of offensive player, he would be everybody's type of offensive player. ... If Frank is healthy, he's been good against everybody.
I don't view having too many good players as a problem.
Ken did a great job for us. We've always said that. He was a good enough manager for us to want him back before, and he's still a good enough manager to come back.
We're fine with Joe as the only lefty down there. He was a very good reliever for us before Rich got hurt, and I expect him to be a very good reliever for us again. He has all the tools for success.
When it comes to working, Matt can be a little nutty. We wanted to make sure he realized work is secondary. Obviously, he's here because he's a very good employee, but our interest in him is as a person, first. There are far more important things in life than your job.
This is the first time since I've been here that we haven't spent the off-season replacing what we've lost. We felt like we were very competitive last year. . . . In particular, when we were healthy, it was a very, very good team. So the idea that we were adding to this group . . . it's a first for us since I've been here as the general manager.
This whole issue didn't sneak up on us. It's disappointing we couldn't come to a conclusion that was satisfactory.
We had a little bit of a logjam (on a one-year deal), and this was a creative way to bring it to a conclusion. We didn't want it to drag on.
Assuming we're healthy, Kenny's not going to have his hands tied very often.
At this point, both sides have agreed to pursue other options. We were just too far apart. I don't think we were ever going to be able to bridge the gap. ... When you're so far apart, there's no sense going through the exercise.
Why do people care about anything we do? We play in a crappy stadium, in a market that we share with another team, with one of the lowest payrolls in the game. Really, I'm not that interesting.
Who wants to get really granular with sabermetrics when you're going to see a two-and-a-half-hour Brad Pitt movie? You don't go to the cinema for a maths lesson.
When I first came into baseball, people didn't want to hear that a team was a business. But it is. And the better the business is run, the healthier the team on the field is going to be.