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
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.
He is one of the greatest offensive players of his generation. He is nirvana for us as far as what we look for in an offensive player.
There was a real sense of determination in talking to him. You could get carried away with superlatives with Frank Thomas. Arguably, he is one of the greatest offensive players of his generation.
This guy probably represents nirvana for us from an offensive standpoint. We see him as an incredible acquisition.
You could probably get carried away with superlatives when it comes to Frank Thomas. He's arguably one of the greatest offensive players of his generation.
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.
We try to create a situation where we're the casino. It's like how an actuary would set insurance rates. Predictability, predictability, predictability. What's the path to least risk? What's the greater chance of getting some return on this asset?
Trying to build a team over the course of the winter to put on the field is really just half the job. Because if your best players go down, it's not so much him going down as who you replace him with, which ultimately might have the biggest impact on how you end up finishing. So you want to have both a belt and suspenders for support.