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What was Billy Beane’s Red Sox offer? Was this Moneyball Red Sox offer hard to turn down?
Billy Beane’s Red Sox offer would have made him the highest paid GM of all time in baseball. Billy Beane’s Red Sox offer helped Sabermetrics get recognition in the baseball community.
Billy Beane’s Red Sox Offer Arrives, Despite an Insiders Victory
While the outcome of the 2002 playoffs is obviously frustrating, the playoff flameout does little to undermine the soundness of the team’s overall approach. That Joe Morgan is out in public claiming that Oakland’s loss is due to their inability to “manufacture runs” says more about the absurdity of his critique and his ignorance of how baseball actually works than it does about the A’s. And the Moneyball Red Sox offer can prove that.
Morgan is part of an insiders club of pundits, writers, scouts, and ex-players, one almost entirely immune to accountability. No matter how inaccurate their predictions, no matter how wrongheaded their analysis of the game, they are never drummed out of professional baseball circles. The members of this clique always seem to find ways to make a living in the world of baseball, despite their often poor performances and recycled cliches. This situation contrasts with that of active players, managers, and GMs, who are unceremoniously traded, demoted, or fired for the most capricious reasons.
This state of affairs would never exist in a functioning market. In a rational labor market, people who were bad at their jobs, whether commenting on baseball or scouting future players, would be fired. But as we’ve seen, baseball is one big market failure, one in which salaries rarely correspond with actual value. It is less of a business than a social club, one that values loyalty over competence. But that doesn’t stop Billy Beane’s Red Sox offer.
Billy Beane’s Red Sox Offer
Billy Beane is surprisingly calm in the wake of his team’s playoff disappointment. He knows that what he has accomplished with the A’s on a shoestring budget is extraordinary. He is frustrated by the media commentary, which seems inordinately focused on how a team fares in the playoff crapshoot rather than the real test of its mettle during the regular season, but he knows he cannot change this.
What he can change is the makeup of his team, to prepare it for success in 2003. One of his first moves is to get rid of manager Art Howe. He persuades the Mets to hire Howe, taking his hefty $2 million salary off the books, and he promotes one of the assistant coaches to the manager position. And in the A’s organization, the manager is more of a symbolic role: Billy will be calling all the shots. By the time Billy Beane’s Red Sox offer comes around, he’s already started making decisions for next year.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Moneyball summary :
- How Billy Beane first flamed out as a baseball player before becoming a general manager
- The unconventional methods the Athletics used to recruit undervalued players
- How Sabermetrics influences American baseball today
