the SWINGIN' A's thread!

Beane and the Athletics Are Still Playing by the Book
By LEE JENKINS

OAKLAND, Calif., Sept. 7 - Baseball's celebrity general manager wears shorts and sandals to the office, skips road trips and insists that he cannot get through the book that was written about him.

Billy Beane acts as if building a perennial division champion is like taking a walk through Sausalito. He rattles off a list of reasons he has the greatest job in the game, neglecting to mention how his team operates with a parsimonious budget and plays in a football-first stadium that has a chain-link corridor for an entrance.

Beane's surfer-dude look and cheerful exterior reflect his Southern California upbringing, but not his analytical nature. Like the Oakland Athletics, the team he pieces together every winter with Popsicle sticks and rubber cement, Beane only looks like a pushover. He is baseball's version of an aw-shucks pool-hall hustler, a guy who makes you believe he does not know the right end of the cue stick, then cleans the table and empties your wallet.

"I guess we just have a sense of calm and confidence here now," Beane said. "When I was playing baseball, I used to look at Kirby Puckett and see how relaxed he was and think, 'It must be nice to know you'll get a hit every time.' I don't think we feel like we'll always be right, but we'll eventually figure it out."

Each season of this new millennium was supposed to signal the death of Beane's New Age baseball philosophy and Oakland's unlikely success story. And, yet, each season has brought more of the same. Two years after Michael Lewis wrote "Moneyball," the best-selling book that chronicled a season with the A's and hailed Beane as a small-market pioneer, the most compelling chapter yet is unfolding in the East Bay.

In the past year, Oakland found itself besieged by Beane discounters who either disagreed with his theories or resented his newfound celebrity. Some baseball pundits, and a few anonymous officials, poked fun at his number-crunching methods and his unwavering faith in select statistics. At the same time, the A's had to endure the latest blow from baseball's economic infrastructure, which cost them their most valuable player, Miguel Tejada; their closer, Keith Foulke; and their catcher, Ramon Hernandez.

Oakland lost three of its most reliable regulars in the winter and has not lost much of anything since. For the third straight season, the A's are leading the American League West and are closing out the summer in signature form. [Oakland lost its fourth straight Wednesday, 8-3 to Boston, but still leads Anaheim in the West by a game and a half.] Over a four-year span, Oakland has the best record in baseball, the best record at home, the best record after the All-Star Game break and the best record in September.

"This season is really a credit to Billy," said Rick Peterson, who was the A's pitching coach for five years until he joined the Mets this season. "I'm not surprised by what they've done because Billy has no fear. He is never afraid to think outside the box. There was a demand for excellence this year, not a wish, not a hope, but a demand. I don't think people realize how difficult it was to build that team with those market dollars."

There is a 300-page book dedicated to the challenge. Though Beane admits he cringes when reading about himself, "Moneyball" has defined his career and changed the art of team building in many small markets, as well as a few large ones. Beane has to be one of the only general managers invited to lecture at the Harvard, Stanford and Southern California business schools.

Predictably enough, "Moneyball" spawned a backlash from some members of baseball's older guard, who wondered why Beane showed such disdain for sacrifice bunts and high-school pitchers. If Beane's feelings were hurt, he will not show the scars. He admits only that he has learned a great deal about the arc of fame, in which those who are made famous are sometimes leveled by the same machine that constructed them.

"Sure, I became the subject of criticism, and there were people who said my ego had run amok," Beane said. "I went through the whole thing. But I didn't really care because those people talking about me didn't even know me. I still say that it was a great experience, a grounding experience, and I wouldn't trade it for anything."

Beane was supposed to learn such lessons in celebrity-making a long time ago. The Mets drafted him in the first round in 1980, the same year they also selected Darryl Strawberry in the first round, but baseball did not come as naturally to Beane as business would. He hit .219 with three home runs in six major league seasons, failing to achieve as a player what he would as an executive.

On the afternoon of most Oakland home games, Beane does not even go down to the field for batting practice, retreating instead to the isolation of his office, where he is more comfortable. He sits alone with his BlackBerry and his television set, showing an early out-of-town game. "Watching the Mets right now," Beane says. "Down, 1-0."

He has earned the right to skip road trips, wear sandals and watch the Mets in the office. The essential reason Beane and the A's became the subject of a book is that they won more baseball games than they had a right to imagine. Even after the critics took their shots, Oakland is still winning, though no one seems surprised by it anymore.

The worst thing anyone can say about the A's is that they have not captured a playoff series since Beane took charge. When he is criticized for putting too much emphasis on walks, home runs and on-base percentage - and not enough on stolen bases and defense - the team's postseason record is always at the crux of the argument.

"I don't think if we'd have bunted more it would have made a difference," said Terry Francona, who was the A's bench coach last season and is the Red Sox' manager this year. "Because of payroll, Oakland is not as deep as other teams, and if their horses get nicked up late in the year, they don't have the backups."

But they do have the pitching, and while everyone else seems to complain of a sore arm at this time of year, the A's are topping out on the radar guns again. Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito are monitored so closely in April and May that they routinely perform at full strength in August and September. A team with three aces can succeed even if Erubiel Durazo is the leading run producer.

"They have that really solid core - and then they have the ability to change their peripheral players with great success," said Theo Epstein, the Red Sox' general manager, who is among a legion of young executives who count Beane as a mentor. "Billy always seems to be ahead of the curve."

Beane shrugs off praise as easily as he does ridicule. He insists that he does not care about acceptance and is not obsessed with winning a playoff series. He even predicts that the A's will eventually fall into the same trap that befalls any other small-market team. "At some point," Beane said, "we'll go through major rebuilding and we won't win 96 games."

There he goes again, sandbagging and hustling, the master of low expectations setting up his marks for the next season.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company