Beane was made GM of the A's in 1997. From 1999-2006, they won more than 200 games more than they lost with a below-average payroll, never having a losing season or finishing worse than second in the division in that time. I think that's long enough to suggest that, for a while at least, the A's were thinking ahead of most of their peers.
The Giants play moneyball. They've used it to win 3 world series this decade. They just have more money to ball with.
That seems cherry-picked to be the worst possible measure of how your FO is doing, though. The A's played 1300 regular season games in the period, but we're just gonna throw 'em out and count only about three dozen.
Not throwing them out and if Moneyball was about making small profits while under-exploiting a pretty large market than sure it was a hug hit but it didn't produce for Oakland in a pretty important way, and that's in championships.
Notice that he spends a lot of time talking about figuring out how to compare players from different leagues? That's the big point. What's been evident lately is that in soccer you can't even hope to scout everybody you need to scout what with the 30 or so decent leagues spread around the world. If you just go after the players becoming famous well then there are 20 or so big money clubs out there with scouts already in place. To get the hidden gems you need to run the stats and then send the scouts. That approach was key to Leicester getting Marhez and Kante.
Doesn't seem relevant to the discussion. If that's the 'real' beef here, then I would think it would be directed at the sales staff or the owners. Being that the GM can't get out there and deliver the one hit that shift a series, nor can he pull the pitcher that might or might not be fading, it doesn't seem to me to reflect on a GM that a team did not win a playoff series that's pretty close to a random outcome from his point of view.
Our crack analytics team worked around the clock crunching some insane numbers and determined there's some great young talent in the French league.
England's Billy Beane. He concluded that most goals were scored from fewer than three passes: therefore he proposed it was important to get the ball forward as soon as possible. The quicker the ball was played to goal with the least number of passes the more goals would be scored. His theory became known as "the long ball". How One Man’s Bad Math Helped Ruin Decades Of English Soccer - FiveThirtyEight.com Billion Dollar Billy Beane - FiveThirtyEight.com
Not quite with Mahrez. They went to watch another player and noticed him. Then ran the info. Plus he was 6 months away from being out of contract so 400k wasn't much to spend.
I'm not sure exactly what numbers they ran but I do know that a popular method is to look first for teams that are achieving numbers that indicate a playing style seen at higher levels and then the scout figures out who is causing that anomoly.