St. Francis Xavier University | MONEYBALL | Leadership and Billy Beane | | Brandon Guenette/200905666 | 3/5/2012 |
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Introduction
Michael Lewis’s Moneyball is a fascinating story about a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. The underlying question to this story is where the real discussion should begin. That question is: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? This question can lead into a series of discussions regarding strategy or luck, but the real answers can be found in the leadership of the organization. This leadership is found in the form of
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These traits can certainly be attributed to both the good and bad sides of leadership. It should be noted that these traits alone cannot be credited with why Billy Beane was an effective leader, but can be used as a starting point as to why he had the potential to be such a leader. Understanding the full leadership story being told will require a deeper look into the values and behaviors exhibited.
Leader-centered Perspective: Values
George et al.,(2007) provide the importance of an authentic leadership. A key focus of the article is that the leader should not only understand his values, but practice them as well. One of the most interesting values described by Billy Beane is his value of education. Major League Baseball would recognize him as one of the top high school talents in the country during his youth. He valued education so much, that he informed all Major League Baseball teams that he would not sign any professional contract so that he could attend Stanford. Even upon being convinced to sign with the New York Mets, he made his intentions of taking classes in the off season quite clear. This may have been his undoing as a player, as he did not value where his natural talents could take him in baseball. This would lead him to develop values regarding life decisions. He swore after that sequence of events he would never make a decision based on money ever again. This is a value he has stayed true to, as he turned down the opportunity to be the highest paid
Moneyball, the story of a dynamic change agent who rallied a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives to overturn convention and rethink how Major League Baseball (“MLB”) was managed and played. Its really a book about hustlers. Moneyball consecrated the notion that its noble to win inexpensively, but believe its good to stay a cheap baseball club, because of their fat annual revenue-sharing check they get at the end of the year. Michael Lewis wrote an un-organizational confusion, his misunderstanding of baseball, to his constant interruption of financial and statistical talk, that turned interest in the book away from many.
Throughout our country’s history there have been many examples of fraud and scandal. One of the most well-known scandals of our century is the 1919 Chicago White Sox Scandal. The movie “Eight Men Out” shows us what really happened throughout the 1919 baseball season with the Chicago White Sox. The Chicago White Sox were a Major League Baseball organization who was run by their penny-pinching owner, Charles Comiskey. He has been under -paying his players, despite the fact that they were the clear favorite to win the 1919 World Series. As a result, the players decide to come up with a plan to get back at their cheap owner.
Anyone who has been involved in an organized sport, whether it is backyard football or a high school sports team, knows that these sports all have organizations that are responsible for setting rules, determining conditions of play, and penalizing individuals who infringe the rules. Some of the organizations like the National Football league and the MLB are familiar to most people, the rules they follow are not generally understood by anyone who is not closely associated with the sport. Most fans and sport critics assume that what is happening inside these organizations are of little concern to them. However, this is not the case. In the MLB, the New York Yankees spend an excessive amount of money every year to obtain big name players. A
Therefore Billy Beane decides to set an unconventional strategy in order to be able to compete with other wealthy teams “out there”. His goal setting is based on the strategy he sets for his game in what he calls “an unfair game”. Manager Billy knows that decreasing cost is the main concern of the top executives of his team. The main shareholders and stakeholders have set their goals based on their conservative approaches. To be more specific, the top manager of Oakland Athletic is not willing to take any risk in order to pay more money to recruit better players.
Imagine a darkened evening in the spring the lights are slowly warming up to illuminate the field in which the cleats of the great will graze the grass and scuff up the freshly dragged dirt. The crowd is feeling anxiety to know if the umpire is going to call the pitch a ball or a strike. This is in the mind of every person that comes out to support their local major league baseball team. In recent decades the sport of baseball has become criticized for the amount of money that the owners pay their players for their services. The question On the minds of not only the general public, but to the owners and the fans is the salary paid to the players. Major League baseball players are paid too much.
1. Based on the “Billy Beane: Changing the Game” case, explain how and why the Oakland A’s economic situation after 1995 shaped its:
The A's recent success is attributed to the innovative approach taken by Billy Beane in assembling a baseball team with a very limited amount of financial resources. Billy Beane has built a successful ball club because he has found an efficient and cost effective way of measuring baseball talent thus essentially creating a loophole in this unfair game because winning percentage is a result of talent not
1. What leadership qualities did Beane bring to the Oakland Athletics? A: He was not scared to speak his opinion, he believed in his players and their abilities and he made sure he let them.
In the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, talks about the traditional methods in how to choose a ball player and it tell also told me about Bill Beane's unsuccessful career as a baseball player. The five tools or abilities that a baseball scout looks for is run, throw, hit, and hit with power. A guy with wheels means a guy could run. A guy with strong arm had a hose. Each time a baseball scout scouted Billy Beane all they saw was a future big league star. Mets had the first pick of the 1980, Major League Baseball draft and they had the choice down two players. One was Beane and the other one was Strawberry. However, Beane had baseball and football scholarship from Stanford University. As draft approach a scout thought teams were scared of Beane
Suddenly the ethics of all baseball players came into question. The scandal led fans to doubt the validity of any baseball game outcome Hugh Fullerton; a prominent sports writer reported, “The most severe blow to the sport was not that these skillful athletes sold their loyal supporters, and accepted bribes from gamblers, but that baseball can be made crooked without detection by outsider” (Berkow).
The book I read is called Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Moneyball is about a major league baseball team called the Oakland Athletics and how they went from losing their best players during the free agency, to still be able to have a winning season and go on a 20 game winning streak. The Oakland A’s are a low budget baseball team, meaning that they are extremely outmatched when it comes to facing bigger city teams financially. The book goes over the life of Billy Beane who was a major league player that was projected to be a superstar but ended up not being very effective in the big leagues then transitioning to being the A’s general manager. Billy Beane has a strategy to how they will win which relies greatly on the statistics of the ball players.
The movie “Moneyball”, released in 2011, contains several negotiations that exhibit techniques we discussed and practiced in class. To provide brief context, the movie is based on the Oakland Athletics baseball team. The film begins by showing a 2001 Playoff Series featuring the Athletics playing the Yankees, and highlights the difference between the salaries each team has. The Yankees boast a salary of $114 million, whereas the Athletics salary is $39 million. Despite the efforts of the Athletics, they eventually lose the series. This foreshadows the movie’s main plotline – that the Athletics suffer from a lack of funds, making it difficult for them to compete professionally.
number 23 out of 30 top salaries in the league, they also had 96 wins
Major League Baseball is known as America’s favorite pastime, and MLB teams spend an extensive amount of money in the excess of a billion dollars with the ultimate goal to win the World Series. This learning team’s focus throughout this descriptive statistics paper is the MLB players’ performances, salaries, salary caps, and winning percentages. Though salaries will by no means be a trade for wins, the goal is to use the less experienced players and pay them a lower salary. Research has been done on whether or not player’s salaries and wins are connected.
“At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it