Quotes About Billy Beane

#1. I like Billy Beane for his idiosyncrasies - that he can't watch the games without getting too emotional, that he often has food down his shirt, that he tends to break a few chairs now and then.These things make him human.

Brad Pitt

#2. WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything.

Michael Lewis

#3. Billy Beane was a guy who had been devalued by the sport as a player and now is working as a GM for a small-market team.There is such a gulf in what these teams have to spend on talent [that] they can never play equally - they can never have a true competition.

Brad Pitt

#4. I hate losing more than I want to win.

Billy Beane

#5. It's hard not to be romantic about baseball

Billy Beane

#6. How can you not be romantic about baseball?

Billy Beane

#7. I hate this idea that I've somehow become detached. It's like I can't win. I'd been hearing all these years that I was too hands-on: that I was the guy writing out the lineup card. Now, I'm not present enough. How is it possible to be a detached micromanager?

Billy Beane

#8. The idea that I [should] trust my eyes more than the stats, I don't buy that because I've seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I know that the rabbit's not in there.

Billy Beane

#9. I just talked to a young lady, a freshman at Santa Barbara. She's taking a course, and 'Moneyball's one of the required readings. This young lady could dream of one day becoming a general manager.

Billy Beane

#10. 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.

Billy Beane

#11. I don't want a lot of guys like me who played the game. Quite frankly, I want blank canvases; I want people to come in with new ideas. I don't want the biases of their own experiences to be a part of their decision-making process.

Billy Beane

#12. I may not be as visible as I used to be, and by that I mean being in the clubhouse or on the field. But I'm just as invested as I've always been.

Billy Beane

#13. You have to face reality some time. But there's no sense in facing it until somebody forces you to.

Billy Beane

#14. I love what I do. That's one of the reasons I've stayed. I love the community; I love driving to work.

Billy Beane

#15. You know, I'd actually say Lionel Messi. He's so remarkable, watching him play he's probably still undervalued. When you're scoring five goals in one Champions League match, there's no value that's too high.

Billy Beane

#16. 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?

Billy Beane

#17. The bottom line is that any business should be a meritocracy. The best and brightest. Period.

Billy Beane

#18. 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.

Billy Beane

#19. The math works. Over the course of a season, there's some predictability to baseball. When you play 162 games, you eliminate a lot of random outcomes. There's so much data that you can predict: individual players' performances and also the odds that certain strategies will pay off.

Billy Beane

#20. When your enemy's making mistakes, don't interrupt him.

Billy Beane

#21. It takes more to abstain than to err, more to avoid mistakes than to make mistakes; but the good thing is that it gets better with practice.

Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

#22. We've got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully that will help us be accurate with our player evaluation. For us, that's our life blood.

Billy Beane

#23. The idea that you can create a template that will work forever doesn't happen in any business. There's some really, really bright people in this business. You can't do the same thing the same way and be successful for a long period of time.

Billy Beane

#24. Say no to an ephemeral, superficial and throwaway culture, a culture that assumes that you are incapable of taking on responsibility and facing the great challenges of life!

Pope Francis

#25. Quite frankly, I can't get enough of soccer. I tell my jingoistic friends in the United States there's a reason why it is the world's No. 1 sport. The rest of the planet can't be wrong.

Billy Beane

#26. 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.

Billy Beane

#27. We can't do the same things the Yankees do. Given the economics, we'll lose.

Billy Beane

#28. My mom always told me, "Whatever happens, will happen" or "Whatever is supposed to happen, will happen." I've learned you'll know when you find the right person. When I found the right person, I knew it immediately.

Katrina Bowden

#29. I made one decision in my life based on money and I swore I would never do it again.

Billy Beane

#30. Before you start patting yourself on the back, remember--it's just typing.

Don Gillette

#31. Certainly, you're not going to able to go and pull a Mark Mulder out of your hat somewhere.

Billy Beane

#32. Smaller markets teams, when you hit bottom, you hit with a thud.

Billy Beane

#33. Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding,

Bernard Lonergan