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Paulie123 · 10-07-2015, 06:24 PM

The Oakland Telegraph
4 April 2024
Oakland and Paulie Beane: The art of winning an unfair game
By Wally Street, finance correspondent

There's no escaping it: they may be world champions but the 2024 Oakland A's are a small market team. The fanbase is small. The payroll budget is small. The owner's pockets are small to non-existent. Logic implies that their chances of success should be small.

As a finance journalist I'm contractually obliged to quote some numbers in my articles in an effort to show that I have some expertise in the subject and am not simply a failed political correspondent desperately trying to avoid getting a real job. So here goes. Oakland's budget for the coming season is rumoured to be $150m. It's not a pittance, admittedly. If this newspaper had a budget that size it might even occasionally contain some actual news. But it's dwarfed by some of Oakland's competitors. It currently puts the A's at the basement of Major League Baseball along with Tampa Bay and the Mets. Elsewhere in the American League, by contrast, the Yankees' budget is $250m, Boston's and Detroit's are $230m, and divisional rival Texas's is $240m. Over in the National League, the LA Dodgers and Washington Nationals have budgets of $280m and $270m respectively.

With the top players in today's game earning $20m-$30m or more per year, even with my dire maths skills I understand this means that the A's have a clear budget disadvantage. Their superstar pitcher Jose Fernandez is their biggest earner and will take home a wallet-bursting $22.5m this year. That's 15% of their payroll on just one player (subs, please enter percentage here for me, I can't work it out). So while Oakland can afford to have some star names on the roster, they can't match the spending power of their rivals. And skint owner Ban-ki Rupt is an economiser (although he was rather less prudent in his past business initiatives) who expects a small profit each year.

General manager Paulie Beane acknowledges the challenges, and is understood to currently have a player payroll for 2024 of about $138m. He has denied that the offseason departures of lineup stalwarts Jake Lamb and Jonathan Schoop were driven by financial constraints, but he surely would have kept them if he could have afforded to. Beane believes he does have one edge which allows him to be competitive, however. He says he manages the back office functions of Oakland's business personally. By contrast, the other 29 teams all slavishly use the calculations of a software package called "Computer AI" to dictate all their decisions. He has used that edge to build a title-winning side once. Now he is trying to use that edge to keep them there.

10-07-2015, 06:24 PM	#9
Paulie123 All Star Starter Join Date: Sep 2015 Location: Manchester, England Posts: 1,945	The Oakland Telegraph 4 April 2024 Oakland and Paulie Beane: The art of winning an unfair game By Wally Street, finance correspondent There's no escaping it: they may be world champions but the 2024 Oakland A's are a small market team. The fanbase is small. The payroll budget is small. The owner's pockets are small to non-existent. Logic implies that their chances of success should be small. As a finance journalist I'm contractually obliged to quote some numbers in my articles in an effort to show that I have some expertise in the subject and am not simply a failed political correspondent desperately trying to avoid getting a real job. So here goes. Oakland's budget for the coming season is rumoured to be $150m. It's not a pittance, admittedly. If this newspaper had a budget that size it might even occasionally contain some actual news. But it's dwarfed by some of Oakland's competitors. It currently puts the A's at the basement of Major League Baseball along with Tampa Bay and the Mets. Elsewhere in the American League, by contrast, the Yankees' budget is $250m, Boston's and Detroit's are $230m, and divisional rival Texas's is $240m. Over in the National League, the LA Dodgers and Washington Nationals have budgets of $280m and $270m respectively. With the top players in today's game earning $20m-$30m or more per year, even with my dire maths skills I understand this means that the A's have a clear budget disadvantage. Their superstar pitcher Jose Fernandez is their biggest earner and will take home a wallet-bursting $22.5m this year. That's 15% of their payroll on just one player (subs, please enter percentage here for me, I can't work it out). So while Oakland can afford to have some star names on the roster, they can't match the spending power of their rivals. And skint owner Ban-ki Rupt is an economiser (although he was rather less prudent in his past business initiatives) who expects a small profit each year. General manager Paulie Beane acknowledges the challenges, and is understood to currently have a player payroll for 2024 of about $138m. He has denied that the offseason departures of lineup stalwarts Jake Lamb and Jonathan Schoop were driven by financial constraints, but he surely would have kept them if he could have afforded to. Beane believes he does have one edge which allows him to be competitive, however. He says he manages the back office functions of Oakland's business personally. By contrast, the other 29 teams all slavishly use the calculations of a software package called "Computer AI" to dictate all their decisions. He has used that edge to build a title-winning side once. Now he is trying to use that edge to keep them there.