Moneyball Questions

At the end of the 2002 major league baseball season, the Athletics had the same number of wins as the Yankees - the team with the highest payroll in baseball. Doing the math, the Yankees paid $1,400,000 per win. How much did each win cost the Athletics?

$260,000

In the scene Billy Beane is meeting with the scouts he explains to the scouts that they should be looking for

players that get on base

Peter Brandt took ideas that were expressed by Bill James and developed them into the approach the Oakland Athletics used during the 2002 season. How long how Peter Brandt had been involved in Major League Baseball?

He hadn't. This was his first job out of college.

During the season, Oakland had a record-breaking consecutive wins streak . How many games did they win during "The Streak" to break the record?

20

After the season ended, which team tried to hire Billy Beane to implement his system?

Boston Red Sox

According to Billy Beane, what was the problems the Oakland Athletics had to deal with?

Building a winning team with very limited resources and budgeting to compete with teams with big payrolls

What was General Manager Billy Beane told to do by the owner of the Oakland Athletics?

Find new/replacement players with the money he has

What was the key metric that Billy Beane and Peter Brandt used to evaluate players?

On Base Percentages

According the Peter Brandt, the goal was to win games by buying players that could generate:

Runs

Peter Brandt compared the team he and Billy were building using their model and analytics to:

The island of misfit toys

The model for evaluating players that Billy Beane and Peter Brandt used discovered what about players that got on base a lot, but had medium to low batting averages?

They were undervalued

The algorithm that Oakland uses to find players is about getting down to one number that is used for what purpose?

To find players that everyone else undervalues

The dugout manager (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) of the Oakland Athletics doesn't buy-in to Billy Beane's approach, at least not early in the season. What does Billy do to ensure that the players he brings in using his analytics approach get played?

Trade to other players he didn't bring in to teams