Uneven impact: Billy Beane’s tangled legacy

September 30, 2014. American League Wild Card Game. Oakland Athletics at Kansas City Royals.

The pitching matchup could hardly be better with Jon Lester and James Shields squaring off. Lester, known for his playoff exploits, was acquired by the A’s for this exact moment. Going into the game, he owns a 2.11 ERA in the postseason. Shields’ nickname is “Big Game James.”

For Oakland, this game is it. After three years of patient team-building, A’s general manager Billy Beane has gone all-in. He swapped five-tool outfielder Yoenis Cespedes for Lester at the trade deadline, and acquired pitchers Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel from the Chicago Cubs in early July, dealing away his top prospect, shortstop Addison Russell, in the process.

The decision to let cheap talent with years of team control leave for two rental players was nothing short of a declaration: this was the final opportunity for an A’s team three years in the making.

It’s 2016, and an April morning breaks sunny and clear. I’m in Chicago. The sun is out but a coat is still necessary. Beane calls from San Diego for our interview and tells me that he is lounging in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. No coat necessary. He’s visiting his mother before watching a prospect and then heading back to Oakland.

I am deeply interested in Beane’s legacy and his thoughts on the matter. He seems more interested in what breakfast will be.

In his 18 years as general manager and now vice president of baseball operations with Oakland, Beane has become the face of a franchise that, without his intervention, would seemingly be hopeless. The A’s play in a small market with a television deal that only began broadcasting all 162 games this season.

Their stadium leaks raw sewage. There is a Twitter handle dedicated to this issue, an homage to the screaming need for a new venue.

Beane, a former player and can’t-miss prospect who missed badly, has become the biggest star of the franchise.

“I probably was not overly patient with my own career and in some respect it was partly due to wanting to run a club,” Beane said. “… When you are a young person in sports you want to speed things up.”

Beane has been called out and called on, with other clubs hoping to poach him from the A’s. He has won consistently, but never won it all.

He’s the ultimate winner with the ultimate shortcoming.

To understand the full extent of Beane’s impact, one first needs to look at baseball before his influence.

MLB began play in 1876. In the following century, the statistics of baseball hardly changed. Position players were judged on walks, strikeouts, home runs, runs batted in, batting average and steals. For pitchers, earned run average, walks, strikeouts, wins, losses and batting average against ruled the day.

While other stats lingered in the background, none were taken seriously.

“The sport is very traditional,” FOX Sports reporter Ken Rosenthal said. “It almost took this new generation of executives to introduce this Wall Street element and the forward thinking we have seen. Even today there is legitimate debate and argument about the value of stats and approaches. Some teams are taking an advanced sabermetric approach. All 30 teams use it but one of the arguments against it are the two best teams in recent years, the Giants and Royals, are very scouting and coaching oriented.”

Beane did not invent any statistics, but he was at the forefront of the analytics movement. There were others who dedicated time to sabermetrics, but nobody within baseball had fully embraced them.

Bill James — who coined the term sabermetrics and wrote several books on the topic in the late 1970’s and ‘80s — was considered little more than a lost eccentric before Beane started using his methods. In a sport that had shunned intellectuals for well over a century, Beane began hoarding them.

“He’s the first one (hiring intellectuals) to my knowledge,” San Francisco Chronicle and A’s beat writer Susan Slusser said. “There were a lot of people using metrics before and at the same time as Beane but he’s always been outside the box in hiring.”

This is probably the area where Beane had the biggest influence on the industry, but he had a surprisingly simple reason for choosing to go Ivy League instead of American League.

“My own self-preservation,” he states half-jokingly. “First of all, I felt in my situation I represented a certain portion of the business as an ex-player and I had a viewpoint from that end. Being around Sandy (Alderson), you realize being smart works in any business. I wanted to surround myself with people who complimented my strengths and filled in my weaknesses. All business should be a meritocracy and running a team is far different than playing it. … If I’m going to pat myself on the back for anything, it is hiring guys smarter than me. Hopefully it has provided a chance for guys who didn’t play the game, including females. That’s the great thing about the sport, we have gotten smarter in many cases with people who have not played. That was not the case 20 years ago.”

Beane still hires from prestigious colleges. The strategy has become standard practice for all MLB clubs, but it was derided by baseball traditionalists at the time.

“He went a different route because he was too smart to go the route that everybody else went,” ESPN senior baseball writer Tim Kurkjian said. “He said there has to be a different way to go about this because of the playing career he had and how he was looked at. Maybe we are looking at all our players the wrong way. That doesn’t make him a contrarian or smarter than anyone else. It is a smart guy saying let’s look at this a different way.”

Nobody has influenced Beane more than current New York Mets general manager Sandy Alderson in this regard.

Alderson was not a baseball man by trade. The Harvard Law School graduate joined the A’s front office in 1981 and served as general manager from 1983-98. In 1989, he signed Beane, then finishing up a wildly disappointing playing career in which he hit .219 in 301 at-bats over six seasons.

Beane lasted less than a season as a player in Oakland before becoming a scout for the organization in 1990. This period was crucial, as he watched Alderson in action.

“I’m not sure Sandy’s impact can be overstated,” Slusser said. “He doesn’t do the same things because the game has moved on so much but the general idea of looking at different things and trying to get all the data possible all started with Sandy, no doubt about it even if the numbers were different. Sandy’s background as a lawyer and not a baseball person also impacted Billy, he was willing to hire those people for his front office. He was out in front of other people doing that.”

Beane himself talks of the magnitude of Alderson’s influence on him as both a player and a general manager.

“Anytime you are going through your career and find a mentor early, I think it is really important and to find someone like Sandy from not only a business and personal standpoint but a moral standpoint,” Beane said. “In my opinion that is as good as it gets not just in this game but in any business. … I was very fortunate to work under him as long as I could.”

“Working with Sandy Alderson all those years in Oakland shaped how he looks at things a little differently,” Kurkjian said. “I don’t think I have met a smarter executive than Sandy and Billy revered him. … He has told me many times that when he makes a decision, he asks himself, usually privately, what would Sandy do here?”

In some ways, as Kurkjian suggests, Alderson is still the benchmark for Beane. He transformed a woeful Mets team into a 2015 NL pennant winner, and has reached four World Series over the course of his career.

Beane has reached none.

Top of the first: Oakland 0, Kansas City 0

The A’s get off to a promising start. In the top of the first, Coco Crisp leads off with a single into left field. Three batters later, Brandon Moss unloads into the right-field stands, swatting a home run deep into the night. 2-0 Oakland.

The lead is short-lived. Kansas City shortstop Alcides Escobar reaches on a leadoff, infield single before going to second base with two outs. Billy Butler, who will join Oakland the following month, ropes a single to left. The Royals lead 3-2.

In the home half of the third, Lester falters once more. With two outs and Kansas City’s Mike Moustakas on third base, Lorenzo Cain laces a double into the left-field corner. Cain is then knocked in by a bloop single to shallow left by Eric Hosmer. The pitch is perfectly executed, a fastball away with two strikes.

Hosmer gets lucky, the A’s do not.

Beane has become synonymous with moneyball, but plenty of confusion remains as to what the term actually means. Despite the now-common idea the strategy values walks and on-base percentage above all else, there are ample nuances that have to be taken into account.

“A simpler way of it is understanding what we have available to us and then employing those resources in the highest possible leverage situations,” said Beane. “Allowing players to use their skill sets to succeed. … We couldn’t get players with complete skills, we tried to match them up who compliment other players. I don’t think that is a secret anywhere. There are a number of clubs employing the same thing. We are using the personnel available and getting them out of situations where they are likely to fail.”

Beane is always working with the deck stacked heavily against him. In his time in Oakland, the A’s have never been in the top half of MLB in payroll. Most years, the franchise languishes in the bottom five while desperately trying new ways to get fans inside the decrepit Oakland Coliseum. It is a complex problem for a team playing a famously unfair game.

Perhaps if it was fair, it would not interest Beane.

OAKLAND PAYROLL RANKINGS

1998: $22,463,500 (25th)

1999: $24,175,333 (25th)

2000: $31,971,333 (25th)

2001: $33,810,750 (29th)

2002: $39,679,746 (28th)

2003: $50,260,824 (23rd)

2004: $59.825,167 (16th)

2005: $55,869,262 (21st)

2006: $62,243,079 (21st)

2007: $79,366,940 (17th)

2008: $47,967,126 (28th)

2009: $62,310,000 (26th)

2010: $51,654,900 (28th)

2011: $66,536,500 (21st)

2012: $55,372,500 (29th)

2013: $60,664,500 (28th)

2014: $83,401,400 (25th)

2015: $86,086,667 (27th)

2016: $85,823,390 (26th)

And while Beane believes more money would be helpful, he does not think it is a guarantee of success.

“I have always thought if you take the bigger market the advantage is having money allows you to make really good decisions and your own intelligence prevents bad ones,” Beane said. “In our market, Tampa being another one, there are some baseball decisions that cost a lot of money and there are a few teams including us that can’t be in that position. The game is really smart now. In the last 15 years, the people running these teams have changed significantly and the idea of being the lone guy who is going to find hidden value isn’t there. There are a lot of smart guys out there.”

Shin-Soo Choo, who signed a seven-year, $130 million deal with the Texas Rangers in Dec. 2013, is a quintessential example. Choo is a career .281 hitter with zero 25-home run seasons, but the Rangers decided his .382 career OBP — highlighted by a .423 OBP in 2013 — was worth a considerable sum.

Oakland is not alone in looking for new ways to gain a cheap advantage. When Joe Maddon was the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, he began shifting his infield against almost every hitter. The tactic enrages some traditionalists, but every team in MLB now uses it.

In some ways, the A’s have become victims of their own success, as teams with larger budgets continue to get smarter. Beane and his team of intellectuals are constantly looking for a new edge.

By 2000, Beane’s third year on the job, the A’s began to take wing. The talent was already there to an extent, with Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, Jason Giambi, Ramon Hernandez, Tim Hudson and Jason Isringhausen inherited from Alderson’s tenure.

But Beane added to that nucleus by drafting aces Mark Mulder and Barry Zito in his first two years. After making the playoffs for the first of four consecutive years in 2000, Beane traded for outfielders Jermaine Dye and Johnny Damon to make Oakland a favorite to win the World Series in 2001. While the moves didn’t lead to a championship, the A’s won 102 games.

The next offseason saw the losses of Damon, Isringhausen and Giambi but the emergence of castoff Scott Hatteberg and rookie Mark Ellis. Despite losing three All-Stars, Oakland won 103 games and the AL West for the second time in three years. In 2003, the A’s repeated as Western Division champs, winning once more behind the dominant trio of Hudson, Mulder and Zito.

Throughout that four-year period, Oakland’s players collected hardware at an eye-popping rate. Giambi won the AL MVP award in 2001 with Tejada taking the mantle in 2003. Hudson and Mulder each put together 20-win seasons while Zito won the Cy Young Award in 2002 with a 23-win campaign.

In June 2003, Beane went from baseball iconoclast to national icon. Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning of Unfair Game, which focused on Beane’s exploits in Oakland, became a bestseller, the most talked-about baseball book since Jim Bouton’s Ball Four. Beane, with his GQ looks and swashbuckling team, became a celebrity.

This was the stretch that turned Beane into a household name and ultimately spawned the movie Moneyball, released in 2011, in which Beane was portrayed by Brad Pitt. The A’s lost talent consistently and yet continued to win with players cast aside by other teams long ago.

It seemed like magic, and everyone wanted to know how the trick worked.

The Boston Red Sox wanted to know so badly they offered Beane a five year, $12.5 million contract following the 2002 season. Beane initially accepted the job in Boston but changed his mind less than a day later, deciding to stay with the low-budget A’s, where he also became a minority owner of the franchise.

It was the height of Beane’s popularity outside the sport and the bottom of his Q rating within it. Many bristled at quotes from the book, in which Beane questioned the value of baseball’s traditional scouting community. In addition, Lewis had written about a man who had never won anything. At that moment in time, the latter point seemed moot.

Beane was going to win a World Series. The only question was when.

Top of the sixth: Kansas City 3, Oakland 2

In the sixth, Oakland seems to realize the potential Beane envisioned. A’s outfielder Sam Fuld singles to right. Josh Donaldson walks. Shields is lifted in favor of Kansas City fireballer Yordano Ventura. Two on, none out.

Moss, who hit .162 with two homers over the final two months of the season, steps in. Already with one homer on the night, he launches another. 5-3 A’s. The sixth yields two more runs for Oakland. Two-out RBI singles by Derek Norris and Crisp put the road team up, 7-3.

Lester is cruising through an overmatched Royals lineup. After allowing two runs in the third, he has permitted one total baserunner in the next four frames. Headed into the bottom of the eighth, Oakland still leads 7-3.

The A’s have six outs to get before heading back to California with Jeff Samardzija and Sonny Gray on tap.

Everything is falling into place.

October has been a cruel month for Oakland and its leading man.

In Beane’s time as general manager, the A’s reached the playoffs eight times. They were AL West champions in six of those seasons and a wild card participant twice. But Oakland advanced past the ALDS only once, in 2006, when it was unceremoniously swept out of the ALCS by the Detroit Tigers.

Beane’s regular-season resumè is terrific, even taking into account a five-year stretch from 2007-11 when Oakland failed to top the .500 mark. The A’s have generally been a power, but the power has switched off when the lights are brightest. And so while his influence on baseball is undeniable, there are many who can’t overlook his team’s shortcomings in the postseason.

“I think he has been incredibly successful especially given the era before the major revenue sharing when there was such a disparity in baseball when Oakland competed and in some cases did really well,” Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci said. “However, you are measured in postseason success and they failed. There is no way around that.”

Due to its small market and late-night games, Oakland has been largely anonymous to the national audience. The postseason is the only real chance for the A’s — and by extension, Beane — to showcase their abilities. For most, then, Oakland has been an unabashed failure.

While nobody expected the upstart A’s to defeat the mighty New York Yankees in 2000, there were real expectations in 2001. Oakland had the talent and the playoff experience from the previous campaign. The A’s took the first two games of the best-of-five series at Yankee Stadium, but ultimately lost because of an inability to manufacture runs.

It was a similar story in 2002 and 2003. Oakland went out in five games to the Minnesota Twins and Red Sox, respectively. In both instances, the A’s had series leads and the opportunity to close out on home turf. They failed both times, and criticism of the machine Beane had built began to mount.

Beane, perhaps unsurprisingly, does not place as much weight on his team’s postseason failures.

“I’ve always said the great thing about baseball is that 162 games essentially gets 10 teams to the playoffs and those teams deserve to get there,” Beane said. “I always felt, given our market, I was always extremely proud of the team given our market place. I don’t view any lack of success as an indictment … I have always enjoyed the playoffs once they got here. There is not much you can do from a front office standpoint, you can’t make personnel moves. I don’t dwell on it and move forward.”

There will always be differing opinions on the A’s accomplishments under Beane. Before his installment as general manager, the franchise played 98 seasons and reached the playoffs 18 times, roughly one appearance every five years. Under Beane, Oakland has gone to the playoffs almost every other year. While the expanded playoff format has made it easier to reach the postseason, league-wide expansion and the explosion of payroll has worked against the A’s.

Ultimately, Oakland has been a six-month dream followed by a one-week nightmare.

Whether that counts as success or failure is a matter of perspective.

“I think people are split on that front,” Slusser said. “A’s fans would say it is a disappointment because they haven’t won it all. I think many A’s fans came on board because of moneyball, because making the playoffs with that payroll is something extraordinary. … Throughout the Billy Beane era the A’s have been one of the most hard-luck postseason teams ever. Quirky plays like the Jeter flip, the baserunning in Boston. … They have excuses for all of them but fans and some baseball people would tell you those are excuses.”

Bottom of the eighth: Oakland 7, Kansas City 3

Kansas City and a crowd of 40,502 awakens. The Royals enjoy another leadoff single by Escobar, who reached third following a stolen base and an out. Cain singles for his second RBI of the evening. 7-4.

Cain steals second on Norris, who is only playing because Oakland’s starting catcher Geovany Soto exited in the first inning with an injured thumb. Soto was starting because of his defensive prowess and Lester’s lack of a pickoff move. Norris has been dealing with a bad hip injury for months. He can’t throw.

Kansas City knows this. More bad luck.

On a 3-2 pitch to Hosmer, Lester believes he has hit the low, outside corner with a fastball. Umpire Bill Miller disagrees. First and second, one out. Lester is gone after 111 pitches. Enter reliever Luke Gregerson. Facing Butler, Gregerson allows an RBI single to right-center. First and third, one out. 7-5. Momentum has swung.

Terrance Gore is inserted as a pinch-runner for Butler at first. The entire stadium, including Norris, knows what is coming. On the first pitch to Alex Gordon, Gore easily swipes second base. Second and third, down two runs, one out. The next pitch is wild and Hosmer scores, with Gore moving to third.

Everyone in Oakland knows how this story ends. Now it is time to watch in pain.

But Gregerson gets out of it. He walks Gordon, but strikes out Salvador Perez and Omar Infante to end the inning. 7-6 A’s, somehow.

After those five consecutive sub-.500 seasons from 2007-11, Beane and his team were dismissed. In April 2012, Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon of ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption did a segment on the A’s, asking if the team should relocate due to a lack of fan support.

The luster that came with early success was gone. Beane was left for dead, and many within the game were glad to see it.

His demise was greatly exaggerated.

From 2012-14, Oakland reached the postseason three times, playing a completely different brand of baseball.

While reaching base and power were still important — that team boasted Donaldson, Moss and Cespedes at the heart of the order — the A’s could swipe bags. During that time, Oakland’s ranked sixth, 11th and 10th in the AL in stolen bases. From 2000-03, it ranked 30th, 29th, 30th and 29th once more.

“We never disliked the stolen base, we disliked the caught stealing,” Beane cracked. “It is the personnel, and understand there is limited personnel available to us because of our market. We can’t choose. Bob (Melvin) has to use the skill sets available to him. Look at Billy Burns. You can’t ask him to sit back and get into a 3-0 count and launch one over the fence.”

Most believed the A’s would be a total non-factor in 2012, but they won one of the most improbable division titles in MLB history. Oakland won 94 games with a September rotation that featured five rookies, overtaking the two-time AL champion Texas Rangers on the final day of the regular season. The following season brought 96 more wins and another AL West crown.

This run of success owed much to a new focus on versatility. A player who can only hit against one type of pitcher is limited, but if he can field multiple positions and platoon effectively, he has value. Oakland, like most teams, carries 13 position players on their 25-man roster. Beane likes to have five full-time players in the lineup and eight others to be interchanged based on whether the opposing pitcher is right or left-handed.

Jed Lowrie, Crisp, Donaldson, Moss and Cespedes played almost all the time, but Norris and Stephen Vogt split time at catcher, Eric Sogard and Adam Rosales rotated at second base, and Seth Smith and Chris Young rotated accordingly.

“Baseball is the sport of constant adjustments,” Slusser said. “They don’t hit every year any more, and when you look at that 2012 team, it isn’t luck because they traded for Josh Donaldson and signed Brandon Moss for a reason, but I don’t think they would tell you they expected Donaldson to became an MVP-level player or Moss would have 30-home run power and become an All-Star. They were fortunate and did some smart things.”

Over time, Beane adapted his method to explore new avenues and find previously unnoticed inefficiencies. This is the ultimate credo of moneyball.

Again, October proved to be the undoing of both Oakland and Beane’s dreams.

In 2012 and 2013, the A’s lost in the ALDS to Detroit. Both times, they had opportunities to clinch the series and failed to do so, losing in five games each time. Then 2014 came and Oakland looked stronger than ever. It had its most devastating roster in over a decade, and sent seven players to the All-Star Game in July.

The A’s were odds-on favorites to win the World Series, cruising to a 59-36 mark at the break — the best record in baseball. They ranked second in runs scored and first in runs allowed. It seemed Beane had finally put everything together. Then, without warning, he took it apart.

On July 5, Beane traded Russell for Samardzija and Hammel, before the trade deadline deal that saw Cespedes head to Boston in return for Lester. From August 1 through the end of the regular season, the A’s went 22-33 and fell 10 games behind the Los Angeles Angels in the West.

“His approach is a little different from teams that go into a full rebuild because he says he is too competitive to do that,” Rosenthal said. “He tries to put the best team on the field each year and then adjustments. He makes trades if the team is not good enough in July. You hear ‘what have they done’ from old-school baseball types and in a sense that is a fair question. They have had plenty of opportunities and not been able to do it.”

The A’s were going for broke. They mortgaged the long-term by moving Russell — probably the best position-player prospect of Beane’s time in Oakland — and traded Cespedes in hopes of building an unstoppable rotation for one October.

August and September were disastrous, but a win in Game 162 put the A’s in the postseason. They would have one more chance.

Bottom of the ninth: Oakland, 7, Kansas City 6

Oakland’s All-Star closer Sean Doolittle takes the mound in the bottom of the ninth.

Former Oakland outfielder Josh Willingham steps into the batter’s box and, with two strikes, lays a bloop single into right. Pinch-runner Jarrod Dyson advances to second on an Escobar sacrifice bunt before stealing third base with one out. Nori Aoki flies out on a 3-1 pitch to deep right. Dyson scores. Tie game.

Through the 10th and 11th innings, nobody scores. In the 12th, a leadoff walk by A’s right fielder Josh Reddick is followed by a Lowrie sacrifice and a Jason Frasor wild pitch. Reddick stands on third base with one out.

On a 1-2 pitch, Alberto Callaspo slaps a high 92 MPH fastball into left field. 8-7 A’s.

Once more, it looked as though Beane and his team would have the final say.

With Oakland reliever Dan Otero pitching and one out in the bottom of the 12th, Hosmer stands in. With two strikes, he smacks a fly ball to left-center. Jonny Gomes and Crisp leap simultaneously for the catch. The duo crashes into each other and the ball drops. Hosmer ends up at third.

Christian Colon is up next, and the little-used utility player drives a pitch right into home plate. The high bounce allows the speedy Colon to reach while Hosmer ties the game.

More horrific luck for Beane and the A’s.

The sellout crowd at Kauffman is delirious. After Fernando Abad relieves Otero and gets Gordon to foul out, Jason Hammel is brought in. Hammel has been terrible since coming to Oakland in the Samardzija-Russell trade, but here is his chance.

The A’s know Colon will steal. They pitch out. Norris drops the ball.

Colon on second and two outs for Perez. On the 2-2 pitch, Perez pulls a low, outside fastball down the left field line. Josh Donaldson dives but can’t reach it. The ball is fair, Colon scores.

The game, and this edition of Oakland baseball, is over.

In the coming weeks, Beane will blow up the team. Lester and Hammel leave in free agency. Moss, Donaldson, Samardzija and Norris are traded for young assets. The A’s, and Beane, have failed again.

In 2015, Cespedes was acquired by Alderson, becoming the centerpiece of the Mets lineup in their World Series run. That same year, Oakland finished 68-94, dead last in the AL.

Beane certainly won’t be forgotten, but how will he be remembered? Is he the eccentric former ballplayer who revolutionized the sport with his hiring strategies and embrace of sabermetrics, or is he the perennial playoff loser who disrespected the game’s oldest traditions?

The answer may ultimately depend on whether Beane can finally win that elusive championship. In today’s society, everyone in sports is judged by the jewelry they own. There is little time for the bigger picture in a world that is constantly looking for the next big storyline. Despite his overall impact, should Beane fail to raise a World Series flag in Oakland, there is legitimate debate as to whether he will be considered a success or failure.

Even among the game’s elite scribes and historians, there is pause when the question is asked. If he doesn’t win a championship, what will Billy Beane’s legacy be?

“I think it will be remembered as an empty one,” Verducci said. “More so than ever these days, it is an all-or-nothing measuring stick. If you haven’t won a championship you haven’t accomplished anything. People in the game don’t feel that way but that’s how it could be viewed. I think you have to pay it off with a championship. I think his legacy is set in terms of the impact on the game and being somewhat of a revolutionary, but it is incomplete without a championship. It’s the reason we keep score, have playoffs and hand out a trophy at the end of the year.”

Still, for many people, Beane is the man who finally brought baseball into a new, more educated era. While Oakland was not the only team looking at baseball in a new way, it is certainly the organization most closely associated to the revolution.

“I still think he’s remembered as one of the best general managers of his era because of the changes that occurred during that time and he at least has something to do with it,” Kurkjian said. “When someone is a trailblazer and changes the game for good in some cases, that is remembered secondary to championships, of course. … People will look at him and positive people will see him as a visionary.”

Regardless of people’s thoughts on Beane, the story of baseball can’t be told without uttering his name. Traditionally, that is the benchmark for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. With Beane, in a way that might be unique in the history of the sport, things are a little more complicated.

“It’s incredibly difficult for any executive to be elected to the Hall of Fame,” longtime baseball writer Rob Neyer said. “…Nobody has ever made it without winning a World Series. If he makes it, it will be because of things carrying weight that never did before.

“Of course, there has never been a Billy Beane before.”