And I must say, everytime I hear or read something similar to this:

just ask Dave Roberts, Terry Francona, and the '04 Red Sox how important a stolen base is

...I get a little crazy.

MACHA IS GOOD ENOUGH!!! His undervaluing of coaching is rediculous.

Otherwise, I think he is a fantastic GM.

I am the type to generally see a trend with my eyes and then investigate it numerically, than I am to look at numbers all day and draw conclusions solely on those.

For instance, I saw that Cupcakes was not getting his hamhock up high enough early in the year and wrote abote it on here ad nauseum.

That caused him to be off balance and his arm was late. For a control pitcher, in fact, even for a power pitcher that is mechanical suicide.

From my old seats in the opposing team's pen I saw David Wells warm up for his start in Oakland and he was doing the same thing. I told everyone, A's fans, around me about this and sure enough the big fella got rocked for the same reasons.

Without that knowledge all you would have is an impression of his stats and not know why.

Stat and Seam heads are very integral parts of a winning formula.

Oh, yeah, and so are the passionate screaming fans that don't give a hoot as long as the home team wins!!!

firing Depo just set the Dodges back by years.  Some of these old "baseball" guys just can't get it through their head that the world changes, and baseball is no exception.  Quantitative analysis is now the new world order...like it or not.  Find yourself a geek and you will go far.  That playoff garbage is annoying....you gotta dance with who brought ya.  The Red sox don't make it to the WS without Theo and his geek squad...and now revisionists/traditionalists wanna declare that one stolen base proves a thousand "geeks" wrong?  Don't think so.  

I became a fan around 1987.  

I don't think DePo's performance merited him being fired, but we don't know what went on behind the scenes.  It could be that his managerial skills were sufficiently lacking.

Sabermetrics is the search for truth in baseball through objective study.  As such, saying a sabermetric principle doesn't work in the playoffs is pretty meaningless.  The playoffs are a bit different than the regular season in that

1. Frontline pitchers will pitch a higher percentage of innings, which means frontline talent is more important and depth is less important than in the regular season.  
2. Games are, in general, lower scoring.  A lower run environment changes the breakeven point of strategies such as stolen bases and sacrifices.  

The playoffs aren't random chance, but a sample size of 5 or 7 games is not enough to determine who the better team is with any type of accuracy, especially when two teams are relatively equal.  This should be obvious.

I have yet to see any study showing that the A's were poorly designed to win in the playoffs from 2000-2003.  They had incredibly different teams in different years of that run.

As for Beane disagreeing with the "experts," here's what John Schuerholz (who I believe has the best track record of any active GM) has to say:

--------------------
"People who understand the game understand that the true measure of excellence for a baseball team, and the construction of a baseball team, and the strength of a baseball team, is the 162-game season. If you prove yourself over the 162-game season, that's the litmus test that validates what you've done.

"And it's that litmus test that validates Bobby's credentials, more than a happenstance, or a bad hop, or a bad play that happens in a short series. And most people in baseball understand that."

His best role may be as a secondary player. One who sits in the corner with his computer and IS the stats guy who's ability to run numbers mixes well with someone else's firsthand visual knowledge.

Not everyone is GM material.

I'm gonna give this a whirl... a more verbose description, yet similar to BCG above...

Stathead vs. Seamhead is a false dichotomy. As someone who's been watching baseball as far back as I can remember, and who played ball through high school in the WCAL, there are some elements of human interaction and human nature in baseball that don't show up in numbers. My favorite example of why scouts are ABSOLUTELY necessary is the one of the kid who grew up in a small town, went to a small college in an even smaller town, and was an utterly dominant pitcher all along the way, but when a big league scout finally got a chance to talk to him, discovered that the kid was a nervous wreck who wilted noticeably when even talking about large crowds. Would you take a chance on him?

However, and I know I'm paraphrasing someone more insightful than I am, numbers aren't just numbers; they are a written record of what somebody observed, only written in a specific way. I buy Bill James's notion that baseball statistics and math are a language that can tell us things our subjective impressions are likely to miss. My favorite example of this is that of the insurance company. Do insurance companies direct their employees to primarily use intuition and subjective impressions? No. Of course not. They use actuarial tables.

When I put it all together, on a basic level, I get a kick out of knowing that it's in a hitter's best interest to work the count, and then watching a hitter either flail away or take close pitches. The academic study of the game informs my senses and visceral enjoyment. So, it's a false dichotomy to say that you can divide baseball fans into seamheads and statheads.

Can still enjoy and make observations about games on a daily basis. It's just those observations are rarely, "Nick Swisher struck out in a key situation. Nick Swisher can't hit in the clutch," or, "Ken Macha subbed in Kielty and he got it.  Ken Macha is a genius."  (I know I'm being unfair, but I go to a lot of games and this is what people say). Being a stathead just adds to the various things you can talk about during the course of a baseball game.

what I think this post is getting at. It's easy to brand fans as one way or the other.BUt I think there's a marriage between different views of baseball which go back more deeply.
   My childhood experiences of knowing my owns stats eg batting avg. etc. became interesting as I continued to grow in the knowlege of the game. But the comment about an opposing player such as "he's good" wasn't met with reeling off the numbers. We all saw and knew the most talented players on our team and the others.
   Games such as strat-O-matic and especially APBA were very influential in not only enjoying my favorite team but appreciating how their stats were interpreted compared with other teams.
   Regarding A's fans over the last 20 years, Sandy Alderson then Billy Beane introduced a "culture" of viewing baseball from a perspective that used statistics as a means to an end. That's one way I've appreciated our A's but at the same time, it hurts a little more when the glaring truth about a particular player or team trend is obvious without any way to correct it. One can get lost in statistics which ultimately are great for trends, but they are in know going to replace the unpredictablility that we commonly see.
    For myself, the astute observation during the course of action is something that I enjoy more, because it leads back to the statements I made while growing up such as, "Dang he's good!"

As a former player who had a pretty good deal of success at what you guys would call "low" levels, it does annoy me when someone who has never played the game at all talks as if they were a Willie Mays, although most of the time he (or she)sounds more like a Marco Scuatro, and assumes that with their knowledge of statisitcs they are superior.

However, Micah realizes that statistics are a very useful tool in determining the value of a player, and they should not automatically be discredited by bigots such as Plachke (spelling?) and other fat, obnoxious writers.

Honestly, my ideal GM would be me. A former player who understands the neoances of the game and just has a good natural "feel" for talent, yet at the same time appreciates many of the assets that statistics provide.

First enjoy the action on the field.
Crisp double plays, stretching a double from a long single, hidden ball, Mgr getting the heave ho!, all of it! Smell of the grass, crisscross cuts of the grass, G*d on the PA system, a colossal dog!, Strike 3!, a 3-run dinger for the lead!

Learn how to win more than you lose
If you take the game serious like I do you want your team to play to win. This brings you to comparisions of all types. All the comparisions have single purpose, to differentiate that which the winners have and that your team needs to acquire. When you compare Zito to Colon to Big Unit to...on and on. To percieve more clearly how your guys can win,to get an edge.
When you compare Yankees and A's it's not to see who has the larger markets and who has the best money stream, we know those answers before the question is asked. Comparisions are pointed towards competing better & winning more.

Stats and minutae.
The business of MLB is deciphered into every kind of study of minutae. Much more so than any other sport or endeavor short of our military complex. As the quest to win by being better informed manifests you are brought back over and over again to the simple facts that you must score more than your opponent or your opponent must score less than you. A single run past a tie score is all you need in two thirds of your games to enjoy the post season. So what's so hard?

Uncontrollable and assumed.
The A's last year suffered uncontrollable health problems, they lacked this years depth because it was ASSUMED they were simply rebuilding and lacked the ability as a team to challenge better teams.
The A's played 234 games over 2004 & 2005 and missed two years of playoffs by 8 games. How do you correct that problem in a field of ever improving competition? It's only 8 games! That's only 4 more wins per year! ...so what to do?

Eliminating the previous season's issue's
The best possible example I can give is the players that were carried over from 2005 and the players that have been added to those that now make up the 2006 A's roster.

My only permanent label is "A's fan"