How are the ex A's doing one month in and what was Billy's biggest Mistake?

“expect to be blasted by some for daring to criticize Billy” — do you READ AN? If you do, how can you come to the conclusion that one can’t criticize Billy Beane? Some of AN’s most respected, most prolific, and most high profile (front page) users do it all the time.

Not having to suffer another Game 5 defeat….priceless.

Can you send billy your crystal ball?

Patterson is not remotely close to being good enough to be labeled borderline.

we have a winner

i was just about to write that

This.

Runner-up: Not signing the talent you drafted or had an opportunity to draft.

the argument at the time was having Crosby as the replacement. No one thot at the time that he would be a colossal BUST.

Billy should have never let Tejada, who was then the heart & soul of our team leave. Trading Chavez at the time would have returned a boatload of specs, and Crosby could have switched over to 3B.

At the time, keeping Chavez and letting Tejada go was the logical thing to do. Chavez was the better player. He was also younger and there were many who believed Tejada was older than he claimed. (The speculation later turned out to be correct).

The A’s had Crosby coming up behind Tejada and Crosby looked like he had a very good chance of being an above average major league shortstop. There was no way to figure that Chavez would break down the way he did. And though Crosby suffered a couple of freak injuries in the minors, who could have predicted he would be so brittle? And how much of his failure to develop can be attributed to the time he spent on the shelf?

If you’re trying to identify a decision that hurt the team the most, this is probably at the top of the list. But if you’re looking for the one that could or should have been avoided, this one isn’t even on the radar.

should lead to some delightful discussion

The biggest question with him has always been his plate discipline — secondarily there have been questions about whether he’d develop power, but I think those two will tend to go together over the long run. With the A’s, his K/BB was 81/13. Last year with the Rockies, it was 70/28 — still bad, but much, much better than he’d been in the past. This year, it’s 18/3, which is pretty much back to where he was with the A’s.

Unless he starts laying off bad pitches, those numbers, as you say, will fall back down.

is he was not in the majors last year and this (so far). The A’s were not going to contend with Carlos Gonzalez in 2009 or 2016.

Crosby was tabbed to be an MVP for ’05.
Ellis had no history of injuries.

Where is the mistake?

I agree the infield didn’t have enough depth.

By far. Being frugal is one thing, but the Scutaro trade was just him being cheap. Shortsightedly cheap.

because you just made a ton of sense.

I love fanposts like this. It makes my head hurt to compile all the players traded and what they are doing now, etc. It’s nice to look back just for curiousity’s sake.

Also, yes hindsight is 20/20, but good GMs do a lot better than bad GMs. They all make mistakes, but we can imagine the “son of a bitch” posts might be 10x higher for the Pirates GMs over the years than for Beane.

I don’t think the point is to bash Billy Beane using hindsight – it’s more of “what if” concept, and, most especially, it shows how we got to where we are.

The fact that this guy went through and looked up all this info is what has enabled us to have a lively discussion here. So I’m going to have to disagree.

He does list Kouzmanoff next to Hairston. I don’t think any of us are missing Hairston. This just gives us a great opportunity to look back at our GM’s track record and see how it came out. I’m not sure how else to evaluate a GM (or any employee in any other situation, in any industry) other than his track record.

Like visible from Florida type of green?

Looking at his splits from 2009, he was a lot better at home than on the road. His OPS was .943 at home and .811 on the road. We’ll see how he fares this year.

news to me