Background

Billy Beane was born on March 29, 1962, in Orlando, Florida. He attended Mt. Carmel High School in San Diego, California. From an early age, Beane had an interest in sports. He played football, baseball, and basketball in high school. His father was an officer in the Navy, and Beane regards him as his first coach since his dad taught young Billy how to pitch. He went to the University of California to study economics, where the New York Mets drafted him. He left college at the age of 18 to pursue a career in professional baseball.

Marriage, Wife, and Children

Billy Beane has been married twice in his life and has three children. The first daughter whom he had with his first wife is Casey. Billy married Tara Beane in 1999, with whom he had two children Tinsley and Brayden, who are twins.

Career and Net Worth

The New York Mets considered Billy Beane as a first-round pick but ended up choosing him as their 23rd pick because they thought he would select attending school at Stanford over a professional baseball career. After seeing the clubhouse, he decided to sign and started playing in the major league.

In 1985, Billy was traded to the Minnesota Twins, where he played as left fielder. He played 80 games before being traded to the Detroit Tigers in 1988. Beane played just six games for the Tigers, which was a very injury-laden season for him. In 1989, he joined the Oakland Athletics and played 37 games with them. In 1990, he retired from baseball altogether due to injuries and weariness from playing minor league baseball.

Front Office Career

After ending his playing career, Beane turned to scout. In 1990, Beane started working as a baseball scout for the Orlando Athletics. In 1993, he was promoted to the Assistant General Manager post, later becoming General Manager in October 1997. Facing one of the smallest budgets for player salaries of any team in baseball in 2002, the Oakland A's were in a bind. Beane, the team's general manager, was fed up with his inability to outbid other teams for good players. He reached out to Paul DePodesta, a Harvard alum with a background in economics who had a knack for baseball statistics. The two of them used Bill James-style advanced statistics, also known as sabermetrics, to take a second look at how the team was scouting talent.

Beane and DePodesta set about mining decades of data on hundreds of individual players to figure out the best strategy for recruiting good players. Their analysis revealed that baseball scouts overlooked statistics that could accurately predict how many runs a player would score. Drawing from these conclusions, Beane realized that the bidding market probably undervalued players who scored high on these overlooked statistics. He began seeking out these "bargain" players, or players who were flying under the radar of other teams but whose statistics suggested that they would score runs. Beane used this to rate different players from bad to good and very best. He used these tactics to scout players and drafted them into his team.

Beane and DePodesta's hard work paid off because Orlando Athletics ended up building a successful team despite serious financial problems and led to an astonishing increase in the performance. Orlando Athletics started to win, even against baseball teams that had much larger budgets. In over 100 years of American League baseball, the group became the first team to win 20 consecutive games.

Moneyball Stats

Thanks to its analytical work Beane showed how a team could achieve major successes despite players are paid little: Billy Beane became the subject of the bestselling book "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" by Michael Lewis. The book discusses Beane's methods and how he used the principles of sabermetrics to manage the team cost-effectively. The book and Beane's methods have influenced the thinking of other baseball teams and their players. In the decade that has passed since the A's legendary season, sports teams have been integrating statistical analysis into the way they play. The book was later adapted to a movie with the same name starring Brad Pitt.

Beane envisions a world in which sports are no longer an exclusive club of insiders. Technology, he argues, is driving sports towards greater diversity and increased access. He wrote, "Technology will transform the social fabric of the sport."

His stats speak for themselves as he created a 976–804 (.548) record, the fifth-best in baseball that time, and won 4 American League West titles. Under his tenure, his players got some best individual awards as well. In 1999, Beane received Sporting News' Executive of the Year, and in 2002, he was awarded Baseball America's MLB's Executive of the Year.

In addition to his successful career in scouting for baseball, he dabbled in scouting statistics for professional Soccer and Football, where he would objectively analyze players. In 2008, Beane stretched the field of his statistical work and collaborated with Gingrich and Sen. John Kerry to co-author an article in the New York Times to present possible remedies for the U.S. health care crisis.

He is also on the board of members of a famous software company called NetSuit. He was once offered a salary of $2.5 million per year for a five-year contract by the Red Sox, which he rejected. His net worth is estimated to be around $6 million. With his out-of-the-box approach to Baseball, Beane remains one of the most influential personalities in the sports world.