Billy Beane Quotes

Baseball has always been filled with negative statistics.

The difference between winning nineteen games and winning twenty for a pitcher is bigger than anyone out of baseball realizes. It's the same for hitters - someone who hits .300 looks back on the guy who batted .295 and says 'tough luck buddy.

Parker's grand slam is the same as going 4 for 4, even though he went 1 for 4.

When you've played this game for ten years and gone to bat seven-thousand times and gotten two-thousand hits do you know what that really means? It means you've gone zero for five-thousand.

Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats for your people: batting averages, home runs, errors, ERAs, win/loss records. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.

Who wants to get really granular with sabermetrics when you're going to see a two-and-a-half-hour Brad Pitt movie? You don't go to the cinema for a maths lesson.

We all know that players will hit a few more home runs than usual in some years and a few less in others. But the mathematics of chance also predicts that some years they'll hit a lot more, and some years a lot less.

Any one game in baseball doesn't tell you that much, just as any one poll doesn't tell you that much.

Beware of averages. The average person has one breast and one testicle.

I loved 'Moneyball,' I thought that was a great Hollywood movie. I like baseball, but I don't know that you have to like baseball to like that. I thought it was really well done.

Personal records are not what football is all about, but as goalscorers, we live and die by figures and numbers because, ultimately, that's how people will judge you.

We need a Moneyball revolution in the NFL. We need Spread teams and Run and Shoot teams and Option teams.

I am way more accurate than my completion percentage shows.

Americans are analytical in their sports, which are very stop-start, so the numbers tend to add up. That's why Moneyball works for baseball. It doesn't work so well for football because it's a fluid game.

As I've become a professional, I just feel more pressure to produce, to score goals and get assists. I know I'm a good player, but it gives evidence of how good you are if you're able to look at how many passes you've made in a game or how many chances you create. It's in the books. It's become more about stats as I've become a professional.

I had a lot of stats in college, and they didn't count for wins. So whatever it takes to win football games is the goal that I set.

I don't really look at numbers. I couldn't tell you what my home-road stats are or anything like that.

Statistics are one thing. But if you're not putting up the numbers as far as winning, they're not going to consider you for things like the MVP.

I don't judge my performance on how many assists I have or how many points I have.

I care about runs scored and RBIs. Those are the most important things for me.

This is the honest truth: I could absolutely care less on yards per game. I think that's a totally overblown stat.

A lot of people don't really understand that a statistic is an indicator, but it doesn't really give the full picture of the body of work. There's been time when I've had one sack or no sacks and controlled a whole game, and I've seen other cats get three or four sacks and it had no effect on that game.

The questions don't happen when you hit 30 homers, right? If you hit 30 home runs, you hit 40 doubles, I don't think anybody questions your conditioning or your offseason program.

If he's averaging 25 points and I can contain him to 17, then I've won the battle. If he averages 12 assists and I kept him to seven, I'm winning the game.