Billy Beane Says The Athletics’ Trades Paid Off →
Beane spoke in the A’s clubhouse on "pack up your shit for the winter" day yesterday, and if he wants reporters to take anything away from this season's aggressive deadline moves, it's that those trades were made with the express purpose of making the postseason, not necessarily succeeding in it:
"The Angels were going to catch us," Beane told reporters. "They played nearly .700 ball from a certain point. If you go back to my quotes from when we made those trades, despite the fact of where we were, at no point were those trades made for the playoffs. I was adamant about it. I could feel the Angels breathing down our necks.
"What I didn't reveal was that I was also concerned about us, which was the point of the trades."
You know who says stuff like this? Losers. Losers also say stuff like this:
One of the takeaways from Moneyball is that Beane believes the playoffs are a crapshoot, that getting there is the hard part and that every team that makes it has roughly similar chances of winning it all.
Nobody ever does anything great by striving for mediocrity.