In 2001, the Oakland As lost hard to the New York Yankees in the American League Division Series. General Manager Billy Beane s soon to lose three of his star players, including Johnny Damon, because they are about to become free agents. He does not know how he is going to put a competitive team together for the 2002 season because the team's budget is so small especially when it is compared with other teams around the League. How to attract big names with such tight purse strings?
Beane takes a scouting trip to the Cleveland Indians where he meets Peter Brand, who has ideas that nobody else has about assessing the value of a player. As a test, Beane asks Brand to evaluate him, as he was coming out of high school, a highly-touted player whom teams fought over. All that notwithstanding, his Major League career had been hugely lackluster. Brand tells Beane that based on his own method of assessing a player he would not have drafted Beane until the end of the ninth round, which Beane finds very impressive; he hires Brand as his Assistant General Manager.
Brand elaborates upon his method of assessing each player. He doesn't use scouts, but he uses he uses sabermetrics, which is the empirical analysis of statistics that measure the activity of each player with in the context of a game. He basically looks at the upside of each player without looking at their downside, and using this method the two men hire players who have remained largely undervalued. It's not surprising that the As scouts are resentful and skeptical about this method; Beane fires head scout Grady Fuson after Fuson accuses him of ruining the team. The team manager, Art Howe, is no more impressed than the scouting corps, with Howe ignoring the sabermetrical strategy and organizing the traditional line-up he is familiar with but that deliberately contradicts the instructions that Beane has given him.
The As are ten games behind first place quite early on in the season; critics dismiss the new strategy but Brand argues that the success of the strategy won't be fully able to be judged until the end of the season. He trades Carlos Pena, the one remaining "traditional" first baseman on the roster, which leaves Howe no choice other than to play Hattenberg. He repeats this at every position until Howe is forced to play the roster as Beane and Brand intended. A strange thing starts to happen; they start to win.
Two months later comes the start of an unprecedented winning streak. The team ties the American League record of nineteen consecutive wins. They break the record in a tight game against the Kansas City Royals, the first game that Beane has actually watched live. The 2002 American League West title is theirs but they lose to the Minnesota Twins in the divisional series. The rise from last to almost first has attracted a great deal of attention; Beane is contacted by other teams, including the Boston Red Sox, who offer him the position of GM, complete with a hefty salary. He stays at Oakland; two years later, using the sabermetrics method created by Beane and Brand, the Red Sox win the World Series anyway.
