The Oakland Athletics have been known as the laughing stock of the MLB for the past decade and this is due to their terrible rosters, record, and their decaying stadium. A large drop off from the early 2000’s when the A’s were the talk of the sports world because their manager Billy Beane created a scheme called Moneyball.
This approach allowed them to beat richer teams like the New York Yankees despite the fact that the A’s maintained a ver low payroll for their own players. So successful that Micheal Lewis had a bestselling book which detailed the scheme and eventually became a movie starring Brad Pitt. The book especially has deep insight into how “Moneyball” works and how statistics could play a major role in picking up cheap, young, and efficient players.
Subsequently, other managers of teams with big salaries read the book and changed their programs to fit the new way of playing baseball. They adapted to the way the Athletics ran their team — putting Oakland at a huge disadvantage because they still couldn’t spend big money on established players and lost successful young talent once signed by franchises with big payrolls like the Yankees or Red Sox. This still goes on to this day some teams farm off of the Athletics.
Perhaps some of the success was due to general manager Billy Beane and manager Art Howe, but whatever the reason the current squad has been very poor and the move to Las Vegas has not improved matters. This leaves the city of Oakland a graveyard of sports teams. Read more about this phenomenon in my article: https://saintjosephsquare.com/13329/sports/another-sports-team-gone-in-oakland/
