Beane count posted, wrapped up!

Well the entire Beane Count has now been posted, hopefully it’s not another slow news day today, however the market is very much like Ricciardi predicted, quiet in between the meetings…

Of the 29 trades analyzed in the Beane Count:
12 were Player Acquisitions in which Beane gave up prospects for a more polished player

9 were baseball deals in which players of similar talent levels and contracts were traded for each other

3 were role player dumps and 3 were Dumps of bigger salaries

2 were role player acquisitions

An interesting fact is of the 3 big salary dumps, Beane actually acquired players that ended up being more productive than the players traded while ridding the A’s of over $11 million. This is mostly because of Terrence Long, however Oakland acquired a total of 13 VORP runs by means of these trades and that does not include the fact that Long was flipped for Mark Kotsay, who is still with the team. The role player dumps were not as successful as the players traded saved the team around $2 million and the loss of VORP was of 17.3. The 2 role player acquired trades made up for this however, as the players acquired cost about $2 million and the gain in VORP was of 18.3. The Ron Gant trade excluded from this observation for entertainment purposes was an acquisition of around $1 million in salary for a VORP of 4.4.

The baseball deals ended up with a BIG advantage in VORP in Oakland’s favour of almost 250 runs. The difference in salaries, from what I could find, was to Oakland’s disadvantage as they picked up around $8 million in salary (after withdrawing cash traded). But imagine, 9 trades made by Billy Beane and he added 250 runs of VORP while adding only $8 million in payroll! There’s also the added value of these trades by later trades of Terrence Long (Kenny Rogers), 4 first round picks (Izzy, Damon), and Ted Lilly (Carlos Pena). All in all, Beane seems to have dominated when making baseball deals.

Beane paid a hefty price to acquire players that could help his team win now as he ended up losing almost 100 runs in VORP in these types of trades while paying over $10 million more in first year salaries. The losses of Karsay, Bonderman and Hinske really skew these numbers but sometimes you have to pay a hefty price to win now.

In the end, it seems that Beane really did have some success with trades in his first five season, more success than Ricciardi...

So there you have it, the Beane Count in all its glory! Read it if you'd like, stay tuned, the next analysis is already being worked on. Check out the Ricciardi Project parts if you haven't already...