Ken MedlockQuotes

Grady Fuson: Major League Baseball and its fans...they're gonna be more than happy to throw you and Google boy under the bus if you keep doing what you're doing. You don't put a team together with a computer.

Billy Beane: No?

Grady Fuson: No. Baseball isn't just numbers. It's not science. If it was, anybody could do what we do, but they can't cause they don't know what we know. They don't have our experience and they don't have our intuition.

Billy Beane: [dismissively] Ok.

Grady Fuson: Billy, you got a kid in there that's got a degree in Economics from Yale. You got a scout here with 29 years of baseball experience. You're listening to the wrong one. Now there are intangibles that only baseball people understand. You're discarding what scouts have done for 150 years, even yourself?

Billy Beane: Adapt or die.

Baseball narrator #1: We got Grady Fuson, former head of scouting with the Athletics.

Baseball narrator #2: And, Grady, can you interpret for us what's going on?

Grady Fuson: [[w:Sabermetrics|Moneyball] They call it ]. Moneyball?

Grady Fuson: Yes, and it was a nice theory, and now it's just not working out. Billy Beane has built this team on the ideas of a guy, Bill James... who wrote an interesting book on baseball statistics. The problem is that Bill James never played, never managed. He was in fact a security guard at a pork-and-beans company. Do you see this as a decimation of the organization? He bought a ticket on the Titanic. Oh, boy. He's tried to come up with a new approach. My hat's off to him. It won't work.

Billy Beane: [[w:Jason Giambi|Giambi] Guys, you're still trying to replace ]. I told you we can't do it, and we can't do it. Now, what we might be able to do is re-create him. Re-create him in the aggregate.

Grady Fuson: The what?

Billy Beane: [[w:On-base percentage|on-base percentage; [w:Johnny Damon|Damon; [w:Olmedo Sáenz|Olmedo; snapping his fingers and pointing at Pete] Giambi's ] was .477. ]'s on-base, .324. And ]'s was .291. Add that up, and you get...

Peter Brand: Do you want me to speak?

Billy Beane: When I point at you, yeah.

Peter Brand: 1.092.

Billy Beane: [snapping] Divided by three.

Peter Brand: .364.

Billy Beane: [snapping] That's what we're looking for. Three ballplayers... three ballplayers whose average OBP is...

Peter Brand: .364.