Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Billy Beane on the future of sports

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Dan sits down with Billy Beane, who became famous outside the world of sports when Brad Pitt portrayed him in the film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s bestselling book, Moneyball. Since March, Billy has been thinking a lot about how the Coronavirus will change sports. Why does this matter? Well, global sports is estimated to be a half-a-trillion dollar industry and growing.  That’s until Covid 19 made its debut, earlier this year. What has the sports industry learned from this unprecedented time? How will sports be transformed?

Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Today we sit down with Billy Bean, who became famous outside the world of sports when Brad Pitt portrayed him in the film adaptation of Michael Lewis's bestselling book, Moneyball. But long before the name Billy Bean and the term Moneyball entered into the pop culture lexicon, Billy was a well-respected business executive, data innovator, and talent recruitment genius inside the sports industry. Since March, Billy has been thinking a lot about how COVID will change sports. Why does this matter? Well, global sports is estimated to be a half a trillion dollar

industry, depending on how you calculate it. And over the last few years, it's been growing, skyrocketing, actually. That's until COVID made its debut earlier this year. The sports industry at every level has experienced a shock to its core during COVID. It all just stopped and then tried to restart with uneven results. I mean, even right now, we're living through, quote, the week COVID crushed the NFL, as summed up by Andrew Beaton in the Wall Street Journal. But there's also been a lot of learning along the way. So back to Billy Bean, who's been thinking a lot about what of these changes could outlive COVID. What have we learned during this time that we'll want to keep? How will sports be transformed? Since Billy is always thinking about what might come next, how things could be different, we thought it would be good

to pick his brain. This is Post-Corona. I'm pleased to welcome Billy Bean to this conversation. I can't think of anyone better to have here than Billy. Billy and I have a lot in common. We both love sports. We are both interested in the intersection of business and sports. We both have children who are deeply involved in youth sports. And I would just say a number of people have commented that if there were ever to be a biopic made of my life, that the character of Dan Senor would likely be played by Brad Pitt. So, Billy, you and I share that and, you know, makes me even feel closer to you, so welcome to our conversation. Well, thanks, Dan. It's quite an honor, given your previous guest to this point, so I'm flattered that I get to play a part in your new podcast. All right, excellent. So let's

jump into it. First of all, just as background, Billy is the Executive Vice President of Baseball Operations and a minority owner of the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball team. He's also a minority owner in a couple of football slash soccer clubs, Barnsley in England and AZ Alkmaar in the Netherlands. From 84 to 89, he played in Major League Baseball as an outfielder for the New York Mets, where he was a first-round pick in the MLB draft. And he's also played for the Minnesota Twins, for the Detroit Tigers, obviously for the Oakland Athletics. And then he joined the Oakland Athletics front office in 1990 as a scout and really transformed

the sport because of his introduction of saber analytics to the sport, which we'll talk a little bit more about later. But Billy, I want to talk about how sports may be transformed for a long time because of the coronavirus experience. And I want to go back with you to March of 2020. So actually, it was the week of March 8th. And I just want you to think for a moment where you were, because that was the week, as you'll recall, that the Ivy League, it started with the Ivy League canceling its sports season. But the NBA was still playing, and Dr. Fauci testified on Capitol Hill that week, and a congressman from northern Wisconsin asked him a question. Because at that point, the NBA had decided – I think they were playing with games with – in some stadiums, they were playing games with no – in some arenas, they're playing games with no fans, but they're still playing games. The Ivy Leagues had canceled.

And this congressman asked Dr. Fauci with no warning for this question. It's not like this professional sports leagues or the University of the NCAA was aware that this question was coming. He was asked, is the NBA, and I quote here, is the NBA underreacting to coronavirus or is the Ivy League overreacting? And everyone just assumed, including this congressman, that the NBA was doing just fine and it was the Ivy Leagues that were overreacting. And what Dr. Fauci made clear in that hearing is he thought the Ivies had done the right thing, and the NBA was underreacting, and there needs to be a pivot. And by midweek, the NBA season had been suspended. You remember Utah Jazz Center, Rudy Gobert was, as Ben Cohn from the Wall Street Journal called him, he called him the patient zero in American pro sports. Gobert tests positive in a game, and they basically suspend all the games at that point.

It was only supposed to be for 30 days. And then within like 24 hours, the NHL had suspended. MLB announced that it was suspending. And then, of course, the big one at the time was the NCAA basketball tournament, which is a huge deal, right? People forget it's a billion. The NCAA basketball tournament is a billion-dollar business, just the tournament alone, and it canceled. The NCAA canceled all its sports, including for the NCAA basketball,

men's basketball finals, canceled for the first time since 1930. So they had played every year since 1930 through world wars, through all sorts of chaos during that century and kept going. And then that stopped. And that was like a big wake-up call. So you're sitting there, you're an executive of a professional sports team, and your season is getting ready to start, really. I mean, it was the spring training. What are you thinking that week? As all the walls start to close in, in the sports world? Yeah, you know, those dates, Dan, I will never forget.

And actually for me, because March 8th was actually a Sunday. And I'll go back to March 6th. At that time, I myself was up giving a speech out of state. We were in spring training, and I had to fly up to Colorado to give a speech on a Friday night. I spent the weekend at home in the Bay Area and then flew back on March 9th into Phoenix to rejoin the team for spring training. And ironically, I started to come down with what I thought was a cold a little bit. I had a little bit of just the oncoming of a cold, but I thought it was because of my travel schedule. Uh, that was on a Monday. I stayed home Tuesday, Wednesday, telling my right-hand guy, David Forrest that, Hey, I'm a

little tired today. I went to, uh, and, uh, I'm just going to work out of the house. Now I sort of go back on that. It was a Wednesday when you're talking about the NBA. And at that time you really started to, uh, and again, we were in spring training, not that far off from starting our season. And I remember sitting there watching the game on a Wednesday. And at that time, California, which was really one of the more aggressive in terms of starting to prevent large groups together.

And I was watching the Dallas Mavericks on TV. And there was a sense of discomfort that I started to have when I saw the crowd, because everyone at that point was starting to, again, starting to become concerned in large groups. And then they broke in on the game that you're speaking about, the Utah game. I believe it was Oklahoma City, Utah, and Rudy Gobert had, had taken a test. And then the, I think it was the OKC's medical director came running out on the court while they were just warming up. So the fans, you know, they're like came running on the court saying, this is a real problem. Gobert has tested positive. And that's, I think that's when things shut down. Well, what they shut down that night from an NBA standpoint, now understand we were still in spring training and we had a scheduled spring training game the next day on a Thursday.

And you knew there was just this real momentum going on, a sense of unknown too. Because understand, at that point, you really knew very little about the virus itself in terms of the severity, how easily, just there's so many unknowns. So I went in, and understand, I'll get back to the sort of feeling this cold coming on in a second. And I went into Phoenix spring

training and there was actually scheduled games in Florida and spring training. And I was in my office watching these games. And there was just sort of this sense of like, this is going to, even baseball was going to be shut down anytime soon. You could just feel the momentum coming from, from the entire country, uh, particularly as it related to sports. And sure enough, uh, I think it was by the end of that, uh, was it that, that Thursday or that we, we, we baseball, we did shut it down and you shut down by the end of that. Yeah. And so I remember on Friday, it was a Friday afternoon, addressing the team. Because even the team, there was a sense of anxiety. Nobody knew what was going on.

But there was also a sense of, hey, maybe this is going to be temporary. Or maybe in a couple weeks, we'll get back. And I remember addressing the team. Just so you can paint the picture. So you're addressing the team. So where are you? Excuse me. In the locker room in Phoenix at our spring training site in Mesa. So you're with the team in the locker room in Phoenix.

Mesa, actually. And you gather them all up and they're all scratching their heads saying, what is this coronavirus thing? And there's also, again, it was such an unknown. We didn't know if this was going to be a two-week thing, if this was going to. Right. I mean, no, I can tell you this. There was nobody in that room.

I remember just saying, listen, guys, nobody knows. You know, one thing about baseball is that we were getting ready to start the season and this hit us like a fire hose. Some of the other, it was different parts of the NBA was about two thirds, three quarters through. Us in MLS soccer, this was literally like right, boom. We literally had no time to react. And in the end, I think baseball did an amazing job in getting through the season. But so nobody really knew. There was a sense of like, is it going to be two weeks?

Is it going to be a month? Because at the time, the announcement was there was going to be a delay in the season. And that I think we were going to, I believe the date that they're going to hopefully open was April 9th. That was kind of the first reaction. Because again, nobody knew.

And as we sort of look back now, we realize how unrealistic that was. And we knew that very quickly. But I kind of the first reaction because again, nobody knew. And as we sort of look back now, we realized how unrealistic that was. And we knew that very quickly, but I remember telling the team, I mean, some of the players, Hey, can we come in and walk out the A's? And I'm really proud of how we react as an organization. We were very aggressive. We told the players, we didn't want them coming, uh, at least initially to work out. We wanted to make sure we protected our staff. So we basically shut down our spring training right off the bat. And I, quite frankly, well, I did what a lot of people did. I had a rental car. Normally, I would fly back to the Berry. My family was up here. I actually went to the grocery store and bought a whole bunch of... In fact, my wife kind of laughed

at me when I got home because I had a rental car full of like dry goods and all this stuff. And I felt like I was back in the fifties, you know, getting ready for a bomb shelter or the UK during World War II. And my wife actually looked at me, I had, I really had a pile of just like dry goods in my car. And I, you know, cause I'd driven up from Phoenix. And then again, there was this, this sense of like, just of unknowing, you know, and we were a little, literally on hold and, you know, I'll sort of go back to me feeling this cold coming on now after a couple of days, I was fine. I felt fine.

You know, as I came to find out later, I can only make the connection to that date was, you know, major league baseball, we all tested for the antibodies and I was, uh, I had tested positive for the antibodies in April. And, uh, and, uh, so at some point where there was in or there, I had tested positive for the antibodies in April. And, uh, and, uh, so at some point where there was in or there, I had been exposed. I don't know, it could have been January. I had a pretty heavy travel schedule and, uh, in January and, uh, and in February as well. So we're all kind of figuring out when this actually came to the U S there seems to be more and more stories. There was a belief that it was here earlier than we,

uh, we thought when everybody thought like, Hey, I just came here in March. And I think that's probably unrealistic given what we know now. So again, we all came home. I say came home to the Bay Area. Players went to their homes and there was just a sense of waiting like everybody else and doing nothing for literally two weeks. It's sort of baseball again, tried to create some sort of plan based on information, which there was very little at that time. When you and I spoke at the time, our minds immediately wandered to the following question. There's going to be a sports content famine, right? Because think about this. We typically, at that time of year, you have, you know, you were in spring training, so you have the start of the baseball season. You have the wind down of the NBA regular season, getting ready for the playoffs. You have

the Masters. There's excitement about summer tennis tournaments, obviously, peaking at the U.S. Open in New York later in the summer. There's a lot of sports anticipation excitement activity all happening around that time and it all shuts down and we and you and i were talking at the time about does this create an opening for other sports uh because there's so much hunger for sports and if we're going to live in a world in which it's we at that point we had no idea what the prospects were for vaccines so if we're going to be living in a world where it's really hard to have tens of thousands of fans in a stadium and arena together, yet there's this huge appetite for sports, are there going to be sports that we're not thinking of? And does that create a whole set of business opportunities for sports that would seem obscure?

I mean, I'll give you one interesting stat. So I spoke to some of the social media companies that feature a lot of sports content. And if you kind of sum it up, they have about 100 plus sports that the content of those sports are on their platforms. That's player content, it's highlights, it's actual full matches and games. And if you push the social media companies, they say, look, there's basically the massive top five sports, and then there's everything else. So the massive top five are, you wouldn't be surprised, in this order, soccer, basketball, cricket, American football, pro wrestling, and then baseball somewhere in there, although there's not huge interest in baseball outside of the US and perhaps Japan. And then you have these other sports, like what they call combat sports, like the UFC,

which is growing on social media, and then all sorts of fitness competitions. But that's basically it. Those are the big producers of content. And then there's, call it, 95 other sports that you and I, or at least I, had never heard of, right? So there was professional bull riding, huge on social media, not considered a top five sport. The World Surfing League, there's a sport in India called Kabaddi,

which I'm not going to describe. It's complicated to describe, but I encourage listeners to go look it up on Google. It's fascinating. There's all sorts of martial arts competitions. There's the Tough Mudder and competitions like that. There's darts in Europe. The UK in particular, darting is a big competition, a big sport on social media. So there's all these other sports that aren't the big five. They historically have not been able to develop a big audience, but because of technology and social media,

they can aggregate a large global audience, but they don't need in-person attendance for their business models to work. And you and I spoke at the time, does this mean we're going to see this boom in what we think of as obscure sports because they don't require fans? What's your thought on that? Yeah, well, I think to your point, at that time, there was just this real void in entertainment as we sat at home. I remember having the TV on, and it was early in the pandemic, and most of the live sports were shut down, and I saw a golf tournament on. And I don't normally watch golf.

I play occasionally, but I don't sit down and watch golf. And I came out of my shoes with excitement, the idea that there was possibly a live event going on. It was golf. A person with a ball on my television screen. Yeah, exactly. And I sat down and realized going to the guy that it was from the previous year's tournament. So, uh, it was a huge letdown. And then in turn, uh, uh, when there was, it was obvious that there was not going to be any live sports for a while. It was, there was two things I watched. I watched how the Germans handled the German soccer league, knowing that, you know, they, they seem to be at least have very much have a plan as to how they

were going to try and open up the Bundesliga. So they were one of the first. Right. And then they announced, ESPN announced that they were going to start broadcasting Korean baseball games live from Korea. And Korea actually has a very good baseball league over there. I know some of the American players over there and I couldn't wait for that to happen, just to have something. The rare moment that there are Americans dying for the start of the Korean baseball season. Unbelievable. And so to your point, I think the idea of sports growing that didn't necessarily need an audience, I mean, that opportunity certainly seemed there then at the time. And now understand part of that mentality too, Dan, I think when we spoke is that at no point did anybody have any idea that there was

the possibility of a vaccine maybe in December of this year. It was a complete unknown. The warnings were it takes years and years to develop that who knew. And so I think that also went into, you know, when you and I were spoken that like, you know, we start thinking of the opportunities. I think as we sit here now, I think there's some, you know, anticipation and hope that we at least can see the end of the tunnel as to, you know, this pandemic in terms of vaccine and creating a situation where we can actually get back to some normalcy in terms of fan attendance. But back then, you know, our, our desire for a live sport, our desire for, uh, entertainment that we didn't know the outcome, uh, was driving us to

sports like the one you mentioned in India is a Kabaddi? Yeah, I think. And I think surfing and things like that. Because I think that- Darts. Yeah. Darts. Yeah. Yeah, that one, you know, say for, yeah, that one, I still have a hard time wrapping my arms around the darts being a sport

until I watched Ted. Professional bull riding, PBR. Yeah, well, of course, I watched Ted Lasso uh school and uh in Dard so I have a little more that's a great scene that's a great scene I mean in the bar when he when he beats the owner former owner of Richmond yeah yeah uh yeah it was a good plug for an amazing show for whatever it's worth but uh yeah uh so uh uh but yeah I I think our mentality than Dan was we were just so desperate I I do I am a little more hopeful you know we sit here closer to the end of the year. I'll tell you what, it kind of needs to be said.

American ingenuity never ceases to amaze me when they put their minds to something. And the idea that we can get up in the morning the last couple of weeks and to hear these amazing companies in such a short time. And we're talking about multiple possibilities. You know, it just sort of makes you realize what an amazing country we have and amazing people that we have when they really focus on one thing. Because again, back in April, Dan, you know, we kept hearing it might take years. We might never, this might be something. And now there's a much different narrative going on, which to me just is just a credit

to the amazing people in this, uh, in this country and the things they do. And I'm thankful that I get to be a recipient of that. I couldn't agree with you more. It's extraordinary just to watch all the resources deployed. It's just not one company. We have multiple companies that have focused and just incredible. I honestly cannot wait for the heroes of that side of the story over time to come out and the stories and the books that they get to write as it relates to their work on something so important. Let me ask you, one issue we deal with

on this podcast is we often wonder, are there trends already in motion that would otherwise take a long time to play out? But because of, like you'd say, sort of taking 10 years of digitization, if you will, of digital progress or digital innovation or digital adoption, and taking, say, 10 years of it and squeezing it into a few months, because everyone had to just, the economy was told to shut down, everything turned off, and people had to just do everything virtually. And so there were already trends in place that just, and those trends just got like hyper-accelerated because of the situation. And you're seeing that with a bunch of the tech companies in terms of how widely their

products and services are being adopted. But on sports, what's interesting to me is the traditional sports broadcast, television broadcast in the US, has been on the decline. And these other sports I'm talking about are building digital audiences, and they don't have to worry about a tradeoff. Do I build a digital audience, or do I still fight for real estate on television?

They don't have that tradeoff because they're really either not on television, or if they were on television to some degree, they're getting pushed off television because the cable channels and the broadcast networks can't afford to pay them anymore because their business is changing. And so they don't have that trade-off. They don't have to decide, should we try to do both? Should we do a little more of this and a little more of that? They're only digital. And what technology has enabled them to do is aggregate an audience globally that is actually a real business in these sports we've never heard of. It would have taken time for them to become major players.

And the reason it's interesting from a business standpoint, the average consumer of sports content on social media and the internet are in their early 30s. Now, what's the average age of a baseball fan? Ironically, I think it's exactly my age, which is not a good thing. I'm 58 years old. And each year, and again, this is one of baseball's, I want to say concerns, but one of the things that we're trying to address is the average age of baseball fan is basically around my age. And it keeps kind of escalating with my age each year. And we need to make sure that, you know, we're like every business, listen, we're still in the entertainment business. We need to make sure that we're attracting a new generation of fans. Part of that is the issue of the game, the way

it's played has been changed a little bit. Also, when you go to a sporting event now, even an NBA game or a baseball game, particularly a baseball game, if you see the fans, a lot of them are multitasking. I mean, it's not like when you and I were a kid, Dan, and we'd go to game and maybe we actually physically kept score. We bought a program, we kept score. That doesn't really happen as much anymore. People are doing a lot of other things during the event. Baseball lends itself to that in some sense, which may be potentially down the road with the wag, with a wagering, which is, you know, something you can do in Europe and the possibility here and baseball lends itself to doing that. But the fact of the matter is, is we in baseball, we have to make sure that we are attracting a new generation of, you know, not just fans, but consumers as well. And you talked about the international thing. Yeah. Baseball, you know, normally,

you know, the assumption is, is, you know, you would expect a country to have to play the sport to be interested in it. I don't actually believe that completely anymore. I think in some sense, the whole world is somewhat of a voyeur. And, you know, I look at the success of the NFL in London, the UK, and they're selling a hundred thousand, roughly a hundred thousand people every time a team goes over on the weekend. And, you know, most in UK football is something that people watch. It's not something they play. I mean, American football. And so I think it's up to us as an industry.

I think this in baseball, I've always encouraged it. We just need to get out there and have people view the game. We did that a couple of years ago when the Yankees played the Red Sox in London and the game sold out. The ticket prices were outrageous, I understand, but they sold out. Now, certainly there was a lot of expats who attended that, but that was kind of how it was in soccer and football over here. When some of the bigger European clubs first came to the United States, most of the people that went were expats. But as time has gone on, the exposure to the sport, now it's a lot of Americans going. And as a business, us in baseball, and I would say that other sports feel the same way, we need to get out there. And we were supposed to have the Cardinals and the Cubs play again in London. And hopefully someday we're playing. We've played in

Oakland every, we've played three different games in Japan, or actually regular season games in Japan. Japan very much has an embedded baseball culture, so we do well there. But I think it's imperative that we get out as a business and play games in Rome, if we can play them in Rome. Play them in the Netherlands, which has a strong European baseball culture there, and get out there just to sell our product. Because to watch an A's game, anybody in the world can do it. They can just hit their app. They can hit MLB app and they can turn on these. There's a lot of friends of mine from all over the world who do do that.

We just need more of them, but we've just got to get out there. And the one thing about COVID is that it has really interrupted all business travel, any sort of barnstorming tours. And hopefully we can get back to that more sooner than later. It's an interesting historical parallel. One wonders how European and, you know, global soccer became so popular in the U.S. It still has a long way to go.

You know, as our friend Roger Bennett says, soccer is the, what does he say, it's the future sport of America since 1972. But it has obviously grown here. There's a big audience for it here now. And he attributes it to the 1990s when people could suddenly start accessing Premier League soccer content on the Internet. But for the Internet, people wouldn't have had access to premier league soccer and then and then it built it slowly built an audience for it here and now and now there's there's real demand to your point whether or not people play the sport initially or not but but i

want to stay with that because youth sports is another one of these trends that has been in trouble for the there's been a downward trend for like the last number of years. Now, it's been a steady trend. It's not been a total collapse, but the signs are worrisome. And there's a question as to whether or not, because so many youth sports have been shut down during COVID,

it's going to accelerate it. I'll give you a couple stats. The Manhattan Institute has done a lot of, I'm sorry, the Aspen Institute has done a lot of work on this subject. So the average child today spends less than three years playing a sport and typically quits by the time they're 11 years old. This is a study by the Aspen Institute. On top of that, in 2008, think about this. So a little over a decade ago, in 2008, almost one out of every two kids in the United States

played some kind of team sport on a regular basis. So almost one in two played team sports a little over a decade ago. This year, or over the past year, that number is down to 28%. So it's gone from almost one in two kids to 28% of kids age six to 12 playing team sports on a regular basis in the last couple of years. So the numbers were already coming down. So I guess my first question is, why were they already coming down? And do you think the fact that COVID is, and I'm familiar with a number of youth sports leagues, team sports that have tried to function through COVID and taken all sorts of precautions and established all these protocols

are now all shutting down because there's just these breakouts of COVID. Is it going to take this trend and further accelerate it? I've got my own little bit of theory, and some of it's my own experience, Dan, is that, you know, what, in fact, I talked about the baseball players today when I was growing up. And again, this is, this is just my sort of observation. There's no science behind it. I grew up playing all the sports, right? There really wasn't the idea of special specialization when I was growing up, save for there was a few sort of kids and where I grew up were sort of tennis prodigies. Tennis was the one sport and maybe swimming where you really had, you know, young kids who that's all they focused on.

But growing up in San Diego, the football, basketball, baseball, the main sports during the summer, we did the summer sports. And then we sort of put the glove away as soon as baseball season was over. What you've seen, again, this is my own observation. There's a couple of things you have going on now. First of all, youth sports at a certain level, usually past the age of 11, ironically, become very expensive. You have travel sports. Baseball has it.

Basketball has it. Soccer teams have it. Yeah, between private coaching, interstate travel, these mega complexes if you want to get special training. When you add all that up, the youth sports economy, according to Kendall Baker, who writes a terrific sports newsletter for Axios, he estimates $15 billion a year, a $15 billion industry, the youth sports economy. And that wasn't the case when I was growing up.

You had the Little League. You signed up for Little League. I'm going to just, $25 to play Little League a whole season. It was over. You didn't have the specialization. You just sort of merged into the next sport. Uh, what you, again, and I take baseball as a great example that young players coming up, they are apps.

There may be less of them, but they are so good. And a lot of these kids, you know, the, the, the, the Bryce Harper's and, and, and we get Machado's and they, that's, they start playing as young kids. That's all they do. And they come up, they get to the big leagues at 19 years old. And what's interesting, the age of 11, what I find in baseball is a good example, is that you really start to see kids at about 11, 12, really separate themselves. The really, really good players become very evident when you go watch your son or your

daughter's youth game. You can see. And baseball is interesting, too, because when you're 11 years old, and maybe you're of average size, and you've got a kid on there who's a big kid who throws really hard, that can be an intimidating situation when you've got the one kid in the neighborhood who throws way hard and everybody else, and there's a chance that kid might hit you. If you go to a baseball, I don't speak for baseball.

My son has been through the Little league experience and he no longer plays baseball. I mean, he wasn't really, really interested in it, but you could really see three or four kids on a field in a little league program that were way better than everybody else. And, and there's a, just a real gap. And, and, and there's a certain amount of discouragement that comes with that. If you're maybe a young young player uh and again this is my own uh observation and about 11 or 12 you really see a drop off and you see in other sports as well where kids start to separate themselves and a lot of reason that happens is because they that's all they may be doing and they may you know some of its natural ability some

it's just they they work harder that's all they do and i start to see that happen at a younger age than when I was growing up. I had friends that I played with all the way up through high school that maybe they weren't particularly great athletes, but they had the ability to participate. But I see that participation ability happening at a much younger age because you essentially have a lot of these sort of prodigies in a lot of sports that are just way better. And that can be very discouraging. Again, this is my own observation. Yeah, listen, I think you also have a safety issue in some sports, you know, whether, you know, concerns if you're, you know, I played

Pop Warner football, which was tackle, helmets, everything at a very young age. And, you know, as we start to, you know, get more and more information, you know, parents, as you would expect, have a concern about, you know, engaging in football at a young age a contact sport a heavy contact sport and even into high school so that's part of the equation there are other things as you mentioned there's other esports there's other things that are become interesting kids spending more time on video games yeah kids spending more time on on devices on tablets and phones. And then I think the cost of it, I mean, to our earlier point, this stuff is getting really, if you want to invest in coaches and training and training camps and travel for travel teams, it really could become cost

prohibitive for a lot of families. It's less of a community activity. Yeah, you mentioned it, Dan, that industry, there's almost a, there's a private, you know, coaching industry in almost every sport, which did really didn't exist when I was growing up, say for, you know, maybe a tennis instructor or something like that. It just wasn't a part of, uh, of my youth and growing up, but it's, it's an entire industry with a lot of sports and it's great. I mean, again, I go back to the point I speak for baseball. There's some amazing young baseball players right now. They're coming to the major leagues at 19, 20 years old who are stars right away and have been really good since the time they were six. And that's all they've done.

And as a result, we've got these great athletes. But this was an industry that didn't really exist when I was a kid. Let me ask you about, you mentioned the players and all these talented players. So they're effectively the human capital of your industry. And I wonder how you think about how they think about how all this has changed their career path. I mean, you know, they've had less opportunities to play. And the question is, particularly for younger players, they need that exposure. That's the bad news. Fewer opportunities to play. And the question is, particularly for younger players, they need that exposure. That's the bad news. Less opportunities, fewer opportunities to play

just because games are canceled, games are postponed, the seasons are messed up. The good news is whether or not we've learned a lot about the wear and tear on these athletes because COVID forced us to experiment with professional sports in a way that we never have before. Like, take the NBA bubble. So I saw this amazing study about the NBA bubble, in which the number of injuries is way down. This is from the Run Repeat website. So they looked at

172 games were played in the bubble in Orlando. 89 of them were seeding games and then obviously the 83 playoff games. So they analyzed the first 89 games of each of the past five seasons corresponding to the 89 seeding games in the bubble. And then obviously they also did the same with the five previous playoffs. And they found the players in the bubble missed 28% fewer games due to injury compared to the average of the five previous seasons.

The playoff injury rate in the bubble declined over 30% compared to the average of the five previous playoffs. So what's going on? We take all these players, we put them in a bubble, and we have them play out their season in the postseason there, and they come out at least in no worse shape than they were in previous seasons. One could argue in much better shape. So what do you think is going on? Well, I'll speak from my own experience as a player and what we deal with here in Oakland, right? And the first thing that's easy to identify when you, something like that, when you've got that controlled environment,

you've got a consistency in your schedule, but most of all, you're in the same time zone and you're sleeping in the same bed every night. Because I can tell you, like, I'll speak, like, take the Oakland A's. We're playing on the far, us in Seattle, as far west as you can get. And we play nearly every, I say we,

the players play nearly every single day. And if the A's play a day game on Thursday and travel on a Thursday, they may take a flight into New York. They may land in New York City at 5 a.m. Okay. Then they get up and they play a night game. They'll play a night game. They'll get to the ballpark, maybe, you know, 1.30, 2 o'clock, right?

So they've got very limited sleep. Their body clock is completely off. And then they'll play a night game that may, they may get home at midnight and then they'll play a day game the next day. And maybe a day game the next day on a Sunday, and then they'll travel again. And they may spend, you know, eight to 10 days on the East coast, then go back to a time zone. And what we're doing in baseball, what's happening now, our medical staff and some of the other medical staffs in baseball is really trying to understand the impact of sleep and when's optimal travel schedules. And we don't have that much control over it because baseball, the grind of a baseball season, it's different than the NFL. The NFL is obviously of impact. You have impact injuries.

Baseball is a long, long season. You're playing every single night. Your body starts to wear down. And what speeds up that wearing down and actually hurts the process of healing is the time zones and the lack of sleep and just the consistency in your schedule. And with the NBA, that's an amazing stat. I have no doubt. I'm no expert on it from a medical standpoint, but the ability to sleep in your own bed, have a consistent schedule and stay in the same time zone probably had a huge impact on, on the, or at least the success rate as far as keeping players on the court. And in baseball, we, we deal with that in Oakland and Seattle, the two teams and Anaheim as well,

we really, uh, the travel schedule. I mean, we, us in Seattle travel more miles than anybody in major league baseball, and we're playing almost every single, every single day. And you mentioned to me that, that there was a challenge from a, from a safety standpoint, when you brought your pitchers back, uh, after, cause your, your spring training had been curtailed. Yeah. Yeah. You brought them back during COVID. That's the opposite. Exactly. One of the things about spring training, you know, some people say it's too long. You know, we, we usually have a six to have a six to seven week spring training. A lot of the position players are usually ready to go after, say, 30, 35 at-bats, which might be a couple weeks of games. One of the reasons spring training is long is because we need that length of time to get starting pitchers and get pitchers' arms in shape. You can't speed that process up. They get in shape, they rest a couple days, and it just takes time. And one of the challenges we had with the startup of the season this year was giving the pitchers enough time. The position players would generally tell you that they were fine, they were ready to go. But in some cases, the pitchers, we really had to speed things up. And early on, there was

a significant amount of pitching injuries that we, you know, listen, pitching injuries always happen, but there was an excessive amount early on. And there was some belief that it was because we had to sort of start back up and sort of rush into the season, which was, you know, one of the risks of doing what we did. As it turned out, I think it kind of normalized as time went on. But it was a concern and, you know, the players were concerned about it. And certainly the organizations in baseball was concerned about it, too. Do you think there's going to be any learning from this moment that is going to result in the leagues and the players' associations saying, you know what? We've learned how much healthier our players are when we don't grind them out like this. We could make changes.

They don't have to travel all over the country to play a regular season. We can figure out a way to keep their travel more regional or a shorter season or, I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud, but do you think there'll be a push for learning from the COVID bubble experience to let professional athletes develop in a way that they wind up healthier and having longer careers? Yes. And this is actually, it's interesting you bring up because some of the things that baseball was addressing even before COVID was, for instance, we've actually, we've created more off days as, you know, just because of what you're saying. The other thing too, think about it, let's just take it from a, forget from a health standpoint. Health is a benefit. But one of the amazing ideas I've heard about in baseball was one of the great things about soccer or football in the UK and SEC football. That's two of the most passionate, I guess, events you could probably experience.

Watching Auburn play Alabama or watching Man United play Liverpool. And one of the reasons they can do that is because away fans can travel. Right? I mean, if the Yankees play the A's, there's a few A's fans in the stands, but it's all Yankees when you go to New York. And one of the ideas I've heard in baseball, which I think is fantastic, which will address what you're talking about, if you sort of created sort of regional divisions,

let's say the Giants, the Padres, the Dodgers, the A's, the Seattle, the whole West Coast was all in one division, and the whole Central was all in one division, and all the East Coast was in one division. And the bulk of your schedule was played against those, and so you created, A, a much easier travel schedule. You probably, your television contracts would be much happier with you because they could consistently broadcast at the same time. Because in Oakland, understand if we go to Boston, our game's on at four o'clock

and a lot of people are still at work. But if we say you had one West Coast division, basically your TV games would all be at the same time. So there'd be a consistency there. And quite frankly, if A's fans wanted to go down to San Diego to play the Padres or watch the Dodgers you'd probably see a lot more you know away travel with away fans and create a much different atmosphere and in turn address what you're talking about will you have less stress on the athletes because at the end of the day listen in sports everyone asks me about what I think the next you know the next frontier is in terms of solving problems in sports. And it's exactly what you're talking about, Dan, it's keeping players healthy. But it's when they ask you, they're asking you from a, from a quant standpoint, right? From the

analytics standpoint, what's the next frontier? Yes. And, and just in general, I mean, you know, what, what's the next big problem to solve? Yeah. And it's, and I think every, anybody involved with a professional sports team will, you know A, prevent or minimize injuries with athletes and keeping them on the playing field. Because, listen, in many cases, if you look at just about every other major sports, the NFL, in many cases, the healthiest teams are the ones that go to the playoffs. A lot of that happens in baseball as well. And the athletes lose so much time due to injuries and trying to prevent that. And, and to your, you know, to, to, to the message on analytics is I think ultimately data will help you solve that. Uh, but, uh, but, you know, keeping players healthy

is a huge, it's really, really important. I mean, listen, if you're buying a ticket to an NBA game and you wanted to go see LeBron James play and he pulled a hammy, uh, you know, you might've bought that ticket four months ago. And so, uh, you know, you miss LeBron James playing that night and that's the one, one guy you wanted to see. And, and from a organizational standpoint, when, when we like this summer, we lost arguably one of the best players in the game, Matt Chapman. And, uh, you know, we didn't have him and, and, and it has a huge impact, uh, on your club and your performance and everything else. So, so the next that's else. So the next, that's interesting. So the next frontier, the way you conquered baseball, so to speak, through analytics,

quant analytics, that you think the next frontier is figuring out the injury. You know, that friend of mine, Guy Aharon, who runs that Israeli tech startup, player maker, you and I spoke to him during COVID actually. A big part of his technology is putting this device on players' feet, and they get all sorts of data from that, and they believe they can begin to measure players in a way that gives coaches information that can help reduce injuries. Sounds like it's a big space, big open space.

Yeah, and driven by data. The challenge in health and data is the privacy issues. You know, that's the real... Explain that. Well, I mean, for instance, you take a major league baseball team, we will normally draft 17 and 18- with either the college or the player themselves, just to get some medical background as much as we possibly can. That being said, the more information you have, someone may have an injury that happened when they were five years old that may have an impact on their future health. I mean, an orthopedic injury. And you may not haveic injury that may, and you

may not have access to that. And so you really have a small amount of information with which to try and predict, you know, the future health of that player. And again, and rightly so, I mean, health and data don't always sort of, you know, it's not necessarily something that go hand in hand because there's a privacy issue. And, you know, for all the concerns that, you know, it's not necessarily something that go hand in hand because there's a privacy issue. And, you know, for all the concerns that, you know, we all have in our lives about using data and privacy, it's a fine line. You got to be careful. So I think, I do think data and analytics will help you improve upon keeping players on the field and maybe preventing injuries, but it's probably, it's, you, you've got to bridge that gap between

a person's privacy and your desire to want to get to the right answer. You mentioned TV ratings, TV audiences, as it relates to baseball and other sports. So what did we get wrong about the appetite for professional sports? Because we all, as you gave that example about watching someone, you know, watching a rerun of a golf tournament or watching Korean baseball, we all thought, as I said coronavirus, and the wake-up call for how much demand there was, was when ESPN released the Michael Jordan multi-episode documentary, The Last Dance. And they released it ahead of schedule, and they dropped two episodes every Sunday night over the course of a few weeks. You know, five, six million viewers per episode. I think the first couple episodes, the first episode may be close to seven million viewers. These were, and that doesn't even include downloads. Then you have

people downloading it. That was like in the tens of millions. And then there's the Netflix distribution of it. So this show, and it was a very universal experience in that people were not watching it on their own schedules. People, because they were dropping two episodes every Sunday night,

people were anticipating the drop and then they were effectively watching it together. And it created the shared experience that comes from sports. And the numbers were better than ESPN has done for any docs for, I think, ever in its history. So we all assumed, aha, this is an early sign during COVID. There's so much appetite. There's this hunger for anything sports-related. And then it all began. You had the NBA bubble. You had baseball. You had other sports starting to pick up.

And the ratings were, to call them lackluster, is an understatement. I mean, I was looking at some of the numbers here from a good newsletter called Huddle Up on Substack. So here he is, NBA Finals. All right, so Lakers versus the Heat. Game one, 7.4 million people. Least watched NBA Finals game in history. Game two, 4.5 million viewers a 68 percent drop from last year's game two which he's you know the the newsletter points out and one of the teams in the last years was a canadian team was a

game in toronto so that so the ratings should have already been bad um but but these numbers were bad you know i don't have to tell you the baseball baseball ratings numbers are bad. So one would have thought there'd be this incredible pent-up demand, and then it wasn't there. Yeah, you know, I have a whole bunch of theories, and they're completely— Bring it, bring it. Well, first of all, Dan, you and I have discussed about it. Our whole, the sort of the rhythm of our lives this whole year

has been interrupted. And I'll just speak for myself. There's certain times a year, you listen to the day after Christmas is boxing day in the UK. I love watching all the soccer matches. I get used to that. There's a certain weather that I expect, you know, and everything was completely interrupted from our own sort of body calendar, if that makes any sense and our own history. So it's different, you know, when you're, you know, I've a lot of times I forgot that there was NBA games on at 10 in the morning here on the West Coast that I could watch.

So it just wasn't something I was used to having happen. The other thing I think about, and I know this because I experienced it, you know, we started the baseball season, and for me to drive to the ballpark, and I was able to have very little, I actually didn't have a lot of interaction with the staff or the management. You know, myself and David Forrest, we would sit in the suite together. We tried to limit our contact with the players and limit it with the major league coaching staff.

So we literally just go right up to our suite. There's nobody in the stadium. It was a very eerie, empty feeling to go into a stadium and have a game going on. It just was surreal. You could actually hear players talking, you could hear umpires. Uh, it was just very surreal. And I, I think even when watching games, there's a certain amount of social gratification that you get by watching a game with a hundred thousand people at Ann Arbor watching university of Michigan. There's an expectation and even though

you may not be there I do think there is something social that you get by seeing people on TV and watching this event and quite frankly when a game's going on with no fans it doesn't quite seem as authentic to me and this is my own interpretation Dan uh I you listen you know what we you know I'm in an industry where we you know our relationship with fans in sports is is the most important thing I mean you realize the the game and the sport is no matter what is about the fans you know they always they always say it but I think again this is just my dime store psychology I think we miss the social part of sitting in our living room and having lots and lots of people at a stadium, and we feel some connection to that.

And we didn't have that. We haven't had it with any sports. And to me, that was a major part of what was missing. Yeah. It also, I mean, I will say, speaking personally, sadly, my family is a diehards Jets, New York Jets family. One of the cruelest things I've done to our children. You call social services to launch an investigation.

But we would go to every single home game. Even more pathetic, we would travel for Jets games. So we would go watch them lose. It's not bad enough to watch them lose at home. We would go travel to watch them lose in an away game. But I wonder how much of the suffering of being a Jets fan was mitigated by the fact that you shared this experience. We'd be in the stadium with 60,000, 70,000 people sharing in the highs and the lows, usually the lows.

And then when we would watch the experience, you still feel part of that because you just see all that emotional intensity stacked, human emotional intensity stacked into a stadium. And when it's empty, it's like the human roller coaster is removed and you're just watching sport on a field, which is impressive in its own way and entertaining, but it's different. And it's great to see athletes rise to occasion in a... You feel the tension from fans. You feel the support from fans, whether it's on TV or certainly when you're there. And that was just a piece that was missing. Listen, I thought the baseball playoffs were a lot of fun this year, but there's a certain amount of pressure that builds during the postseason that's amplified by the fans in home parks. And listen, I like in-between innings shots of fans. I like seeing what they're doing.

I like to see what they're dressing. I like watching, again, I go to SEC football to see both sides in between plays and stuff like that. Well, that's one of the great things about SEC football is you have the home fans and then you have the away fans travel. It reminds me of Premier League soccer, right? Where you have fans traveling to different stadiums. So you get the tension between the competing fan bases. Oh, it's wonderful. Yeah. Again, it's what makes them arguably, in my opinion, the two greatest leagues in the world, SEC football and UK football, because you can go from Newcastle down to Cardiff if you actually want to.

In California, that's a normal drive. It's a long drive in the UK, but you could actually do it and go watch your team play if you decided to drive. And again, it goes back to it. I don't think anyone really realized how important the fan atmosphere was to an event, including on TV. In fact, me and you talked about this, Dana. Years ago, I used to say at some point, these media contracts are so big that there may even be some stadiums where they just let people in free just to create an atmosphere for television, you know, so, you know, because it's more important to create a good media atmosphere on TV than it is

to actually for the match day receipts. Again, it probably, that's probably not going to be the case, but you know, it wouldn't surprise me at some point. Yeah. My first exposure to this is it was in, I think it was 2015 or 2016. I was in, I was in Paris for work and a couple of colleagues of mine and I decided to go to a soccer game, a football game. So we went to see PSG play Chelsea in Paris, and we were not seated in the Chelsea fan section. We were seated in the Paris Saint-Germain home fan section. And that day, there were all these stories about Chelsea fans showing up from

London in Paris and getting in street fights with the PSG fans. And fights were breaking out all over Paris. And one of my colleagues said to me that night at the match, he said, listen, we cannot speak to each other at the match. I'm thinking, what are you talking about? We can't, we're at a sports event. And he says, well, we don't speak french we speak english we're seated in the home section of the stadium if they hear us speaking english they're going to think we're chelsea fans even though we weren't and it could get violent yeah it's uh yeah you know well you know it's interesting you know you talk about sort of fan that i had the uh i mean the the two, probably the loudest, I was a Charger fan growing up.

So some of their Chargers in the late 70s, early 80s, the crowds there were incredible. And then if you remember the Minnesota Twins, I was part of the 87 team. And the fans supporting the Metrodome that year, it was unbelievable. You would get chills when you heard the fans. But the other one I also recall in an environment that i i'll never forget was the opening world

cup match in 2006 it was hosted in germany and i was able to attend in it was in dortmund and you're able to attend the poland germany open and match a world cup and and i think it holds like 80 000 people there at dortmund and to hear 80 000000 people, it was just, it still chills when I think about it. And that's missing right now. And I don't think we realized how important it was until again, I think it had an effect on viewership, TV viewership, to be totally honest with you. I'm going to posit one other theory that's very difficult to quantify. So this theory was articulated by Tyler Cowen, who's an economist at George Mason University, who's got a fabulous blog called Marginal Revolution and a great podcast. And he was looking at the ratings drop in sports during

COVID. He was equally surprised. And he put forth the idea that maybe so much of the sports experience is not just what happens in the stadium, and it's not just what we watch on television, but it's the water cooler talk. It's that we talk about sports with friends when we're out for meals or out for beer. We talk about sports walking the halls of the office. We read the sports page on the subway on the way into work. We listen to sports talk radio when you're driving the kids to school, whatever it may be that, that it's, it's a lot of what happens outside of the actual sporting event that fuels the interest in sports. And during COVID, we weren't at the water cooler with our colleagues.

We weren't driving our kids to the, to school. We weren't out for, you know for a beer or dinner with our friends. And so the whole channel by which you would use sports as a currency to hang and communicate and enjoy other people's company was gone. I mean, COVID was a lonely experience. And if you don't have the space to be chatting away about sports, there's less of a sense of urgency to watch and keep up with all the sports. And therefore, why do I need to watch this game? I'll kind of hear what happened.

I'll read about it. But I'm not really going to be talking about it at the office tomorrow. You know, I was thinking as you're talking, and you're exactly right, Dan, is, you know, obviously the Masters, one of the biggest golf tournaments in the world, but, uh, the other one that's probably just as popular in a different way is the Phoenix open, you know, the, the, the legend of, you know, attending the Phoenix open, uh, to be a part of that whole environment is, you know, that atmosphere and everything it's turned into, it's kind of legendary and it's grown into something that's really not just about the golf, but about the people and the fans that go there. And so, uh, again, I think in some respect

that, you know, having missed it or seen what it's like without it, I think we're going to have a stronger appreciation for the people that do buy tickets. You know, we always have, but it even stronger appreciation and, and the, and the part they, the, you know, the most important part they play in the game. You know, not having them there, I think we really, I know I do. I really appreciate them. And I miss them, that's for sure. Let me ask you, another sub-industry that may not be so sub, that's growing, it's like extraordinarily, is sports gambling.

Obviously because the Supreme Court case made it so many states now are in the process time period, third quarter. How much do you think COVID was rocket fuel? It was clear that sports betting was going to be a growing industry, but the fact that everyone's at home with not much to do, sports betting is an easy activity to adopt. And whether it's people who were betting illegally now just doing it legally, or whether it's actually new people betting on sports who've never done it before, it was an easy thing to do at home. And COVID introduced a lot of people to this activity. You know, wagering is a major part of European sports. It's, in fact, yeah, you go to the UK, most of the teams and many of the teams

have betting, you know, companies as sponsors. So, and, you know, and I guess the good thing from that, and it's a huge business over there. So it's very, it's policed, you know, and the companies themselves police it because they don't want to lose the opportunity that they have. Over here in baseball, it's always been incredible taboo. Since I entered the game, in fact, when you walk into Major League Clubhouse, there is a sign in every Major League Clubhouse in English and in Spanish that tells you what you

can't do as it relates to that. I mean, it's drilled into you. And in fact, the word coming off your lips if you worked in baseball was uncomfortable, you know, certainly there's been, you know, legislation that now has opened the doors potentially, you know, uh, in the U S for some of the similar structures that you have in Europe, but still, even now, when I talk about it, it's just an uncomfortable conversation to have because it's always been, the word has almost been taboo when it comes to American sports team and in particular baseball, because understand baseball has a history in 1919 with the Black Sox scandals. And that has, listen, it's very strange, but something that could happen in 1919 that still sort of strongly resonates within your business.

And it has had that effect and it was always drilled into your head. And, you know, we've had, you know, other situations over the year, very few, but, but it's, it's, it's been again, a taboo, but it's, you know, it's starting to become part of the conversation as it relates to states finding ways to raise revenues and challenging times, particularly after what we just went through. And there's been some, I believe some legislation that has opened the door. So I think we've just started to see the start of it here in the States. In wrapping here, I just want to, I'm always struck by the fact that you had, I don't think, just your own life. You had no formal, you weren't a statistics PhD.

You weren't, it wasn't obvious that you were going to be this math guru that would transform a sport through your analytics. So just briefly, I assume most of our listeners have seen or read Moneyball. What did you identify when you unleash this analytics revolution at the Oakland A's? And are you surprised that you were equipped to make this observation and implement it? That's my first question. My second question is, what's the next money ball? And I know you get this all the time, whether it's in the sport that you're in or another sport. So firstly, what about you made you, equipped you be this this big quant-based problem solver

that revolutionized how sports how this particular sport was run well if anything and i feel blessed to have two wonderful parents and and the one of particularly my mother gave me was the the the love of reading all right uh my mom was a voracious reader, as my grandfather was, who was a military officer. So I inherited that love of reading, and I chose a profession, majorly, or professional baseball

that gave me a lot of time to read. And I've always been very curious about the world. So... Right, because you could have played football or basketball or baseball, right? You had opportunities. Yes.

Did you have scholarships? Yes, at Stanford. Stanford to do what? Play football and baseball at Stanford. Right. Yeah, so that was a long time ago. And in some sense, the time off, and the one thing I always love, I love to learn. I was very curious about the world.

And again, I think that was inherited from my grandfather and my, you know, and my mother. And so it's, and I say, it's a skill. The love of reading is, is, is, is a learned trade. And I'm so lucky that I love to read. I feel like that. And so again, the curiosity and having downtime in baseball sort of allowed me to sort of look for, for answers in the industry I was in. And some of the things that we were doing didn't make sense. And the other thing, I was around some incredibly stimulating people. You know, Sandy Alderson was my sort of business mentor, a Harvard Law graduate, former Vietnam Marine lieutenant, a really different background than most. Currently leading the Mets. Currently leading the Mets. Yeah.

And so I was around some really bright, you know, people who also had a curiosity to, uh, to look for different answers. So I think as much as anything, that was it. And I'd also like to think that, um, you know, if anything, I, if, if a lot of things I'm not good at, but I always felt like I hired really well. And I, and I always felt like I hired really well. And the reason I felt like I hired well, I mean, the people that I brought next to me, is that I was never embarrassed by what I couldn't do well. I knew what I was good at and what I wasn't good at. And I didn't feel an insecurity about finding people who did things much better than I do because I felt like I would compliment them.

And you mentioned math. Listen, I don't know. I mean, there's a small percentage of the world who are really good and just can't wait to do that. If anything, I did understand the power of mathematics. And a lot of that was through sort of my own research, reading even like Warren Buffett, reading Warren Buffett, how he made decisions and reading about card counters in Las Vegas and understanding how actuaries set insurance rates. These are all things that, you know, were part of my research. And then when I hired people, I hired people who had skill sets that they, you know, this quantitative skill set, because I wasn't embarrassed by the fact that they were better out than I was. I think of Paul DePodesta, you know, my first right-hand guy, you know, who was, who's running the Cleveland Browns now. And,

and there's things that Paul was just a lot better than I was and vice versa. And, and so in some sense- Paul DePodesta, who's effectively played by Jonah Hill, right? Yeah. In Moneyball. Exactly. And, you know, and then Farhan Zaidi and David Forrest, you know, people who sort of complimented my skills. And again, if anything, I get it. He's at the Giants now, right? Yes, forehands running the Giants. And David, my right-hand guy, who just really, really bright people. And so again, my own curiosity, and I'd like to think some humility in the way I hired

and realizing I don't know everything and that there's a lot of smart people in the world that can actually contribute to the organization's success and in turn my success. I think of those two things, that combination a lot. And again, you know, it's hard. And Alita, one thing I, and being around a guy like Sandy Alderson, he was a great leadership example for me, as was my father as well, who was also a military officer. And, you know, just try to borrow from those people.

And again, have some humility and realizing you don't know everything and being curious and also knowing that, you know, you're not going to succeed all the time. You know, in baseball, we always say this thing. If you make five decisions, if you're three out of five and you multiply that time after time after time, that becomes a big gap. And so as a result, Oakland, we're kind of a transactional organization, and we make a lot of transactions.

We just try and be right three out of five, three out of five, three out of five, and it adds he says, I don't have to be that good. I've just got to make sure that there's always the seven other managers that I compete against are not smart or dumb. And if that's the case, I'll be okay. By the way, go ahead. Yeah. It's funny you mentioned that. You can use the said in sports and Darrell and I are very close friends. He's far smarter, brighter than I am, is that baseball has become such an intelligent industry. I mean, the people running baseball teams are so bright and it's very, very competitive. And that's one thing I'm really proud of. If anything, I don't talk a lot about the book, but the thing, the impact of the book had, the thing I'm most proud of is that we really created a meritocracy in terms of hiring. We hired the best and the brightest as opposed to people who are, say,

ex-players like myself. And the use of data has created a transparency in our decision-making, which is good. And as a result, baseball has become a much more diverse, and the executive pool diverse. We've got opportunities for women. As you can see, Kim Ng just hired by the Miami Club. We have a number of very, very talented young women executives in our front office here in Oakland.

And I think that a lot of that is just the opportunity. And again, I think the book and the use of data has really opened the door for people like that. I think that's great. Listen, in 10 years, I won't be able to apply for my own job. I always say that. And that's a good thing because I won't be smart enough. And I think a lot of that's because of, you know, A, Michael Lewis's book and the use of data and creating a meritocracy.

And finally, I just, people ask me this all the time about when they watch Moneyball. They're like, how did this guy, he was an athlete, he gets into quant stuff, there's an article written about him by Michael Lewis, and there's a book written about him, and then he's being played by Brad Pitt in a movie that got nominated for an Oscar in 2011. When they approached you and they're trying to buy your life rights and they're trying to make a movie about you and these actors want to start meeting,

were you just like, what the hell is going on? I'll make this as brief. Paul, this is a great story. Because when the book came, first of all, Michael wrote the book. We didn't know he was going to write a book. I know you'd think two intelligent guys, myself and Paul DeFedesso. Michael's brighter than we are. And he really sort of sneakily embedded himself into the A's.

And he'll tell you that. He told us he was going to write a newspaper article for the business section of the New York Times. And then that was going to be it. Well, he sort of kind of, again, he became, first of all, we were very just enamored with how bright Michael is. I mean, he understood what we were doing. So we kind of became friends anyway. So he writes the book unbeknownst to us. He tells us later in the year, that's going to be a book. And we were horrified, you know, because we'd given him complete access with no idea that every quote we had was going to be in a book. So it was very, very, just an uncomfortable winter while he wrote the book. So when the book

came out, there was a lot of noise and then it became a bestseller. And that was enough. It was kind of overwhelming for both myself and Paul. And it was not something we were, you know, it was, you know, we weren't looking for fame or anything like that. So when they approached us about the movie, I wanted no part of it. I wanted like no way I've had enough. And in fact, Michael's at that point was giving me advice like, Hey, just sign the option. They never make my move. They never make my books into movies. They're just going to give you a little bit of compensation every year. They'll never make it. It's just, you know, free money. It's not going to happen. Well, then guess what they did? They made Blindside and made about a half a billion dollars out of Michael Lewis's book. And then, you know, I'd

heard that, you know, Sony was very, there's some people at Sony who are very committed to making the movie. They love the book. And then Brad Pitt attached himself. He read the book and was committed to making the movie. So, but I can tell you up to that point, think about it. Someone says they're going to make a movie on you. You have no idea who's going to play you. So you're kind of holding your breath. So when I found out that he was actually going to be playing it, I, if any, first thing I did was I exhaled like, Oh, it can't be that bad. It's Brad Pitt. And then my, then my wife looked at me like, really? You know, like brad pitt's gonna like she felt chipped and so uh you will be you know you're being humble yourself bennett miller who who

directed the the film as you know told me a lot a while ago that he had the hardest time getting you to cooperate with the film it was like pulling teeth oh he's yeah no one believes me you know i you know it says oh no you i said i really had been it is exactly right i told bennett and uh this is hopefully the most inappropriate word i'll use on this is that bennett i'm gonna be a complete pain in your butt the whole time because you're gonna have to drag me kicking and screaming through this whole process because it was just it was i i it was it was uncomfortable i wasn't looking to be famous the movie was a whole different category yeah he said he says i don't goes, I'm making a major movie. It's well-budgeted.

Brad Pitt is paying him. I want him to help a little bit. Sit down with Brad, work with us, and he won't return our calls. You know, so. I was awful. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I wish I would have enjoyed it more.

But I really, you know, there's something about, you know, you really want to be aware of like, hey, they're's something about, you know, you really want to be aware of like, hey, they're making a movie about you. You know, this idea that you think you're more important than you really are. I just, again, I came from a military family and I like to think that I was raised by parents who kept me grounded and I wanted to make sure that I, instead of just saying that I lived it. So yeah, Bennett was right. I was a complete, I was of no help to him whatsoever. I just wanted it all to go away and I could walk my dog and go fishing. Right. So with that, Billy, as I say, you're one of the lowest key people I know, but you're obviously chock full of insights and interesting observations.

And this has been a great conversation helping us think through where this massive industry goes after it's been struck by this unbelievable shock that we're hopefully gonna start coming out of. But until then, this was a very illuminating conversation and I hope you'll come back. And thanks for taking the time. Well, thanks, Dan. It's been an honor. Well, this is one podcast because it's mine that I can't listen to while I'm walking my dog. Your other podcast, I share with my dog on our long walk.

So, but thanks for having me on. And your history podcast, your big consumer history podcast. I am. Yeah, I'm a storehouse of useless information, Dan, is what I've become. And Israeli history. You're also obsessed with Israeli military history. Absolutely. Yeah. The whole creation of the Israeli state is just fascinating to me. The Israeli military. My dad used to tell me stories about the Israeli fighter pilots. And yeah, I probably know way too much than I should about a lot of things and should concentrate on some other things. But yes. No, no, no, no. We'll bring you back. Thank you for doing this. Well, thank you. Thank you.

That's our show for today. Thanks again to Billy Bean. And if you're interested in the work of some of the writers and journalists and the particular studies I cited in today's show, you can go to the show notes. We'll have links to all of them. Ben Cohn and Andrew Beaton from The Wall Street Journal. There's the Huddle Up newsletter, which you can find on Substack. There's Kendall Baker's sports tip sheet from Axios. There's the Run Repeat website that had all that terrific data on sports, the sports injury record out of the NBA bubble. And then there was the Aspen Institute study on the future of youth sports. Again, go to the show notes. We'll have information on how to access all those writers and studies. One final comment. In the last episode with Adam Grant, we received a lot of comments

from listeners, particularly about Adam's closing comment about what he predicted for the world post-corona that he said he would have never predicted, which he phrased it as the end of the nuclear family. And a lot of people got in touch with us saying, is he really predicting the end of the nuclear family? No. I mean, what he actually was describing when you listen to his explanation of it was that nuclear families will be depending more on extended families and extended networks

of friends and you know being part of a broader community uh going forward which he may or may not be right about but his kibbutz example is not the end of the nuclear family he cited that we're going to be living in a more he predicted we'd be living in a more kibbutz environment which means a community of nuclear families all sharing sharing some resources, but it's not the end of the nuclear family. And he recommended, he suggested we write a book on the topic. I'm not writing a book on the topic, on the capitalist kibbutz, as we called it. I'm working on another book, but that's another topic for another day. Before we wrap, I want to invite you, our listeners, to send in your thoughts, your suggestions, any questions about what the post-corona world might look like.

Please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.fm. So I can share it on future episodes. Post-Corona was produced by Ilan Benatar. Our researcher is Sophie Pollack. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.