Dayton Moore is 4 wins from the World Series, Billy Beane is not

Like Branch Rickey and Buzzie
I’m the Cult of General Managing
I’m the Cult of General Managing
I’m the Cult of General Managing
Stadium lights, playoff prize
When a leader speaks, that leader Rule 5’s

- Mark Twain, probably

Let’s chat briefly about the Cult of General Managing. Your offseason entertainment is centered on the comings and goings of baseball players. You hope these players will stick ball good or throw ball good, to use technical jargon. Your in-season entertainment is watching the results of these transactions. Your level of interest in and enjoyment of baseball is predicated on exactly whom the team employs. Of course you’re going to pay a lot of attention to the HR director.

That’s why I always think it’s weird when people complain about the attention Billy Beane receives. He makes the team, you dorks. He’s the one roaming the countryside every winter, looking for ronin to help with his doomed quest. He’s the reason the team exists in its current form, why it will take on a different form in the future. I don’t think we pay enough attention to general managers. They announce the Best Director Oscar at the end of the Academy Awards, yet the only award for GMs is given out by an independent publication and barely covered, let alone argued about. What’s the point of an award if you can’t argue about it? We should talk more about GMs.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about what it would mean for Dayton Moore to win a pennant before Billy Beane.

Moore has been the GM of the Royals since June 2006. In his eight seasons, he’s built a roster that could score more than 700 runs just once; a pitching staff that could prevent runs better than the league average just once. He lost more than 90 games in five of his first six years on the job, and in the year he didn’t, he lost 87. The list of players he acquired on purpose is both hilarious and terrifying. For several years running, he’s been an inexplicable sitcom that was syndicated and in no danger of being canceled. If Dayton Moore didn’t exist, nerds would have to invent him.

Moore is four wins away from the World Series.

Beane has been the GM of the A’s since Oct. 1997. He’s built a 90-win team eight times and won six division titles. In seven of nine playoff series his team has played, the A’s were eliminated in the final game of the series, with a chance to advance to the next round with a win. The names of the culprits and villains don’t matter so much. Gil Heredia, Billy Koch, Trot Nixon, Jeremy Giambi, Justin Verlander, Justin Verlander, and Justin Verlander are symptoms of a larger, incomprehensible malaise.

Beane was four wins away from the World Series once. Once.

If Moore’s Royals do advance, you’ll read at least one column about this juxtaposition. The paragraphs might come in an easily digestible one-sentence format, and they’ll discuss the little things. The Royals do the little things, you know. They scamper and scoot and sacrifice. You might then read that the A’s are made in Beane’s graven image, and they’re cold and selfish, arrogant and aloof. The nerds got Moore and the Royals wrong, just as they’ve been incapable of getting Beane and the A’s right. This is a preemptive response to those columns.

I went through all of the A’s postseason losses over the last 15 years with a simple task: Find the things that Moore would have done differently with the A’s roster that would have helped them advance past that elimination game. It’s an exercise in absurdity. Things Moore could have done differently:

The same thing applies in reverse, too. What has Moore done over the last two years that Beane wouldn’t have done. Moore made the huge trade for James Shields and Wade Davis, but Beane makes bold, insane trades, too. The Shields trade was almost a cover of a Beane trade.

Moore put together a brilliant defensive team. Beane’s been on that, too. Both the outfields and infields for the A’s for the past few years have been special in the field.

Moore signed mid-level starters like Jeremy Guthrie and Jason Vargas to fill out his pitching staff. Beane’s been good with that, with Bartolo Colon and Scott Kazmir recently.

Moore focused on the bullpen. So did Beane, albeit with less success this season. Moore entrusted his young starting pitchers with a lot of responsibility. So did Beane. Moore continually folded young hitters into his lineup. So did Beane. Moore buttressed that lineup with trades and mid-range free agents. So did Beane. Moore exchanged his best pitcher in a down season for a collection of players, spreading the talent around future rosters. Beane’s been doing that for almost two decades.

Somehow, Moore has built an honorary Billy Beane team under our noses, and because a baseball went this far out of the reach of a third baseman ...

... it’s supposed to mean something about Beane’s failures? I don’t know, man. That seems awfully shaky.

What will it mean if Dayton Moore wins a pennant before Billy Beane? It will mean that baseball hates Beane and everything that he touches.That’s the only conclusion I can come up with, and I’ve been trying for the last three hours to come up with something smarter. Baseball doesn’t have to make sense, but you’d like to think that occasionally it will humor us. The plight of the A’s and their ability to run into exactly the wrong team, the wrong starter, the wrong late-inning rally every single time is one of the greatest mysteries in recent history.

That mystery only becomes more tragic and hilarious when you look at what Moore and the Royals have done this year. They trusted The Process, you know. Maybe the A’s should ...

After watching baseball for decades, I’ve decided to give up. I don’t get it. I’ll never get it. Maybe Moore was the better GM the whole time, and maybe he built the kind of team that’s better in a short series. That last sentence is absurd, of course, but I give up. What will it mean if Dayton Moore wins a pennant before Billy Beane? Everything. It will mean everything. Except I’m too stupid to explain it, so you’ll have to look somewhere else for the details. Best of luck.