MR. Beane.

[animallittle3]

Well old animal is as intrigued by Billy Beane at Oakwell as the next man .

The funny thing is I only saw the film for the first time a few months ago and thought of our club straight away as the story unfolded .

I'd never heard of the guy before watching the film and I always thought US sports such as baseball and american football were all fairly equal because of the college draft system which is designed so the same teams can't dominate .

Oakland is a fairly blue collar city and a poor relation to San Francisco just across the bay , I've an interest in baseball in as much as I watch a highlights programme on BT sport and the odd match , sometimes it can be very boring in a low scoring game and yet can also provide extreme drama with a team a few runs behind who load the bases and then some dude hits a home run and all four get home and turn the game on its head , some of the homers are unbelievable , those top batters knock em out of the stadium and that ball is travelling at great speed , curving , diping and god knows what else .

I once had a go on a computer game , reality WI MLB , your havin a laff trying to hit that fecker , it was past you before you could blink , rounders it aint .

Billy Beane didn't invent Moneyball by the way , he was the chief recipient of it , some saddo kid with a liking for baseball , stats , computer programmes and too much time on his hands did and Billy hired him .

The kid taught Billy the system and how to analyze the stats , not a clue where that kid is today .

I think this is an important point , some kid had to learn Billy about his own game , the game he played in the majors and brought him to Oakland as General Manager when he retired .

So clearly Billy thinks he can add value to our model using a system he didn't even invent and in a game he doesn't really know .

I'll tell you here and now Hecky might not fancy this , I suspect there's one or two players at the club today Hecky doesn't care for and that's with football people and Cryne junior blowing in his ear .

Interesting times at the club , to say the least .