Billy Beane quotes:

You know, I'd actually say Lionel Messi. He's so remarkable, watching him play he's probably still undervalued. When you're scoring five goals in one Champions League match, there's no value that's too high.

I just talked to a young lady, a freshman at Santa Barbara. She's taking a course, and 'Moneyball''s one of the required readings. This young lady could dream of one day becoming a general manager.

Quite frankly, I can't get enough of soccer. I tell my jingoistic friends in the United States there's a reason why it is the world's No. 1 sport. The rest of the planet can't be wrong.

We've got to use every piece of data and piece of information, and hopefully that will help us be accurate with our player evaluation. For us, that's our life blood.

I made one decision in my life based on money and I swore I would never do it again.

In baseball, you can do something poorly and still get credit. A pitcher could throw a bad ball, the batter hit a screaming line drive, and an outfielder make a fantastic diving catch. Yet, when you look at historical databases, 80% of the time when a ball is struck with that trajectory and velocity, it is a hit.

When I first came into baseball, people didn't want to hear that a team was a business. But it is. And the better the business is run, the healthier the team on the field is going to be.

Smaller markets teams, when you hit bottom, you hit with a thud.

Trying to build a team over the course of the winter to put on the field is really just half the job. Because if your best players go down, it's not so much him going down as who you replace him with, which ultimately might have the biggest impact on how you end up finishing. So you want to have both a belt and suspenders for support.

I don't want a lot of guys like me who played the game. Quite frankly, I want blank canvases; I want people to come in with new ideas. I don't want the biases of their own experiences to be a part of their decision-making process.

I love what I do. That's one of the reasons I've stayed. I love the community; I love driving to work.

We try to create a situation where we're the casino. It's like how an actuary would set insurance rates. Predictability, predictability, predictability. What's the path to least risk? What's the greater chance of getting some return on this asset?

The bottom line is that any business should be a meritocracy. The best and brightest. Period.

We can't do the same things the Yankees do. Given the economics, we'll lose.

I hate this idea that I've somehow become detached. It's like I can't win. I'd been hearing all these years that I was too hands-on: that I was the guy writing out the lineup card. Now, I'm not present enough. How is it possible to be a detached micromanager?

The math works. Over the course of a season, there's some predictability to baseball. When you play 162 games, you eliminate a lot of random outcomes. There's so much data that you can predict: individual players' performances and also the odds that certain strategies will pay off.

I may not be as visible as I used to be, and by that I mean being in the clubhouse or on the field. But I'm just as invested as I've always been.

When your enemy's making mistakes, don't interrupt him.

Certainly, you're not going to able to go and pull a Mark Mulder out of your hat somewhere.

How can you not be romantic about baseball?

The idea that I [should] trust my eyes more than the stats, I don't buy that because I've seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I know that the rabbit's not in there.

No matter how successful you are, change is always good.

I hate losing more than I want to win.

You have to face reality some time. But there's no sense in facing it until somebody forces you to.

Itâ??s hard not to be romantic about baseball