I recently saw the film based on Michael Lewis’ bestselling book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, and starring Brad Pitt as the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. It is not necessary to be a baseball fan and/or knowledgeable about analytics to appreciate both the book and the film, although that helps somewhat, as is also true of another of Lewis’ books, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and the film based on it.

Here is an excerpt from an article by Keith H. Hammonds that was published in FAST COMPANY magazine (December 19, 2007). To read the complete article, please click here.

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“I was up at 4:30 this morning, on the Net. I love going to Stetson University’s site, or James Madison’s, to see what their ball teams did last night. That’s the fun part of this game — that’s the foundation. To me, that’s why we’re in this game — because we love it at the grass roots, where it’s still at its most pure.”

William Lamar Beane — Billy Beane — the 41-year-old general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball club, perches his sandaled feet on the desk before him. He is a former ballplayer — not a great one, but fair enough to have made it to the big leagues and stayed awhile — and he still looks like a ballplayer. Both of his shoulders are shot, but he is tall and fit, with a sweep of brown hair over jock-rugged features.

Today is a great day to be a baseball guy. It’s February in Phoenix, and the first morning of full-team workouts is taking place. Outside, the Arizona sun pokes past wispy clouds. It feels like spring. It smells like spring — like freshly mowed grass. Warning-track gravel crunches underneath the spikes of coltish pitchers loping through their warm-ups in emerald jerseys. Sluggers grin when kids yell their names.

Spring training is an annual ritual celebrating the reemergence of hope — and, hell, these days, there’s nothing wrong with hope. But something else is going on here at the Papago Park Baseball Facility. For the Oakland A’s, the start of the baseball season honors the careful admixture of mathematics and economics, of regression models and market analyses. Which is to say that for the Oakland A’s, there is an air of certainty along with the scent of hope. Fans dotting the bleachers are witnessing the fine-tooling of a team that almost certainly will win a lot more games than it will lose this season. The statistics bear this out.

Just as surely, this season, Billy Beane will be called a genius again. He will be compared, as before, to Branch Rickey, legendary mastermind of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Some will predict his inevitable election into the Hall of Fame. Beane, it will be said, has changed baseball forever.

More accurately, Beane has discovered a way to succeed in a sport already changed. He has perfected a formula for competing and winning both on the field and in the books. Over the past decade, professional baseball has devolved into an increasingly dysfunctional, sharply divided game of big-time haves and small-time have-nots. A few big-market teams like the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers lever fat television contracts to acquire top talent at top salaries. Clubs in smaller cities, relegated to miserly budgets, scrap for what’s left and hope — there’s that word again — for the best. The big-market teams win and make money; the rest live hand-to-mouth.

Except for the Athletics. Bound to playing for a city of just 410,000 and to playing in the aging Network Associates Coliseum, the A’s averaged just 26,787 fans per game in 2002. That put the A’s at a dismal 18th in a league of 30 clubs. Oakland’s player payroll this season will total $49 million, roughly one-third of what the Yankees spend on big-name talent.

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Sidebar: The Beane-Ball Handbook

Over the past five years, general manager Billy Beane has made the Oakland Athletics one of pro baseball’s most consistent winners — and he has done so on one of the sport’s most meager budgets. Here’s how Beane turns a double play, making one into more.

The real highlights don’t happen on the field. “It used to be, general managers just evaluated players on their ability. Today, the economics drive every decision. You have to evaluate talent not just on playing ability, but also on economic feasibility — and not just a player’s current feasibility, but also his future trend. Every single decision, down to drafting a kid out of high school, has economic ramifications.”

It may be a team sport — but there’s only one boss. “We have a pretty tight inner circle. First and foremost, it’s my responsibility what happens here. I give my directors a lot of autonomy, because they’re good at what they do. But that’s a small group, and ultimately, in critical decisions, I want to be involved. We don’t have a lot of bureaucracy here. We don’t get together for huge organizational meetings. We don’t have a lot of patience for four-hour meetings and a hundred opinions. That’s my worst nightmare.”

Hit ’em where the big guys ain’t. “We can do some things that the Yankees can’t. We can trade for a guy like Corey Lidle and make him our fifth starter, even though he was a middle reliever who hadn’t done much. I kid with [Yankees general manager] Brian Cashman all the time: He can’t do that, because New York demands higher-profile players. When Jason Giambi left us [in 2002, for the Yankees], we could sign Scott Hatteberg, a backup catcher, and put him at first and get away with it. We’re allowed to take what are perceived as risks.”

Sweat the details — but remember that it’s a long season. “This is an intense job, because you’re being judged every day. It’s not like being a CEO, where you just have to give a conference call once a quarter. Every day, we play a game, and it’s in the paper. All the data is on the Internet. Everything is public. And I’m guilty of it too. This sport is an emotional business, and I have to be careful not to make sound-bite decisions.”

Even an MVP can’t do it all. “Getting to the play-offs isn’t random: Over 162 games, if you have the right team, the odds work out. But once you get to the postseason, everything becomes random. In a 5-game series, you can flip a coin five times, and you might come up tails five times. In our market and many others, we can’t build a team that’s specifically geared for 162 games and also for a 5-game play-off. That I don’t think we’ll ever overcome.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Keith H. Hammonds (khammonds@fastcompany.com) is a FAST COMPANY senior editor and a die-hard Yankees fan.