The Trading Desk

"Michael Lewis article on Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, who has used statistics to make his job more science than art; by quantifying and assigning value to certain baseball stats, Beane has succeeded in developing excellent team for minimal money, in baseball terms; Beane acquires players that other teams reject or fail to utilize because he is impressed by their numbers, where other teams rely heavily on more traditional performance gauges; photo (L)"