GM Trade History - Billy Beane

what does "count" (the last column" mean?

Looks great. Can't wait to see some other teams!

Awesome idea, Tim. This is always something I've wanted to see somewhere. Definitely continue with it.

Great information. Looking forward to seeing the others.

I would suggest, though, you get rid of the COUNT column. I didn't know what it was at first - like many others, I assume - and even now that I do, I don't find it to be all that useful, especially when it's not carried all the way down the column. The only way to use it as it's listed now is to scroll all the way to the top and see if those GMs hooked up on deals before.

Wow! Even multi-team trades are in there and easy to comprehend too. How in the world do you even start something like this?

I agree with 'Ralow' - eventually migrating this to the web would be extremely cool. Clicking on another GM would show his trade history or a player would show his trip around the majors.

Tim, the site continues to impress. Thank you for creating and building such a wonderful source of information.

I still say if you can ever get a list of Options Status for every player, that's the holy grail. :)

One other correction. The trade where the A's got Durazo shows that Durazo came from the Reds. This was a 4-team trade, but Durazo came from the D-Backs. The Reds were the only team in the trade that the A's were not actually involved with (did not send a player to, nor received a player from them).

You should also say if the trade was good bad or a bust for both teams and add them up to see how the gm trades overall.

very nice. im looking at all these trades and it looks like beane has traded away as much talent as hes acquired. everyone gives beane so much credit but i think the athletics scouting and drafting people deserve more credit. beanes made really good trades but also really bad ones. hes just had so much young talent to work with.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll start on one for Theo and then maybe Brian Cashman. Any other suggestions would be welcomed because I still have a lot of GM's to go. As long as I know there are people reading them I'm more than happy to make more . I also found it very interesting he never signed a major free agent, and also how good the A's scouting was that they drafted guys like Papelbon, Hudson, Towles, Ethier, and Harden in such late rounds.

Unfortunately I'm a Phillies fan too, I'll probably get to him sometime during the next week, and to answer ThaWalrus' suggestion I'd like to do the GM's history with their current teams first and then go back and update anyone who has held the same position for another team. But by the time it's all done I'd like to have each GM's complete history. Thanks for your suggestions, there should be an update of Beane's Trade History posted very soon, hope you all like it!

Retrosheet maintains a CSV file of every trade/free agent signing since the early 1900s. You could probably automate a lot of the effort, simply with a list of who was GM for what team when and a few database queries.

Hey Tim I'll trade you Jose Vidro AND Richie Sexson to have this guy Brendan work for the Mariners along side Pelekoudas... If I have to, I'm not scared to raise it a crate of baseball bats and two bags of practice balls! Seriously though, Brendan, you've done a great job, keep up the good work... How about Vidro and Sexson for an electric pencil sharpner?! I'm flexible, you don't even have to include the batteries if it takes them!

Guru, dont you know? Richie Sexson is just lulling the opposing pitchers to sleep so that they give him better pitches in the second half. This was part of his plan ever since spring training. He will hit 45 HR's after the all star break and be right back on the HOF fast track. I thought you would have known this..

The Kotsay trade is wrong, kotsay went to the braves, some of the other trades are like that to.

GM trade history is a nice idea, good work. However, I don't think a spreadsheet is the right format... makes it hard to maintain and difficult for people to always get the most up-to-date version. How about a simple a set of wiki pages or a small CMS type application?