FanHouse BillyBeane

OAKLAND -- The A's rebuilding plan may appear to be progressing quickly with the team's hot streak, but don't expect GM Billy Beane to make any big splashes on marquee players this winter to fill out the picture.

He tried that last winter. Didn't work.

Only after the A's got rid of Matt Holliday, Jason Giambi and Orlando Cabrera, essentially handing the wheel to the young players, did the team start to win. So the youth movement will continue.

"We'd look to add some guys, but we're going to be very disciplined," Beane told FanHouse. "We're trying to build something. We're not going to go crazy in the offseason."

After signing a free agent deal with the Oakland A's prior to the start of the 2009 season, Jason Giambi has endured a rough season. It just got a bit worse, as Giambi has been released by the A's. He had been on the disabled list with a quad injury since June 20, before which he had compiled a league-worst -- among qualifiers -- .193 batting average.

Giambi, 38, has 407 career home runs and a lifetime .282 batting average. In his eight seasons with the A's, Giambi put up numbers as solid as anyone in Oakland franchise history.

Weeks after the dramatic last-minute shelving of the Moneyball movie, Sony Pictures has unshelved it. The movie is back on again, this time with Aaron Sorkin writing the screenplay. Brad Pitt is still expected to play Billy Beane.

That probably means we'll get all sorts of great scenes with Beane and Paul DePodesta talking in way-too-smart-for-real-life dialogue as they hurriedly walk from place to place. Sorkin, right, is the writer responsible for The West Wing and Sports Night and films A Few Good Men and The American President.

He's also working right now on a movie about ... Facebook.

Seriously.

Although the big movie studios have all balked at putting the best-selling baseball book 'Moneyball' on the silver screen, one of the versions of a screenplay for the movie has surfaced on Hollywood Elsewhere. (EDIT: The link to the actual script seems to have been removed.)

I just finished reading through the whole thing and it actually does stick relatively close to the story of the book. Sure, there are some changes -- like making Billy Beane a bachelor and having him hook up with a waitress (p. 20) -- but for the most part it's a story of how he built the 2002 A's into a winner on a shoestring budget after losing three big-time free agents, Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and Jason Isringhausen.

Billy Beane's public position has always been that the A's were happy to keep Matt Holliday until the end of the season, even if they weren't contending, because he could get the draft picks as compensation if Holliday signed elsewhere.

Don't believe that.

Beane has to make that his public position. He has to convince his fellow GMs that he is happy to keep Holliday, or else he has no trade leverage.

That was a dubious position from Day 1, but now it's looking even more questionable. As we near the season's halfway point, Holliday is still having an unspectacular year, and there is a growing possibility, as pointed out by Buster Olney, that the A's might not be able to get those draft picks anyway.

OAKLAND -- The future has arrived a little early for the A's pitching staff.

A team that looked awful as recently as a few weeks ago is suddenly on a roll, having won six games in a row, largely on the strength of the youngest rotation in the majors.

"It's extremely exciting, not just as a player, but as a fan of the game, to watch what these young guys are doing, " 25-year-old lefty Dallas Braden, the senior member of the group, told FanHouse.

And that was before 22-year-old Vin Mazzaro, the most recent addition to the rotation, pitched 7 1/3 scoreless innings on Sunday. Mazzaro, who pitched 6 1/3 innings to beat the White Sox on Tuesday, is the first pitcher in Oakland history to start his career with consecutive scoreless starts.

OAKLAND -- Billy Beane, whose team hit Memorial Day in last place, with the second worst record in the American League, is willing to overlook such pesky details.

"The most important thing we had to do this year was to start to develop the youngest rotation in the big leagues," Beane told FanHouse. "I think some of those young guys are starting to show some progress and that's ultimately where our future lies."

The A's general manager spent most of the winter trying to beef up the offense with acquisitions like Matt Holliday, Jason Giambi, Orlando Cabrera and Nomar Garciaparra. The point was not so much to get the A's to the playoffs in 2009 as it was to help provide an offensive cushion to support the pitchers who the A's hope will get them to the promised land in 2010 and beyond.

From the Windup is Matt Snyder's extended look at some aspect of America's pastime each Thursday.

With the recent news that Mark DeRosa is on the trade block and the White Sox have possibly landed Jake Peavy, junkies of major league baseball trade rumors got an early glimpse at what promises to be a very interesting July. It's far to0 early to know exactly who will be in the market for what -- or who can afford to take on temporary payroll in this economy -- but it's certainly fun to speculate. Let's do it.

Ken Macha is doing it again.

The manager who has never had a losing season -- not as a minor league manager, major league coach or major league manager -- has the Brewers playing some of the best baseball in the big leagues.

As they head into this weekend's series with the Cardinals, who are tied with the Brewers for first in the NL Central, the Brewers have won 18 of their last 24.

While Macha would be the first to tell you that the players are more responsible for winning than the manager, this team has Macha's fingerprints all over it.

You might know him as a genius. Or maybe as a revolutionary. Or maybe you simply know him as the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. One way or another, you know Billy Beane.

He is arguably the most famous executive in sports, a byproduct of Michael Lewis' best-selling 2003 book Moneyball (also an upcoming motion picture), which detailed how he was able to compete annually with baseball's financial powers on a strict budget and introduced many fans to sabermetrics.

Beane stopped by FanHouse to chat with fans Friday afternoon. Read the transcript after the jump.