A lot of A's fans talk shit, not all but A LOT of them do... about the Giants specifically. I like the A's and root for them when they don't play the Giants (Not a hardcore fan but the only AL team I give a shit about, the A's).
My question is... is money ball really working? They made a movie about it but to me it's not working. All it is, is a never-ending cycle of developing talent, trading it for more talent and so it keeps going.
Moneyball is just a book, it's not a philosophy.
The A's are stuck in a piece of shit stadium that they're sharing with a football team that ruined it and soured the city (who is broke now anyway) on supporting professional sports teams. San Jose would welcome them with open arms and allow them to thrive, but they gave the rights to the Giants when they wanted to leave San Francisco (which they no longer needed when they gave up on San Jose for Florida,) and they won't give them back because even after multiple championships they know that the majority of their fanbase is fleeting and they don't want to compete with another team in a nice stadium that can afford a high payroll.
No owner is going to come into Oakland and spend money on the payroll until they can build a new stadium. Between the Raiders, the city of Oakland, the Commissioner (now Commissioners) of Major League Baseball and the Giants, they're stuck without a means of building a new stadium, which means they're stuck with a low payroll.
Moneyball is just a book that an author wrote about the A's when he wanted to find out why they could win as many games as teams like the Yankees with a fraction of their payroll. Broadcasters and sportswriters with a limited understanding of the situation like catchy buzzwords so they throw it around a lot, but it's not some philosophy that the A's have been perpetuating for all these years because they feel like they have something to prove... They have one of the best GMs in baseball and he can win more games with less money more consistently than others because he's good at what he does. The reason that he doesn't have a lot of money to work with is because no business owner in their right mind would put money into that team while they're playing in that stadium. For the most part it's been a never-ending cycle of developing talent because they've been stuck in a never-ending search for a solution to the stadium situation.