In the new film Moneyball (which is very good), Johan Hill’s character is a composite of several real-life statistics nerds who would revolutionize how players are valued in baseball.
In the beginning scenes of the movie, he works for the Cleveland Indians, and impresses Billy Beane, who then buys him for Oakland.
Can front-office personnel really be bought and sold like players? I’ve never heard of this happening in real life (but I’m not a big sports fan.) I always assumed those guys were just regular employees.
Did the real Billy Beane actually buy any undervalued nerds from other teams? I had always heard that he had been leaning in this direction for some time and the A’s analyses were very much a team effort.
To 1. Not as such, but if somebody you want is under contract to another team, then you would typically have to give the other team compensation for breaking that contract. Even if that weren’t formal, GM’s do have to be open and honest and fair with each other or pretty soon they can’t make deals at all. A moral obligation between teams really is enforceable.
There have been “trades” of field managers where the compensation for their contracts took the form of player contracts.