Oakland's Potential Star

Being the general manager of the Oakland Athletics and wanting a superstar as the face of your franchise are two things that rarely go together, unless one of two things take place. You can either get lucky and have one of  your previous draft picks be mentored and home grown through the farm system until they are a perennial all star alla Alex Rodriguez with the Seattle Mariners in the 90's. Great, you know have a superstar as the face of your franchise..until they are able to hit the open free agent market where their current small market teams can't compete financially  with the Yankees, and Red Sox of the baseball world and their bid$ to keep them in town are blown out of the water. So the only other option to a general manager of a small market team like Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics has to land a superstar at a manageable price is to roll the dice and take a gamble on a foreign player just entering his prime. This is exactly what the Oakland Athletics did yesterday when they handed a 4 year $36 million dollar contract to 26 year old Yoenis Cespedes. He is known as a 5 tool Cuban outfielder with plenty of pop in his bat (not too mention two sweet training videos). The contract which will pay Cespedes 6.5 million his first season 8.5 million in his second season, and 10.5 million the last two years of the contract! His contract tells us that Billy Beane is banking on this Cuban import to really hit it big right off the bat and be able to market him to fans and the rest of the baseball world as a superstar which would then generate a stream of revenue for the Oakland Athletics, and is their only chance at being able to afford the last two years of this contract. If he doesn't play like an all star, or isn't especially marketable his first season in the MLB look for Billy Beane to sell him to a big market club for a couple prospects. One reason i say this is because there is no other player on the Oakland Athletics roster makes $6 million dollars annually http://espn.go.com/mlb/team/roster/_/name/oak/oakland-athletics. But primarily because as we've read in Moneyball, Billy Beane takes the only road available to a small market general manager and that's the unconventional one. To assemble a competitive baseball team under tight and restrictive finances Billy Beane began incorporating advanced metrics when analyzing players and picking up under-appreciated players that he was always able to get the most out of. This is absolutely not your typical Billy Beane signing, someone who so deeply analyzes a players statistics that some believe he is ruining the beauty of the game.http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/yoenis-cespedes-elite-talent-and-war/. Billy Beane typically refuses to get personally connected to players, but rather sees them as assets to a statically run business. Again this was not a Billy Beane decision because the record tying 33 bombs that Cespedes hit in the Cuban leagues last season and his shiny .300+ batting average mean diddly squat for Beane's advance statistical analysis because he was playing against inferior competition in Cuba, comparable to the minor leagues. That's why this surprise signing most likely came as an initiative from the owners box, desperate to put a face on a struggling franchise. From that perspective this contract makes sense for a small market team desperate for a star, like the boy from Universal Baseball Association, the Oakland Athletics rolled the dice hoping they just luckily landed an instant star at a bargain- for 4 years anyway.