Jeffrey Miller points out that A’s GM Billy Beane is a huge fan of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead:
“Moneyball” made Billy Beane one of the most polarizing figures in baseball, but the book that really gets the A’s GM feeling like a man apart is “The Fountainhead.” Ayn Rand’s classic is about a renegade architect named Howard Roarke [sic–it’s Roark] who refuses to yield to conventional standards, even when it means creating enemies who want to destroy him for it. “He’s my favorite,” Beane said. “He said (the heck with) everything else and did it the way he wanted to. He didn’t care. I read it, like, three times.” Beane is something of a Howard Roarke himself, a renegade baseball architect who refuses to yield to traditional methods, even if it means the old guard wants to destroy him for it. And it does. Beane has de-emphasized the role of field scouts and stripped his manager of most in-game strategy decisions.