If I can believe what I read on the Internet, questionable at best, Billy Beane likes to retreat from baseball – even during the season – to fly fish in Oregon’s Deschutes River.

Which, today, would be far safer than in the streets of Oakland where crime is rampant and Beane’s baseball team, the A’s, is taking an incredible dive from being “the major league’s best baseball team” to one where player confidence is AWOL and die-hard fans are pulling out their hair.

At present, a team that recently was banging the fences at a near-record rate is dropping series after series to weak sisters like the White Sox and Rangers with wild card opportunities, at best, in a mad stumble.

Why?

If anyone in America can produce the name of one current MLB general manager, it would have to be Billy Beane.

His maverick style of assessing baseball talent since becoming GM of the A’s in 1997 is legendary. Beane works with one of the smallest budgets in baseball and, for the most part, continually has fielded competitive teams against deep-pocket foes like the Yankees and Angels.

Although a visual unknown to most, it’s safe to say Billy Bean’s appearance differs from the image most people have of him. That would be the face of Brad Pitt, who played the role of Beane in the 2011 movie Moneyball.

Beane actually did play major league baseball, being a first-round draft pick of the Mets in 1984. However, in Wallowa County jargon, Beane’s career was a “bust.” He played for the Mets, Twins, Tigers, and A’s until his lifetime .219 batting average sent him elsewhere. Beane’s power as a major league baseball player was somewhat questionable too, smacking a total of three homers during his career.

Still, since becoming general manager, Beane’s mantle as a maverick has expanded to near-mythic proportions as atypical trades he’s negotiated regularly work well for the A’s.

Yet this year not long after the mid-season All Star break, with many sports broadcasters only questioning if the 2014 A’s would be able to win the World Series after they got there, Billy apparently decided “the best team in baseball” needed some assistance from the front office and negotiated two trades based on the adage that good pitching trumps good hitting.

I’ve been an A’s fan since long before the team moved from Kansas City to Oakland in 1968 and am not yet ready to give up on the 2014 season, but Billy’s moneyball strategy is based on statistics and the stats recorded following those two trades might be why Billy Beane is fly fishing in Oregon instead of sitting high in the stands at O.co Coliseum.

In trade No. 1, he sent away the heart of a healthy minor league system to the Chicago Cubs in return for two quality starting pitchers; one a long-haired, likable dude with the unlikely name of Samardzija. Shrapnel from that trade included the fact that an A’s starting pitcher who had recorded six consecutive wins was sent to the minor leagues.

Did that trade tilt anyone’s confidence?

Then it happened.

At the trading deadline, Beane shipped off one of the most feared hitters in all of baseball – the two-time home run derby champion and an incredibly genuine, nice, team player – for a pitcher who likely won’t be around next year.

No wonder Oakland A’s bats have gone silent! Players might be worried about being tapped on the shoulder and told they’re being served bon voyage papers to play in the minor leagues for the Toledo Mud Hens.

Jabberwock II columnist Rocky Wilson is a reporter for the Chieftain.