I thought this story was pretty interesting.
Mainly because I’m an A’s fan, but also because I’ve read Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, which followed A’s GM Billy Beane through much of the 2002 season. The book is generally about Beane’s baseball philosophy, which Lewis named with the title of his book.
The moneyball concept was/remains controversial within the game because it kind of goes against a lot of what passes for conventional wisdom when it comes to baseball. It’s essentially a scientific approach to the game, which is why I like it. You have a set of data (statistics), which you can use to measure on-field performance, and to some degree, predict how a player will perform in the future.
Beane didn’t really come up with the concept himself, but he was among the game’s first GMs to implement it. And anyone who decries the use of statistics need look no further than the 2007 Boston Red Sox, world champions built on the moneyball model.
The story I linked is interesting because it talks about Jeremy Brown, a college catcher who Beane was high on and wanted to draft in 2002. Few others in the organization or even the game liked Brown, basically because he was fat. The “conventional wisdom” is that fat players can’t be good players.
But the stats said otherwise – in college, Brown absolutely killed the ball. Brown wasn’t on anyone else’s radar, and Beane knew he’d be able to take him in the amateur draft without any trouble, and so he did.
Lewis’ book kind of gives the impression that Brown was a couldn’t-miss prospect, but that wasn’t really the case. Lewis chose to highlight Brown because he was a good example of Beane’s philosophy, as well as the probably more important aspect of Beane’s strategy, which was to search for players and qualities that other teams were undervaluing and to stress those in our approach to putting together a team.
But it caused a lot of backlash from the anti-moneyball crowd when Brown didn’t really pan out. If you look hard enough, you’ll find scads of ill-advised articles about how Brown was an example of why Beane failed. That’s an insane argument, but it’s one that many sportswriters love to make. What can you do?
But the point was that Beane assembled his baseball organization different than anyone else at the time. And it paid off – from 1999 to 2006, Oakland posted a winning record each year, impressive for a team amongst the league’s bottom-dwellers as far as payroll. It’s also notable that several successful franchises seem to have emulated or built upon Beane’s philosophies (the aforementioned Red Sox, as well as the Yankees) since 2002.
It’s unfortunate to see Brown retire – reading the book kind of made you root for him to be a success, but there’s still hope that he could resurface with another team that doesn’t have two catchers ahead of him in the organizational depth chart. The story of his retirement from pro ball, in any case, kind of puts an unfortunate end to one of the cooler baseball stories I’ve read in a long time.
For more information about Lewis’ book, click here.
