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"Moneyball" Jeremy Brown Retires.

metirish Feb 19 2008 11:07 AM

I think Chass could have got a better article out of this. ] Assessing the ‘Moneyball’ Payoff MURRAY CHASS Published: February 19, 2008 Not that they want to see any prospect fail, but old-line major league scouts everywhere stood up and cheered last week. Jeremy Brown, the Oakland Athletics announced, had retired. Jeremy who? The Athletics have been the home of Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Jason Giambi, Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito. But Jeremy Brown? The best that can be said about Brown in his six years in the Oakland organization is that he made the team’s 40-man roster and played five games in the majors. But Brown will be remembered most as a portly college catcher who was a central figure in “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis, the book on the revolutionary way Oakland identified players to be drafted for a system that had little money to spend because of the team’s low-revenue status. • Brown was one of seven players the Athletics picked among the first 39 players taken in the 2002 draft, a focal point of the book. Billy Beane, the Athletics’ general manager, found Brown attractive, despite his size, because he was a college player with a high on-base percentage. Veteran scouts for the A’s scoffed at the pick. Picking amateur players from among thousands was too much of a gamble, as everyone knew, and Beane sought a system that could be more reliable and less wasteful. Brown’s retirement is a good time to look back at the Athletics’ 2002 draft and see how the system worked. Based on statistics more than on the established method of having scouts identify prospects from seeing them play, the system has become more widely used and has created debate between old-timers and younger executives. The change in thinking made its biggest impact on the former Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty, who was let go last fall despite a World Series championship in 2006, because of a difference in scouting philosophy. “There are whole Web sites and companies dedicated to providing statistics on college players,” Beane said in a telephone interview. “I think clubs are utilizing them more now than they have in the past. Some companies have solicited clubs and some have accepted.” Beane unveiled his method to his scouts before the 2002 draft. That was to be a potentially fruitful draft for the A’s because they had so many early picks as a result of the Oakland free agents signed by other teams. With their first seven picks, the A’s selected Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, John McCurdy, Ben Fritz, Brown, Stephen Obenchain and Mark Teahen. Swisher, Blanton and Teahen have played in the majors for three years, although Blanton is the only one remaining with the Athletics. Swisher was traded to the Chicago White Sox this winter, and Teahen was traded to Kansas City in June 2004 for Octavio Dotel. Fritz, a pitcher, is preparing for his seventh minor league season, but infielder McCurdy and pitcher Obenchain were released after last season. Beane said hitting on three of seven early picks was a good result. “You’d like to be 50 for 50, but that’s the imperfection of the draft,” he said. “That was the point of the process for us. The complete randomness is why we did what we did. I think the draft up to this point has been pretty random. The average number of players teams get to the big leagues is two. The idea was to try to do something objectively to compare decisions down the road.” Four of the seven players picked by Oakland (57 percent) among the first 39 picks in that draft have played in the majors, including Brown. Of the other 32 picks, 20 have played in the majors (62.5 percent). The difference is in the number of high school players in those groups. Oakland drafted none while other teams selected 18, and 11 have played in the majors, including Prince Fielder, B. J. Upton, Cole Hamels, Scott Kazmir, James Loney, Jeff Francoeur, Matt Cain and Adam Loewen. From Beane’s perspective, college position players are the safest selections while high school pitchers are the riskiest. Yet Hamels, Kazmir, Cain and Loewen are pitchers drafted out of high school. But Beane cautioned that people make a mistake with their “absolute interpretation” of the Athletics’ drafting strategy. If anything is to blame for that misinterpretation, it’s the book that made Beane a celebrity. The book, for example, makes fun of Fielder’s size, saying: “Here’s an astonishing fact: Prince Fielder is too fat even for the Oakland A’s.” • The A’s didn’t even consider Fielder, whom Milwaukee selected seventh, nine slots ahead of Oakland’s first pick. Yet last season the too-fat guy outperformed Swisher, the college kid the A’s coveted, in every major category: .288 batting average to .262, 50 home runs to 22, 119 runs batted in to 78, .618 slugging percentage to .455, and in the A’s favorite, .395 on-base percentage to .381. Maybe the fact that Scott Boras was Fielder’s agent influenced the A’s view of Fielder, but that’s not apparent from the book, which portrays the A’s as only being concerned with which team might select Fielder and how that could affect their ability to get Swisher. The A’s system has enabled them to contend, but they have yet to reach the World Series. They did not make the playoffs last year and Beane doesn’t expect them to get there this year. He wouldn’t talk about his current thinking on the draft. “Are we doing the same things now as we did then?” he said. “No. Things change. Nobody’s invented a template about how to draft in professional baseball. There’s no silver bullet out there. We don’t have it and no one else has it.” [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/sports/baseball/19chass.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin]Brown[/url]

seawolf17 Feb 19 2008 11:20 AM

What? The A's didn't consider a prospect who got picked nine spots ahead of them? Don't you think that might be because they knew he'd be gone by the time their slot came around? ]Four of the seven players picked by Oakland (57 percent) among the first 39 picks in that draft have played in the majors, including Brown. Of the other 32 picks, 20 have played in the majors (62.5 percent). That's a pretty small sample size, so that'd be statistically insignificant. I know Beane gets picked on because he had a book written about him, but this is a stupid article.

Frayed Knot Feb 19 2008 11:27 AM

Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus did get a better article out of it in a piece he wrote the other day [below]. Chass's problem is the same one a lot of pundits have in that they over-generalize the point of the book and what the concept of 'Moneyball' really meant. That said, I think part of the problem was with author Michael Lewis for his occasional over-the-top prose. Fielder, for instance, went 9 or 10 slots before Oakland had its 1st pick that year so they couldn't have drafted him anyway. The "too fat" comment was probably gratuitous as 'The Prince' was exactly the type of power + OBP guy that 'Moneyball' was supposedly all about at the time. The A's "didn't consider" Fielder because they pretty much knew they had no shot at him. The other thing Chass is ignoring is the role that money played in those 2002 draft picks. Brown was drafted that high not because the A's thought he was better than all other picks left but because they couldn't afford to dole out first round money to every pick they had lined up that year and therefore were looking for "hidden" talent that they could make 1st & supp round picks but pay 3rd & 4th round money to players who were only too happy to take is since, going in, they weren't expecting to be drafted anywhere near that high. Goldstein: More than a year ago, an A’s official sent me an email asking me, half jokingly, to stop mentioning Moneyball. It was an understandable request. Baseball changes quickly, and the lessons from Moneyball, or maybe more accurately, the lessons that the readers often perceive from Moneyball, no longer really apply. In 2006, Oakland selected a high school pitcher with their first draft pick, shocking many of the book’s diehard fans, and if you look at their renewed system after all of the trades, the biggest strength of the system is now a plethora of those high-ceiling young arms that give many of the risk-averse shivers. Moneyball is a dead issue it seems, even to the A’s. And now comes word that one of the players, who often unfairly represented Moneyball, has hung them up, as Jeremy Brown has not reported to camp this year, and informed the A’s that he is retiring. For none of the right reasons, Brown was kind of forced to wear the jersey of Moneyball. The A’s gave him over $300,000 to sign when many teams would have never have drafted him. If you balance the scales in a certain way, Oakland was more right about him in many ways that some of the scouts were. He really could produce offensively, batting .268/.370/.439 in six minor league seasons, including a .276/.364/.469 line last year at Triple-A Sacramento. In 1904 at-bats, he delivered consistency on a secondary skills level, with 115 doubles, 68 home runs and 288 walks. In the end however, that body, the one that wasn’t selling jeans, worked against him. Brown was often injured, and a downright bad defensive catcher – anything but agile behind the plate, with an arm that wasn’t very strong. With the offensive profile of a backup, as he was never going to hit for much of an average, Brown ended up miscast for the role, as there is little room on a major league roster for an offensive-oriented reserve catcher. So while overall, I think it’s fair to say Brown turned out better than many thought he would, he still didn’t turn out good enough to be a big leaguer – so at best, it’s a moral victory, and in reality, it doesn’t mean much at all. And with that, I will now finally honor the request that came from that Oakland official. I’m done talking about Moneyball – and so should you be.

metirish Feb 19 2008 11:38 AM

Cheers FK, Goldstein sees it differently than Chass. I've read Moneyball twice and one of the things I remember from it was how the A's dismissed some guys because they wouldn't have a shot at signing them.

AG/DC Feb 19 2008 11:40 AM Re: "Moneyball" Jeremy Brown Retires.

I'm curious about this paragraph. Murray Chass wrote: Jeremy who? The Athletics have been the home of Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Jason Giambi, Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito. But Jeremy Brown? He reviews Dick Williams's A's and the Howe/Macha A's, but completely passes over Tony LaRussa's dominent squads in between. Canseco? McGwire? Rickey? How about some Connie Mack-era guys? Eddie Collins, Chief Bender, where are ye?

John Cougar Lunchbucket Feb 19 2008 12:08 PM

I'm not sure I agree any more with Goldstein than Chass. Goldstein casually asserts "baseball changes quickly" which is complete fiction. I think one of the things that MONEYBALL exposed was how tradition bound and resistant to change baseball was. And as noted above, that it was at its heart a book about economics and not baseball, necessarily. While the market conditions may have changed, the idea that clever folks with fewer resources should try and expose inefficiencies in that market for their benefit surely didn;t. I also don't think there was anything "unfair" about Brown being remembered as an example of Beane's philosophy. "We're not selling jeans here." He provided the perfect example of it, as long as it was understood correctly. Finally, I don't need my pay-to-read Internet baseball smartypants columnists telling me what to discuss. So should you. STFU.

Benjamin Grimm Feb 19 2008 12:22 PM

I read and enjoyed Moneyball I think it, along with Game of Shadows, are the two recent books that I'd call "important." Anyone who wants to understand the game as it is today should be sure to read both books. The thing that gets me about Moneyball is that I don't understand the animosity towards it. (Come to think of it, I feel the same way about Hillary.) One player doesn't pan out and all these writers are dancing on Moneyball's grave? I can see some old-time scouts huffing and scoffing at something new. That's human nature. But the backlash is much stronger than I would have ever guessed it would be. I don't get the controversy.

seawolf17 Feb 19 2008 02:29 PM

I'm with BG on this. Minor leaguers wash out all the time... it's just that this guy happened to be in a bestselling book.

metirish Feb 19 2008 02:32 PM

I don't know but having three of their first seven picks make it to the majors seems good to me.