Beane took over as GM in 1998. He was assistant GM prior. Anybody selected, kept on board, or shipped out had much to do with his decision making as anybody elses.
Immediately when he took over the team he only selected college players and had already been a huge advocate of Bill James theories and sabermetric player evaluations.
Mark Mulder was selected in the 1st Round in 1998 out of MSU
Byrnes was also selected in the 8th Round in '98 out of UCLA
Barry Zito was selected in the 1st round in 1999 out of USC.
Rich Harden was selected in the 20th round in 2000 June draft.
Jeremy Bonderman, Bobby Crosby, Mike Wood(SP Royals in the Octavio Dotel trade) & Dan Johnson were all top 10 selections in 2001.
Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, & Mark Teahen were all selections in 2002. (all currently hold a starting position on their respected teams)
Omar Quintanilla (one of the A's biggest prospects) is currently the only standout in '03 draft (but it only been 2 yrs, an emerging star can be in the making)
Huston Street is the highlight of the 2004 draft, only 21 and already making major league hitters look foolish. (already being called the next Brad Lidge)
Its really hard to gauge the upside of the selections from 2002 on without them having any real time to perform to their projected ceilings.
Over the last 8 years....year after year Beane's draft selections have yield one super-star after another. To credit that to a pre "old school scouting overhaul" is false.
I dont want to get into the whole Beane argument because I dont see what he does every second of every day, so do not feel inclined to comment on his activites. I wana keep this post short so someone will read it.
But to say the A's arent a good organization because they lose the first round of the playoffs isnt a valid argument. Many of those times it has come down to one game, even one pitch. The saying that in baseball anything can happen on any given day pretty much sums that up. Things didn't fall their way for those games, but a larger sample size (i.e. the entire previous seasons) represents how consistent they have been over the years. If you wanna talk stats, particularly in a stats game, you cant base how good a team (or theory) is purely on what they do in a 5 game series. The sample size is just too small.
TheYanks04 wrote:A. Please do not call Morgan the poster boy of the anti-moneyball crowd or anything to that ilk. Morgan is a moron and we on that side of the "Alan Embree is a great closer option/Scott Hatteberg a great hitter" fence will take exception to it.
B. This comment of Morgan's is sort of like the Gammon;s effect. Every once in a while if you babble enough eventually you get something right. Rare, but it does happen. Money ball has won nada...zip.
Well, you're pulling a classic Morgan move with the strawman arguement. No one ever said Embree was a dominant reliever. The claim was that teams aren't best served saving their best reliever for official save situations, but rather, team's should use their best reliever in high leverage situations, whenever they come about. A bullpen comprised of ineffective relievers isn't going to be an asset no matter how you choose to organize it.
And Hatteberg is a good hitter. He's not an all-star, but very solid. The point with Hatteberg was, for the price, to look at what he can do for your team, instead of focusing on what he can't.
I think it's safe to say there is more then one approach to fielding a competitive baseball team in a small market, or a large on for that matter. Almost all teams have fixed resources and the ones that make smart decisions in regards to how to allocate those resources are the ones with success.
Now, to equate success with WS championships is ridicules. To do so would be to term the Braves of the past 15 years as disappointments, with 95 being the lone exception, or the Yankees as of the past 4 years as failures. Its foolish to use WS appearances as the only mark of success
As for the "moneyball" approach. People are refereeing to others only having read the cliff notes to moneyball. Michael Lewis' book could be described as a poor set of cliff notes to one front offices approach to baseball. Lewis was writing a book and hoping to actually get people to buy it. It is more a story of a draft then a diagram of a draft, and it is inaccurate to base one's opinion of the sabermetric approach on his book.
When it comes down to it, both "classic" scouting and statistical analysis are tools for evaluating talent, and im sure almost all front offices use both. To dismiss either is the height of folly
He began letting Koby Clemens drive the orange Hummer to school after he signed a letter of intent last November to play baseball for the University of Texas, whose colors are burnt orange and white. Before that, Koby drove a black Hummer to school
Close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades.
Beane, Schuerholtz, and Ryan all have one thing in common. None build their teams for a five or seven game series in October. To turn Morgan's ignorant statement on its head, when was the last time Brain Cashman drove in a run in the playoffs?
CubsFan7724 wrote:Beane is going to start hunting out Defensive Range guys? For some reason I don't think that will work as well as OPS. OPS is a far more predictable stat than Range Factor or Zone Rating, even though they are the good measures of fielding, they are still iffy at best.
Beane mentioned on an XM interview that getting Kotsay was due to defense being undervalued this offseason.
DominicanLou wrote:Well, the Marlins, who are a small market team, have won the World Series two times in the last eight years. Seems slightly more succesful than what any Moneyball team has done.
That is just plain false. In 1997 the Florida Marlins' team payroll was $52,465,000, the fifth largest in baseball and $12,403,849 above the average payroll. You also have to keep in mind that team payrolls were much, much smaller back then. The Yankees had the largest at $73,389,577. That Marlins team was a collection of mercenaries. Brown, Alou, Bonilla, White, Leiter, and so on. Then Wayne sold them all off in one of the most shameful dismantlings in baseball history.
wrveres wrote:and maybe that is the A's problem.
Every team I know has a goal in the beginning of the season to "Win the World Series", except the A's. Their goal is to "Be a Good team".
Someone should tell the Beaneiacs, its time to "raise the bar"
Fan of Leonard Koppett? New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, Palo Alto Times, and the Oakland Tribune? Hall of Fame writer, and about as old school as it gets.
It is unfashonable to talk about luck in baseball. To losers, it implies alibi; to winners, it detracts from self-esteem; to spectators and streategists, luck is an unwelcome intrusion into the illusion of an ordered universe and spoils the second-guesser's sensation of omnipotence. And to all those involved in baseball as a business - players, managers, executives - it is a wise policy to ignore luck, good and bad, in their own thinking. Their concern is always with the next time - the next inning, the next game, the next season, the next pitch. To dwell on the chance factor in what has already happened undermines the will and disciplined thinking; in planning ahead, one must, by definition, exclude luck from the calculation.
Nevertheless, the reality is that luck plays an important role in almost every game. It could not be otherwise with round bats, round balls, and fields full of pebbles, ruts, clumps of grass, or seams in the carpet, and odd-shaped boundary walls. Baseballs do take funny bounces; a ball hit weakly may drop between fielders who were properly placed; a ball may land fair or foul by a fraction of an inch; a roller may be beaten out for a hit; and the hardest possible line drive may go right into a fielder's glove instead of a foot to either side. - From The Thinking Fan's Guide to Baseball
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by fantasyfiend » Tue Apr 19, 2005 2:02 am 
