Under the leadership of general manager Billy Beane, the small-time MLB club goes all-in on analytics in a bid to remain competitive against big-market rivals.
Over and over the old scouts will say, "The guy has a great body," or, "This guy may be the best body in the draft." And every time they do, Billy will say, "We’re not selling jeans here," and deposit yet another highly touted player, beloved by the scouts, onto his shit list. One after another of the players the scouts rated highly vanish from the white board, until it’s empty. If the Oakland A’s aren’t going to use their seven first-round draft picks to take the players their scouts loved, who on earth are they going to take? That question begins to be answered when Billy Beane, after tossing another name on the slag heap, inserts a new one:
TEAHEN
The older scouts lean back in their chairs, spittoons in hand. Paul leans forward into a laptop and quietly pulls up statistics from college Web sites. Erik Kubota, scouting director, holds a ranked list of all the amateur baseball players in the country. He turns many pages, and passes hundreds and hundreds of names, before he finds Teahen.
- Page 31 of "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis
Rather than following industry consensus and drafting for potential, Beane and his new-school staff target players who are easier to project (college players rather than high-schoolers) and players who show well in certain statistical categories correlated with future MLB wins (on-base percentage).
Michael Lewis’ book and the subsequent movie portray Beane and co.’s strategy as a great success. But in Sawchik’s research 20 years on, Moneyball’s protagonists don’t fare as well.
So, how does that "Moneyball" draft and the subsequent era stack up?
On one hand, the 2002 A's draft board beat the previous 10 years of performance for the same respective draft slots.
The average WAR of the eight pitchers on Beane's 2002 draft board (5.0) beat the average of the players taken in the same draft slots from 1992-2001 (3.6).
The 12 hitters on Beane's board were better, too: an average of 3.0 WAR to 2.6.
On the other hand, the first 10 rounds of the 2002 draft proved to be the best over the last 30 years to date, producing a total of 751 WAR. Only the 2005 draft (712 WAR) comes close, though more recent drafts have plenty of current and future major leaguers yet to accumulate production.
By focusing only on college players, the A's didn't rank Zack Greinke (74.8 career WAR) and passed on Cole Hamels (59) and Matt Cain (29.1), who outperformed Swisher (21.5).
Zack Greinke, drafted out of high school, has been the most productive player from the 2002 draft. Icon Sportswire / Getty Images
The A's 2002 draft as a whole finished ninth out of 30 MLB teams (41.7 WAR) from the first 10 rounds, though they had a then-record number of first-rounders (seven among the 30 standard and 11 supplemental picks).
"'Moneyball' was many things, but when it came to revolutionizing the draft, it mostly missed the mark," Baseball America's J.J. Cooper recently wrote in a column about the 2002 draft.
It is ultimately unsurprising that Beane and his staff don’t do everything right at the 2000 draft.
In the two subsequent decades, the pro sports industry as a whole gains respect for the power of statistical analysis, but also for player development and in-depth video study, two topics broached by Sawchik in the excellent book TheMVP Machine (related read).
As an analyst for the Toronto Maple Leafs, I witness a much more evolved approach to the annual NHL Entry Draft and make mental notes on how to further refine the process.
Here’s how I would run an NHL draft.
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Step 1: Make a Long List
Casting a wide net is the name of the game.
With age, league and point production data widely available for draft-eligible skaters, there is now no reason for any player with reasonable upside to be left off a team’s initial list.
Most of the these 150 names will not be impact NHLers. The idea is not to miss a high-scorer playing in a weaker league, an over-ager showing consistent improvement or a divisive player who is much more highly ranked by quantitative models (adjusted scoring/NHLe) than qualitative ones (scout’s eye-test).
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