I forgot to take the book I was reading to the airport on Friday, so I picked up the only book that looked interesting, Moneyball. And it was very interesting, even to me, a guy who doesn't like baseball (I like going to games, but that's a social event with easy availability to snacks and beer) or the business pages of the paper. It was a very compelling story with amazing characters and a great underdog (actually, several great underdogs) to cheer for.
The first underdog doesn't start out as one. Billy Beane was the classic ballplayer. Scouts base their assesment of players on many things, including build, strength, psychological tests, even facial structure, and Beane had it all. Except that their psychological tests couldn't see that he wouldn't be able to handle failure, that he'd crack under the pressure. They also couldn't tell that he'd be a great front-office employee.
He's one of those rare people that can ignore his own experience and the received wisdom of a hidebound organization when he sees proof that things work differently than anyone thinks. In his case he sees that teams have been overpaying for certain things for years. He didn't have that luxury, since he worked for the Oakland Athletics, with either the smallest or the second smallest payroll year in and year out.
Mostly they were overpaying for high school players who looked like ballplayers when they didn't have any proof of actual ability based on past performance, the high school stats are just too skimpy. So Beane decided to draft college players exclusively, and to base his drafting on their stats, not their build and certainly not the bones in their face. He also used different stats than the other executives, putting a premium on a combination of on-base percentage (OBP) and slugging average called on-base plus slugging (OPS). To Beane it didn't matter if you lead-off guy got a single or a walk, as long as he got on base.
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