Post
by Sebadiah23 » Thu May 13, 2010 2:42 pm
2004 Update of Player Drafted on Stats Alone
Jeremy Brown is one of Moneyball's main characters. After four years at Alabama, Brown left as the school's all-time leader in games played (251), runs scored (244), runs batted in (231), and walks (207). He hit .363/.465/.574 as a junior and .320/.493/.566 as a senior. Baseball America did not have Brown ranked among their top 250 draft prospects.
When the A's draft room discussed Brown, there weren't a whole lot of positive things said by their scouts. One Oakland scout said, "This kid wears a large pair of underwear." Another scout chimed in that "it's a soft body ... a fleshy kind of body." To which Billy Beane uttered the now-famous line, "We're not selling jeans here."
As a college senior who had not been getting much attention from scouts, Jeremy Brown expected to be drafted in the late rounds. The A's called him prior to the draft and informed him that they were interested in taking him in the first round. According to Moneyball, Brown thought it was one of his friends playing a prank on him and he told A's scout Billy Owens that he would need to call him back. "He thought it was a crank call ... he said he wanted to make sure it was me, and that I was serious," Owens said.
The A's were serious and they selected Brown with the 35th pick in the draft, signing him to a pre-draft deal worth just $350,000, far lower than the bonuses the other players selected in that range received.
Brown's first two years as a pro were very good. He hit a combined .307/.452/.516 between two levels of Single-A after signing in 2002, smacking 10 homers and drawing 54 walks in 65 games. Then Brown moved up to Double-A Midland last season and hit a very respectable .275/.388/.391 while showing a ton of plate discipline and no power in 66 games, before missing the second-half of the season with a thumb injury.
Through his first two seasons and 131 games as a pro, Brown hit .290/.419/.451 with 15 homers, 25 doubles and 95 walks. In other words, he was exactly what the A's were hoping he would be. This year, however, things are not going as well for Brown. He is back at Double-A and hitting just .226/.322/.345. He is continuing to walk a ton (24 walks in 47 games), but he has also struck out 35 times and has just three homers in 177 at-bats. Perhaps the thumb injury is hurting Brown's hitting or perhaps the scouts were right about him. Either way, he'll need to turn it up a notch offensively if he wants to play a big role in Oakland someday.
Interesting 2008 Updates
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.
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Jeremy Brown of the Oakland A’s retired last week. He was a prominent figure in the delicious baseball tome, Moneyball, which, depending on whom you speak with, was either baseball’s new bible, or the first sign of the apocalypse.
If you are a firm believer in Moneyball, then we recommend the book Black Swan. A snippet: “I call this overload of examples naive empiricism – successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence. Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself – and no doubt his peers. The Black Swan idea is based on the structure of randomness in empirical reality.”
We drove 22 miles, country around Farmington. Signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. Cars,tour bus,cameras;postcards sold.
No one sees the barn,
They are taking pictures of taking pictures
-Don DeLillo
@Sebadiah23, IG:sebadiah26
I'm pulling nights and weekends here ! I think my real job is the part time one.
