Moneyball Thesis

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If you are looking for a true underdog story you find it in Michael Lewis' 2003 #1 National Bestseller, Moneyball. It follows the Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane in his quest to field a winning team with the third lowest salary in Major League Baseball (about 40 million) by using an unconventional method of studying statistics in a new way which would be called Sabermetrics or Moneyball. According to Beane's assistant Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate who never even played high school baseball, the statistics that front offices, scouts, coaches, etc. focused on were flawed. They focused on runs batted in, stolen bases, and batting average, while DePodesta realized that players with higher on base percentages and slugging percentages had a much greater chance of being successful in the long run. …show more content…

Beane also went against the conventional thoughts of many scouts in the fact that he did not like the idea of drafting high school players, especially pitchers. To understand Billy's feelings about this we must look back at his own pro baseball career. Beane was one of the most highly regarded players coming out of high school. He was what the scouts called a “five tool guy” which is a player who can: hit for average, hit for power, has good base running skills and speed, can field and someone who has a high caliber throwing arm. His stats dropped off from his junior to senior year in high school and one scout was quoted saying “I never looked at a single statistic of Billy's, It wouldn't have crossed my mind. Billy was a five tool guy. He had it all”. Quotes like this show how feeling based scouting had become. Billy's pro baseball career never panned out the way everyone had hoped but he got his chance to reinvent himself with the Oakland A's. Flash forward to 2002 and we see Billy defying the odds and changing the game

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