Most of the scouting on Brown assigns him a very low place in the draft, if, indeed, he is to be drafted at all. Swisher is one of the relatively few players about whom both the traditional scouts and the sabermetric-focused newcomers are in agreement: the young player is a surefire MLB star.īrown, on the other hand, is a highly unconventional pick. The picks any team ends up with depends on a combination of prioritization, strategy, and pure luck.Īt the top of Billy’s shortlist are two amateur players-fielder Nick Swisher and catcher Jeremy Brown. Whether or not they are still available depends on what the other teams do. But getting most of them, or even some, is difficult. Based on his own experiences as a high school draftee, Paul DePodesta’s statistical analysis, and his insights from reading Bill James, Billy Beane establishes a new rule for his club going into the 2002 draft: no high school players.īilly and Paul create a shortlist of 20 players they wish to select, many of them overlooked and undervalued, but nevertheless, extremely talented college players with a talent for getting on base. Billy has been burned in previous drafts by his scouting staff’s insistence on drafting high school players over college players, despite the objectively better performance history of the latter group.

Money ball michael lewis