Originally Posted by
CDu
Not really. Beane was tasked with taking an incredibly small budget and finding ways to compete with that ridiculously small budget. So he had to find ways to do things better than his counterparts. In other words, he knew he couldn't win by doing things the same way everyone else did, so he had to find areas where other teams were doing things wrong (i.e., finding the market inefficiencies) and exploit them.
One of the biggest places in which he felt he could gain an edge was in the draft. By virtue of the salary structure of baseball, prospects are generally underpaid (relatively speaking) while veterans are generally overpaid. So it made the most sense to try to have a high "hit rate" in the draft (so that they didn't have to overspend in free agency). A draft pick means more to the A's than it does to the Yankees. As such, Beane wanted to minimize the risk of missing on a player. And high school pitchers (because of the lack of development of off-speed pitches and the wild discrepancies in high school hitting talent) represented the highest risk. So Beane tended to avoid taking those risks. Doing so meant that he'd likely not land a Kerry Wood, Andy Pettitte, or Josh Beckett, but he was also less likely to land a Brien Taylor or Todd Van Poppel. That didn't mean he wrote off all high school pitchers. It just meant that he wasn't going to go "all-in" for a high school pitcher. There's actually a lot more neat stuff that he did with the draft (like drafting "underslot" guys earlier than projected).
OBP was an example of a market inefficiency that he could exploit in free agency. Specifically, he found OBP to be much more highly correlated with runs scored than AVG, and OPS was a better predictive measure of individual value than runs scored or RBI (which are team-dependent stats). Despite this, teams were generally undervaluing OBP and OPS and overvaluing AVG, R, and RBI. So Beane tried to exploit that market inefficiency.
However, with the emergence of Moneyball and the success of the Red Sox (who used similar principles) and Yankees (who have a ridiculous payroll but have loaded up on "Moneyball" players), things like OBP and OPS are no longer market inefficiences (everybody looks at them). The new challenge for the A's is to identify new market inefficiencies. I'm guessing he's not going to agree to be the subject of another book that makes his job more difficult.