Moneyball In Process Blog Post #1

This quarter, I'm reading Michael Lewis' Moneyball. This book was written when Lewis spent the entire 2002 Major League Baseball season shadowing Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's. This is a fascinating book, as it documents how the A's were able to be the best team in baseball at the start of the 21st century despite consistently losing their star players to teams with more money. The A's had the second lowest amount of money in the MLB. The book details how Beane was able to build a competitive team despite the disparity of wealth between his team and the New York Yankees, for example. The first half of the book has detailed the way Beane came up with his new analytics, a process know as Moneyball. He broke the entire season down into the amount of runs they would have to score all season to win the amount of games Beane and his assistant felt the team needed to make the playoffs. From there, they tried to get players that would generate these runs.
What is most fascinating to me about this book is Beane's discovery that the way the game of baseball evaluates talent is incredibly flawed. Scouts watch young, immature, high school players, and if they look athletically gifted, then those kids are paid millions of dollars to become superstars. Yet, despite investing incredible amounts of money in these young men, no one thought to actually look at the players stats to see if they were successful, or talk to them to see if they were mentally suited to be baseball players. Beane saw how ineffective this was, and changed the way the A's looked at players. They looked purely at the stats of players, and completely ignored how a player looked while playing the game. This allowed them to get good players at an unbelievably low cost to the team.
One thing that I'd consider writing my essay on is analytics in baseball, explaining them to people who don't really understand the game, or even analyzing these analytics to understand how effective they really are.