Moneyball: The art of how the hell am I going to pay for seven first round picks?

One of the things that bothered me about the book Moneyball was the overdrafts of Jeremy Brown and Steve Stanley-type proportions. I appreciate the fact that Billy Beane was using radical, and what ended up being trend setting methods of statistical analysis, but why bother spending a first and second round pick on a couple of guys who nobody else had on their boards? That just doesn’t make any sense.

Well, actually it does. As Billy himself discusses, the team didn’t have the money to sign 7 legit first round picks. To be fair, there were probably only a handful of teams that did. Now look. I’m not trying to suggest that the famed 2002 draft was a bust. That would just be false. The first round alone yielded three big leaguers, and that’s not even including Jeremy Brown and his .864 career OPS.

But still, talk about a missed opportunity by ownership. Seven picks in the first 39? That’s insane. So if ever there was a time to not be cheap as hell, well, that was probably it.