Someone on the board made a comment about Jeremy Brown. For those not in the know, Brown was a fat college catcher no one wanted to draft and Billy Beane ended up taking around the 2nd round of the 2002 draft. He felt Brown's on base skills were undervalued because of his physical appearance as opposed to his actual production.
Its funny noticing how Jeremy Brown hasn't quite panned out
He did decent in his call ups. Not great, but they were small sample sizes. The point of the book wasn't that teams should draft fat college players or only get players with good OBP, but to look for deficiencies in the market and find those stats/players that were undervalued. The A's couldn't afford to waste pics on High Schoolers with high risk/high reward potential because of the signing bonus and time invested. They needed guys they could be more sure about that weren't seen to have as much potential (college players). They played against a higher level of competition and had stats you could study far deeper than that of a High School player. But for a long time scouts frowned upon taking college players (at least with high picks) because they felt it was easier to mold High School players into the type of player they wanted them to be. Billy Beane's point was that you can't totally reinvent anyone's swing and expect them to be a great player: they are who they are. They took a shot on Jeremy Brown because he was waaaaaaaaaaaaay undervalued and would be cheap to draft. In the same draft they got Nick Swisher and Joe Blanton.
Anyway, he probably didn't mean anything by the original comment other than it's been interesting to see how Brown has done since the book came out. It stinks that personal problems has forced him to leave the game, but them's the breaks.
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