[jojo]

The As might be tired of talking about Moneyball because it's often used as an irrelevant cliche. Basically Moneyball suggests the As generally value stats over scouting and that approach has helped them identify market inefficiencies to exploit in the past. Michael Lewis used Brown as a the poster boy for the As approach. The As themselves might not agree exactly with Lewis' depiction of them in the book. Also as many clubs have begun integrating sabermetrics into their player development efforts, it's probably safe to assume any snapshot in time of the As represented by Moneyball has become dated and less accurate.


IMHO, any draft pick the results in a player posting .276/.364/.469 in AAA can't really be considered a failure. Drafting is a huge crapshoot even under the best of conditions. A traditional scouting approach would've suggested Brown had no chance to accomplish what he did in his professional career (reach the 99.99999999th percentile in his field).

This kind of stuff makes for great debate/discussion but I guess if the choice has to be between one or the other pole (and I don't think it really has to be defined that way) I find Brown to be more of an indictment of a "scouting alone" approach than he's an indictment of Moneyball.