Why the 2002 Athletics Bought On-Base Percentage
Oakland's payroll was a third of the Yankees', so Billy Beane bought a stat nobody else priced.
Billy Beane took over the Oakland Athletics in 1997 with a payroll around $40 million, against the Yankees' $125 million and climbing. He could not outbid anyone for the players scouts loved. So he stopped trying to buy what scouts loved.
What Beane and his assistant Paul DePodesta did instead was scan box scores for traits the market underpriced. The big one was on-base percentage. A walk and a single both put a runner on first, but in the late 1990s a walk barely moved a player's salary. Power was sexy. Patience at the plate was not.
The 2002 A's lost their three best players to free agency that winter — Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon, and Jason Isringhausen. Beane replaced them with castoffs whose OBP was higher than their reputations: Scott Hatteberg, a catcher whose elbow had failed but whose strike-zone judgment had not. The team won 103 games and tied the Yankees for the best record in baseball. Their payroll was $41 million.
Michael Lewis followed Beane that season for the 2003 book. The lasting idea isn't "sabermetrics" — it's that markets misprice things, and a smaller player who is honest about it can beat a larger one who isn't. Within five years every front office in baseball had its own version of DePodesta. The edge moved on. Now it lives in defensive shifts, pitch tunneling, and minor-league development data — wherever the consensus hasn't caught up yet.
Make Recess yours.
Sign in to save the ones you loved, never see the same thing twice, and tell us what you want more of.