Is Moneyball Dead?
by Derek Jacques The news that Jeremy Brown was hanging up his spikes due to “personal issues” made more of a stir last week than you’d expect from the retirement of a 28-year-old catcher who’s spent the last two years in Triple-A. Our prospects expert, Kevin Goldstein, gave Brown an extremely evenhanded send-off over on Unfiltered; others have been less charitable, invoking imaginary choruses of scouts cheering the end of Brown’s career. At least, I hope the cheering is imaginary: it’d take a Grinch-sized heart to rejoice in the end of someone’s big-league dreams, unless their name is, say, Ben Christensen. The reason that Brown is the focus of such attention and schadenfreude is because the A’s drafted him in the first round of the 2002 draftan overdraft which, by itself, wouldn’t be that noteworthyand because Michael Lewis wrote a best-selling book which hailed Brown’s selection as the bellwether of a new way of doing business, which the author dubbed “Moneyball” in the book of the
