[egri]

I read Moneyball a while back, and thought the whole thing was a lot of bunk. In the section about the 2002 draft, Beane did everything short of shout from the rooftops about how great Nick Swisher and Jeremy Brown were going to be. Swisher was OK, but the pick after him was Cole Hamels. Brown’s career consisted of 10 at bats, and the pick after him was Jon Lester. Then at the end, when it looked like Beane was going to the Red Sox and it talked about moves he was going to make, he would’ve gutted the core of a team that two years later, won the World Series. He did a lot of complaining about how the playoffs were a crapshoot, but the Yankees were just coming off of four championships in five years, and other small market teams (Braves, Twins, Marlins) were putting together successful playoff runs while Oakland kept getting bounced in the first round. There’s always luck involved, but when it’s happening to everyone but Oakland, there’s something besides that going on.