Money plays a substantial role in every aspect of life. It can either make life easier or it can make it much harder. In Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, Lewis explains how a baseball team is run and the financial aspect of the game. Lewis relates how money is used by the Oakland Athletics in comparison to the other teams that have more money than them. The A’s didn’t have much money to work with, so they had to be creative and discover new ways to find the best quality players their money could buy. To accomplish this strategy the A’s hired Billy Beane to be the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Then later on had hired a man named Paul DePodesta, a recent Harvard University graduate, in order to come up with
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The first action that Beane did was hire a man named Paul DePodesta as his assistant. DePodesta was a graduate from Harvard University and didn’t have a background with baseball. He first started with his career in baseball operations with the Cleveland Indians. Then about 3 years after he had started his job, Beane met DePodesta and offered him a better job with the Oakland A’s. DePodesta looked at the game of baseball differently than others and wasn’t your ordinary scout. He only cared about certain stats that he’s done research on, and “he'd found only two, both offensive statistics, inextricably linked to baseball success: on-base percentage and slugging percentage.” (Lewis 92) This way of thinking had never been thought of before, because nobody believed that you could determine player’s success based on just two things. Most teams care about what the players look like and if they past the eye test but for him “Everything else was far less important.”(Lewis 92) Just because someone looked like they had the body for baseball or they were good in high school didn’t mean anything to Beane and DePodesta. “Beane believed in the notion to select college players who are experienced on a different level than the high school “phenom” who needs to be developed into a player.”(The Sport Journal) The main reason Beane hired DePodesta was to find a way to save money and still win
The first action that Beane did was hire a man named Paul DePodesta as his assistant. DePodesta was a graduate from Harvard University and didn’t have a background with baseball. He first started with his career in baseball operations with the Cleveland Indians. Then about 3 years after he had started his job, Beane met DePodesta and offered him a better job with the Oakland A’s. DePodesta looked at the game of baseball differently than others and wasn’t your ordinary scout. He only cared about certain stats that he’s done research on, and “he'd found only two, both offensive statistics, inextricably linked to baseball success: on-base percentage and slugging percentage.” (Lewis 92) This way of thinking had never been thought of before, because nobody believed that you could determine player’s success based on just two things. Most teams care about what the players look like and if they past the eye test but for him “Everything else was far less important.”(Lewis 92) Just because someone looked like they had the body for baseball or they were good in high school didn’t mean anything to Beane and DePodesta. “Beane believed in the notion to select college players who are experienced on a different level than the high school “phenom” who needs to be developed into a player.”(The Sport Journal) The main reason Beane hired DePodesta was to find a way to save money and still win