One of the most famous scenes in Moneyball is that of the 2002 Draft. Beane goes all sabermetric, to the riotous chagrin of his old-school scouts. He drafts Jeremy Brown in the first round and doughnut crumbs spill from the gaping mouths of baseball's old guards. Beane's draft strategy was centered around minimizing risk. He targeted college players under the theory that their stats were more reliable and their development more predictable. In the scene Paul DePodesta cranks out hidden, undervalued players with few keystrokes from his laptop, apparently basing all his decisions on raw college baseball stats. That year, Oakland didn't draft a player out of high school until the 18th round.
Yet, of all the huge, revolutionary ideas introduced to the general population in Moneyball, one the most dramatized has largely been discarded. Though college players' development can be more reliably predicted, it has been discovered that college stats don't hold much water. Today, cutting edge teams acknowledge that scouting reports are still the best available option for evaluating amateur players, and look to integrate their scouting data with statistics. It's safe to say that the edge the A's believed they had in the amateur market was not nearly as significant as they thought. To see how little has changed in drafting strategies since the A's famous draft, I looked at the amounts of different types of players who've been picked int the first round of the draft. (College players = dark gray, High school= gray, JC = light gray)
