The 2002 Draft and What Moneyball Got Right and Wrong

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 11 min read

An account of the Oakland Athletics' 2002 draft, the college-first approach described in Moneyball, what the picks became in the historical record, and which parts of the philosophy held up.

In June 2002, the Oakland Athletics went into the amateur draft with an unusual number of early picks and a general manager known for drafting differently from other clubs. Billy Beane's approach, later made famous by Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, was to prefer college players with long statistical records over high school players with tools, and to treat the draft as a place to buy undervalued skills cheaply. The draft that year became one of the book's best-known chapters, because the choices were unusual and because the scouting department, as the book tells it, disagreed.

The simple verdict is that the A's 2002 class produced a few useful major leaguers and no stars, while the best players in the draft were mostly high schoolers the A's had no interest in. The fuller verdict is more interesting. The thinking behind the picks was about cost and probability, not about any single pick, and parts of it proved right in ways that reshaped the sport. This article tells the story in order, uses the historical record through the 2025 season for every number, and says where the book's reputation and the record part company.

The 2002 Athletics: winning with almost no money

To understand the draft, begin with the team that held it. The 2002 Athletics won 103 games and lost 59, scored 800 runs and allowed 654, and won the American League West. They did it with one of the smallest payrolls in the sport. In the historical Salaries table, which sums the salaries of players on each roster and so may differ from official payroll figures published elsewhere, Oakland's total was about $40.0 million, 28th among 30 clubs. The New York Yankees' total was about $125.9 million, more than three times as much, for a record of 103-58.

The table shows two things. Money did not guarantee wins: Texas was third in salary and won 72 games. And low spending did not rule them out: Oakland and Minnesota, both near the bottom, won 103 and 94. Of course, a table of five teams proves nothing, but the league's winners were not simply the richest, and Beane's argument was that a small-market club could find the gap between price and value, not in the stars everyone could see but in the skills the market underrated.

The Athletics lost that October to the Twins in the Division Series, three games to two, and the Anaheim Angels went on to win the World Series. The season is still remembered for its 20-game winning streak, an American League record. What mattered for this story was that it gave the front office's methods credibility with the press just as the draft arrived.

What Moneyball actually argued

The popular summary is that the A's valued on-base percentage. That is true, and the statistic is easy to define: on-base percentage is hits plus walks plus hit-by-pitches, divided by at-bats plus walks plus hit-by-pitches plus sacrifice flies. The idea was that a walk, though not credited as a hit, is nearly as valuable as a single for a team trying to score runs, and that other clubs paid for batting average and ignored the walk. The 2002 Athletics' team on-base percentage was .339, fifth in the American League's 14 teams, against the Yankees' .354 and the Mariners' .350. It was an offense built on walks, plus the pitching to complement it.

A player-level example from the same team is Scott Hatteberg, a former catcher the A's signed for the 2002 season and used at first base. He reached base at a .374 clip that season, with 138 hits and 68 walks in 492 at-bats. The player he replaced in the lineup, Jason Giambi, had a .477 on-base percentage for Oakland in 2001 and left as a free agent to join the Yankees, where he posted .435 in 2002. The A's could not afford Giambi, but they could afford a hitter with a good eye. That was the first half of the argument: replace stars you cannot buy with value you can.

The second half was about the draft, and it rested on a different logic. Amateur players come in two varieties: high schoolers, who are young, unproven and far from the majors, and college players, who have a multi-year record against better competition and are closer to ready. Beane's view was that scouts overvalued the physical projection of high schoolers and undervalued the measurable performance of college players. The result, in his reasoning, was that college players were cheaper per unit of probability, and probability, not drama, was what a small-budget club needed.

The draft rules that shaped the strategy

Several features of the 2002 draft made the strategy work. Clubs drafted in reverse order of the previous season's record, with extra picks as compensation for losing certain free agents. The A's, who had lost Giambi and other free agents after 2001, held an unusual number of early picks, which is why the draft was such a large opportunity. A player drafted out of high school could choose college instead, in which case the club lost his rights until he came out again, so clubs often paid bonuses large enough to buy teenagers away from scholarships. A college senior, by contrast, had no eligibility left and so little negotiating leverage, which is why seniors tended to accept modest offers.

Bonuses were also not bound by the hard limits that came later. The commissioner's office recommended amounts for each slot, but clubs could exceed them. That combination, flexible spending for teams that wanted it and weak leverage for college seniors, gave a budget-conscious club a way to buy useful depth cheaply, and it is the setting in which Beane's approach looked clever. For how the modern system differs, including the bonus pools that limit spending, see the coverage of the draft in the MLB draft and prospects topic page.

The picks: Swisher, Blanton, Brown and the others

The best-known members of the Athletics' 2002 class were Nick Swisher, an Ohio State outfielder and first baseman taken 16th overall; Joe Blanton, a Kentucky right-hander taken 24th; and Jeremy Brown, an Alabama catcher taken 35th. The club also drafted John McCurdy, a Maryland infielder, and Mark Teahen, a St. Mary's College third baseman, among its early picks. Every one of these players was a college performer, which was the point.

Taken by themselves, the results are respectable. Swisher became an everyday major leaguer for a dozen seasons, hit 245 home runs and drew 817 walks, which fit the profile Beane wanted: a hitter who got on base and hit for power. Blanton won 101 games as a mid-rotation starter in a career that ran from 2004 to 2017. Teahen played in 831 games. The picks did exactly what a conservative draft strategy should do, which is to produce players who reach the majors and contribute. They did not produce stars, and the one pick most discussed in the book, the catcher, played five major-league games.

The Jeremy Brown argument

Brown is the center of the draft's reputation, because his selection was the point of conflict between the front office and the scouting department. As Lewis tells it, the front office wanted a catcher who had produced for years at Alabama, and the scouts thought he was a poor prospect who could be had later. The book describes the argument as a clash between two ways of seeing, and Grady Fuson, the longtime scouting director who figures in the argument, had in fact left Oakland for the Texas Rangers in November 2001, so the book's account should be read as a dramatization, not a minute-by-minute record. The details of who said what are in the book, and a reader who wants them should go there.

The historical record shows how it turned out. Brown reached the majors in 2006, played five games for Oakland, and went 3 for 10 with two doubles and a walk. That is a thin result for a 35th overall pick, but it is also consistent with how hard the catching position is: catching prospects are generally slower to develop than prospects at other positions, as why catchers take longest to develop explains. A scout who disliked the pick could point to the outcome, and a front office official could answer that nobody drafting a catcher in the first two rounds knows which of them will make it. Both would be right.

What the stars of the class did

The strongest argument against the 2002 approach is the list of players the A's did not draft. Several of the best players in that draft came out of high school. Zack Greinke went sixth, Prince Fielder seventh, Cole Hamels 17th and Matt Cain 25th; others followed in later rounds, among them Jon Lester, Joey Votto and Brian McCann. The historical college table has no entries for any of them, consistent with going from high school to professional ball. Their careers, through the years the database covers, look like this:

By any standard, those careers are better than the Athletics' class. Hamels was a World Series Most Valuable Player in 2008 and Greinke won 225 games. Votto and McCann were both everyday players for more than a decade. No draft strategy that avoided that group could expect to match its upside, and a strategy that told a club to pass on all of them was exposed to the risk that it would miss the best players available. The caveat is that hindsight is easy: the picture in June 2002 was a set of teenagers with uncertain futures, and clubs that picked high-school players also got busts. The Pirates, with the first pick, took a college pitcher, Bryan Bullington, who pitched in the majors from 2005 to 2010 and never became a star. The second pick, B. J. Upton, was a high school player who did play in the majors for years.

What Moneyball got right

The central insight held up. On-base percentage was underpriced in the early 2000s, and clubs that paid attention to it got more offense for the money. Within a decade, most clubs had analytics departments, and the market for walks and on-base skills was no longer undervalued. The Boston Red Sox, who hired the statistician Bill James as a consultant in the early 2000s, won the World Series in 2004. Teams adopted the habit of asking what a player does that wins games, not what he looks like, and that habit has since spread to pitching, defense, and player development.

A second correct insight was about incentives in the draft. College seniors with no leverage are cheap; pitchers and hitters with good college records are more likely to reach the majors than the average high school pick. For clubs with small budgets, filling the roster with productive, inexpensive players was a sound response to a system that rewarded wealth.

What it got wrong, or only half right

The caricature in the book and in the 2011 film set scouts against statisticians, and the truth is more interesting. Scouts see things a stat line cannot: arm action, bat speed, how a teenager reacts to failure. Statistics see things scouts cannot: the base rates that tell you how often a given profile succeeds. Modern teams use both, and how teams develop hitters in the minors and how teams develop pitchers in the minors describe organizations that combine them.

The second problem is that the strategy gave up upside. If the best players tend to come from the group with the most uncertainty, a club that avoids that group will rarely land a star, and the table above shows what that costs. The Athletics' best pitchers of the period were Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito, all college pitchers from the late 1990s, and in 2002 they went 15-9, 19-7 and 23-5, with Zito winning the Cy Young Award. That is the best evidence for the college preference, but it also shows that the club's success rested on a few stars from earlier drafts, which the 2002 class did not supply. The approach is a way of getting value, not of getting the best players.

The third is time. A draft takes about ten years to judge, and a book published in 2003 could not know how any of these players would turn out. Judged within a year or two, the strategy looked brilliant because the team was winning; judged after ten, the class was fine but unremarkable.

Lessons for judging any draft

Three habits help. First, wait. A draft class should be judged on a window of at least eight to ten years, because many prospects need that long, and because players develop at different speeds. Second, compare with the alternatives available at the time, not with the best player in the class: any club that wanted a star in 2002 would have needed to know in advance which teenager would become one. Third, remember how often prospects fail. Most draftees never reach the majors at all, and a pick who plays five games, like Brown, is closer to the common outcome than a pick who plays a decade, like Swisher.

For readers who play in deep fantasy leagues, the same logic applies: undervalued categories exist, and the edge goes to whoever finds them first. Moving to expert and deep leagues describes how the format changes what is valuable. For how rookie-level and complex-league baseball serves as the first step after a draft, see how teams use the complex leagues, and for how some prospects get extra at-bats after the regular season, see winter leagues and player development.

Common questions

Who wrote Moneyball? Michael Lewis, whose book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game was published in 2003. A film adaptation followed in 2011.

Who was Oakland's first pick in 2002? Nick Swisher, 16th overall, from Ohio State.

Did Jeremy Brown reach the majors? Yes, in 2006, for five games with Oakland, according to the historical record.

Did the A's win in 2002? They won 103 games and the American League West, and lost to the Twins in the Division Series.

Does the approach still work? The core insights, valuing on-base skill and cost control, spread across the league, so the advantage is smaller. The combination of scouting and analytics is now standard.

Where to go next

For current draft news and prospect rankings, browse the MLB draft and prospects topic page, the minor league section and the college baseball section. Look up any player named here in the players section, and use the stat calculator to work out on-base percentage from any line of hits, walks and at-bats.