Jeremy Brown announces his retirement

He was dropped from the 40-Man Roster last year... doesn't that hurt a player's financial situation?

He's been hired as an assistant marketing director for Levi Strauss.

and he had a hell of a game against Seattle...

and he has a lifetime batting average of .300...

that not only did the A's consider Brown a legit first round talent, he was a fairly high end first round talent.

According to Moneyball (pg 110), these were the A's Top 12 position players, regardless of signability:

Nick Swisher
Russ Adams
Khalil Greene
John McCurdy
Mark Teahen
Jeremy Brown
Steve Stanley
John Baker
Mark Kiger
Brian Stavisky
Shaun Larkin
Brant Colamarino

Do you have any evidence from BB, et al that this was not their list?

and though Devo points out the list on page 110, it may be a list that Michael Lewis fabricated via conversation, and not reality. But I'm splitting a fine point into a finer point.

It well may be that Brown is retiring due to the influence of the book. A better ultimate story would be an inside-out Santiago Casilla move. Retire, get off the radar, use the name Roy Hobbs, and go for a tryout in a year or two. Work your way back into the Big Leagues under a different name.

Outsell "Harry Potter" with the story!

Oh, also ... the 2002 "Gold Opportunity" ... we got most of the best players available after the first 15 picks (the ones before which we never had a chance at). The guys we missed -- Joey Votto, John Lester and Brian McCann in the 2nd round could have been had for the money we paid our late first round/supplemental round picks (which is where we'd have had to take them -- they were all gone by the time our 2nd round pick came around).

We also missed Curtis Granderson in the 3rd round, who, while he got considerably more than we gave Steve Stanely 13 picks earlier, accepted slot bonus money. That's the only worthwhile guy who we would have had to invested more money to have signed.

It's all too easy to forget that these guys have lives and family obligations.

I'm trying to read too much into the move - obviously from a Win Shares standpoint, his retirement is inconsequential.

I do think it's an interesting opportunity to reflect on what he represented.

brown hit pretty well in 5 mlb games in 06 and in sacramento last year, i'm not sure why he'd retire just now unless it was for personal reasons unrelated to baseball...

In my view, that makes him a justified pick.

He got there. Fair play.

John Elway
Scott Boras
Kurt Russell

well he wasn't a famous minor-leaguer, but his one game in the majors outshines the careers of many thanks to Field of Dreams.

Apocryphal, but "famous."

Billy Beane

another Yankees bust (and not the kind they have out in Yankee Stadium).

Baseball was not the sport where a team would've traded their entire year's supply of draft picks for the right to draft Ricky.

on an error; his only major league run scored.

(A's beat the Halos 11-10)

I think we're too free with our recommendations. Most DLD's (not that all DLD's are "unworthy") make their way to the rec list. Blez's "Welcome to the New AN" is there, even though there is nothing particularly profound or poignant about it. He just poked his head in; all of AN was going to read it whether it was recommended material or not.

and yeah, I guess Blez and crew are running around with their heads cut off. fortunately we have enough talent here to pick up the slack.

link-not-turning-into-a-link thing really should be fixed.

He was a character in that novel by Billy Beane.

if Joe says he hasn't seen Brown play, he would have an excuse for once.

is a really oversimplified assessment. I'm not sure if the oversimplification is due to Lewis' actual assertion, your summarization of it, or both, but...regardless, that's basically saying that baseball evaluation will attain a state of perfection, attaching the perfect value to every player, prospect...hell, every member of the organization, to the point where finances would completely dictate the success of a given franchise. That's ridiculous. The playing field has leveled a bit, the task is more challenging, but team management will never be perfect/equal/perfectly equal/equally perfect.

god, these preview and cancel buttons are enormous compared to the font size as it appears while typing...

and I never thought of posting to be such an accomplishment to merit an exclamation point...that feature should disappear after a certain period of time on the site, once people become accustomed to seeing their words out in the open. Or maybe there should be two buttons, one for the entusiastic and one for the blase..."POST!" and "Post."...then the button you selected could show up in your profile, too, so that everyone can decide how much posting on AN matters to you. It's not that cut-and-dry, though...you'd have to derive some formula that weighs volume of posts with the button used...if, say, I'm posting long posts frequently, but opting for the "Post." button, there's obviously some latent enthusiasm there that would suggest usage of "POST!". Or, you could arrive at the opposite conclusion, thinking that by this point in his posting career the person has simply taken the site for granted. Then we could conduct front-page polls about individual users' enthusiasm levels as determined by the various subjective methods people employ--and those votes' appearances in people's profiles would perpetuate the process--extra piece of evidence for enthusiasm or lack thereof. Eventually these enthusiasm quotients would be quantified by Sal on some special Staturday, and we'd all have numbers attached to us, which would help to fill the void created by the departure of the user IDs. The variable of time spent on site would have to be offset by other variables, like the totality of things one could be doing otherwise. If you're a really frequent visitor, contributor, and, most importantly, user of the "POST!" button, but then it's revealed you're an invalid or a shut-in, with limited Internet access thanks to restrictions placed by the caretaker, well, this is more a product of circumstances, and the enthusiasm quotient should therefore be adjusted downward. But if you're, say, Jeremy Brown, and you've opted to give up on [cult hero-type] fame and [modest] fortune in order to be able spend more time not with family, but AN family, as he clearly has with his retirement here, well, that sort of sacrifice, even if offset by a high "Post." to "POST!" ratio, would demand a high enthusiasm quotient.

This of course was all meant to tie in to the original point about the oversimplification by Lewis as told by richwol (this wording is intentional--Lewis is meant to be portrayed here as a prophetic figure, richwol an evangelist whose account of Lewis' words may sometimes be inconsistent with the accounts provided by fellow evangelists, whose writings will likely emerge sometime in the following decades until the CGV committee decides which interpretations get to comprise AN's sacred text, which was already being compiled throughout the ages, in the manifestos of 1.0 and 2.0, for example)...as of now, the difficulty of perfecting the Enthusiasm Quotients illustrates the limitations of statistical applications. But although I doubt now, I have a premonition that sometime while on the road to Fremont, around 2012 or so, I will be temporarily blinded by the lights of an oncoming BART train, and the parking lot with a mayor will become the unlikely site of a conversion to Lewism, a polytheistic belief system with Lewis as the father, Lew Wolff as the son, and a perfectly valued future A, perhaps Lew Ford, as the spirit. I will from that point forward propagate the unfailing wisdom of Lewism, posting new additions to the Sacred Text with a zeal that would require the presence of an untold number of exclamation points on the POST button, which by this point would attain some sort of mystical significance within the realm of Lewism. AN would be divided--most would reject Lewism, run him out of the Bay Area altogether--but a select few would witness his rising in Vegas in the third year, with a closed door feast in a Bellagio dining room, with Lew exposing the scars left by the upper deck tarp in which his body had been wrapped (he had been presumed dead by the Alameda and Clark county coroners alike). In Las Vegas, Lewism is well-received by the power brokers, as the comped suites and entertainment are merely panem et circenses for the underlying triumph of cold probability...which of course is in accordance with Lewist teachings. What the A's have been doing in the past decade is perhaps employing some sort of card counting scheme--but the league has been increasing the number of cards in the shoe and refining automatic shuffling mechanisms for some time now. Now the MIT blackjack team of the MLB is merely another basic strategy player betting $25 a hand with the same odds as anyone else. The Yankees and Red Sox, however, have found a table with a smaller minimum bet (counterintuitive, I know), and their minimized losses will leave them as the only teams to stay afloat. Higher payrolls and lower bets against the house will be the sole determining factors of long-term success, as short-lived, innovative schemes will eventually either be employed by all or dry up altogether--it's a dry heat in the Nevada desert. Lewism knows this phenomenon will eventually happen.

As I have not yet actually taken the road to Fremont, this is still a "Post."

But he wasn't considered much of a pro prospect. Were it not for DePo's computer, he would have fallen until at least the 5th round and probably further.