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And he did so at a cost of about $5,000 a month in his original contract, Beane noted -- pro- duction which these days would fetch a player upwards of $20 million annually. Stairs went on to play 17 more seasons in the majors with various teams, including the Blue Jays. Meanwhile the A's success in the earlier part of this century was attributed to such data- driven signings. Since 2000, the team has won six AL West divi- sion championships and made two wild card appearances. Yet, Beane said, the impact of the story isn't so much what the A's did on the field, but the people who now have the opportunity to work in the busi- ness of baseball, which he refers to as a meritocracy these days. Professional sports organiza- tions are hiring the best and the brightest, competing with Sili- con Valley for talent, Beane said. "Data has created transpar- ency. We can no longer use our guts and intuition to excuse our- selves," he said. A belief in quantitative analy- sis is what was led Beane to hire someone like Paul DePodesta -- a Harvard economics grad played by Jonah Hill on the big screen. DePodesta, who in real life measures about 5'11" and 165 pounds, was responsible for decisions that reshaped the draft process for the Oakland organi- zation. He initially discovered that teams were drafting high school and college player at a 50-50 rate, despite the fact college players had twice the chance of getting into the major leagues. Alluding to his own experi- ence of being drafted, Beane said teams had been selecting about 100, 18- to 21-year-old kids per year since 1965, with a three to five per cent "hit rate" on selections who made it to the majors afterward. "The process was we'd send a guy out to see a high school or college kid play maybe once or twice and we'd make a mul- timillion-dollar decision on his future -- essentially guess what he was going to turn out to be based on a small sample size of information," Beane said. Another piece of information DePodesta discovered during his tenure with the A's was that in 10 years there hadn't been a high-school position player drafted in the first round, play- ing everyday in the big leagues, who hailed from a state with less than 18 electoral votes. His point was that where a player grew up was more of an indicator of success as anything. "No matter how far you saw him hit the ball and how fast he ran, demographics were more an indicator of success," Beane remarked. Though that trend has changed somewhat in recent years with the emergence of more travel play in the amateur ranks, the chance of turning a kid from the backwoods into a star is extremely improbable, he said. Most baseball movies are romantic, but the sport isn't that way, said Beane, whose organi- zation committed to drafting by putting their heads down and focusing on numbers. "What was the results of this complete experiment? Thirteen players when the average was three to five," Beane said. "It was a bit of an apparition, but more importantly we created a pro- cess -- an objective process. "All we were saying is we're not going to be right all the time, but if we're disciplined with how we do things over the course of a lot of decisions we're going to be more consistent and consis- tently get better." Other teams, including big market franchises like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox caught on, pouring not only money but more resources into educated number crunch- ers and brains who have trans- formed the face of front offices and scouting departments in professional sports. Decision in the past were based on a steadfast belief that the more money you spent, the better you'd be. "There was a certain belief that if you played the game you knew how to run the business, and that's the way it always operated," Beane said. But that's simply no longer the case. Beane said he likely won't be able to apply for his job in the future. The only two remaining former ballplayers at the helm of a major league team is himself and Jerry Dipoto of the Seattle Mariners. Female executives are now joining the ranks in tradition- ally male-dominated sports markets, and Beane said he wouldn't be surprised to see a woman at the helm of a profes- sional baseball organization in the near future. Another one of his former hires, Farhan Zaidi, initially joined the A's as an assistant in baseball operations -- a job that paid just $30,000 per year but garnered 1,500 resumes, includ- ing one from a PhD student in astrophysics. Zaidi, also a Canadian citi- zen, spent most of his life in Phil- ippines where his dad worked for the Asian Development Bank. He watched American sports on the Internet and fell in love with the Chicago Bulls and baseball. More importantly, for Oakland's purposes, he earned a PhD in economics from the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley. Two years ago, Zaidi was hired as general manager by the Los Angeles Dodgers, one of the biggest markets in baseball. "To me, that's the great thing about the book is the diversity we've brought in," Beane said. Data mining creating a meritocracy