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Keith Law transcript from a podcast

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Klaw put himself in the news lately by trashing the upcoming Moneyball movie. Barbs from the interested parties went back and forth. One of which, was calling Keith a hypocrite for defending traditional scouting. This compelled Keith to share a lot about his time in Toronto and how his mindset has evolved. I found it interesting. Relevant to Indians fans interests: About two years, two-and-a-half years after that-- so 2004, 2005-- it became pretty clear to me that we were failing. And this was one of the major reasons I left Toronto. There were a couple-- that's a topic for another day-- but, it wasn't working. The stat-heavy approach was... we were basically two steps behind. What we were trying to do was what Oakland had been doing around 2000 or so, and the Red Sox and the Cardinals and the Padres and one or two other clubs-- Cleveland-- they were pretty clearly adopting some of these same methods. And we were left in the situation-- kind of a similar situation to where we were before we even got there, which was that we weren't innovating fast enough, and the market had become too competitive for the limited type of player we were going for. It really became apparent to me in the draft room. I remember Tony LaCava-- who is still there, who is Alex Anthopoulos's right-hand man in Toronto-- independently had realized the same thing, which was we were killing ourselves, especially in the draft, because we would only take college players with "acceptable" stats. And that's such a narrow pool, especially when five or six teams are all going for the same type of player. You get to the third or fourth round and you're done. There's nobody on the board you think could even be an average regular in the big leagues.