Moneyball: Did the Yankees once sign a player without ever seeing him play?

 

BASEBALL URBAN LEGEND: The Yankees signed a player sight unseen based solely on his statistics in an independent league.

One of the main (if not the main) conflicts in Michael Lewis' book Moneyball and the recent film of the same name is between "traditional" scouting (people who judge players by watching them play in person) versus statistical scouting (making decisions about players based on their statistical achievements). In the film, traditional scouting is portrayed as almost an archaic way of doing business but in reality, there is not a single Major League Baseball team today that does not place a great deal of emphasis on traditional scouting, including the Oakland Athletics. The differences between the various teams is how much emphasis they each give to statistical scouting in augmenting traditional scouting, not replacing it. While nowadays there is a general acceptance that the two modes of thinking are complimentary and not adversarial, it admittedly seemed pretty darn adversarial during those first few years after Moneyball came out. And in 2007, a 26-year-old relief pitcher became a symbol of the divide between traditional scouting and statistical scouting when the story came out that the Yankees signed Edwar Ramírez without seeing him in person.

But was that actually what happened? Read on to find out!