A's GM Billy Beane said teams staying healthy represent the new undervalued asset in the industry, similar to how his club sought to exploit on-base percentage in the early days of "Moneyball." Speaking this morning at a Yahoo event for N.Y.'s Internet Week, Beane said, "Health is the No. 1 indicator of success, and nobody's really solved it yet. When somebody really gets their arms around that, it's going to have a major impact." Beane, the high-profile subject of the "Moneyball" book in '03, again recounted at the Yahoo gathering the early days of his team's budget-fueled embrace of objective, data-driven decision making. "We invented nothing. We robbed ideas from outside the industry," he said. "But it remains much easier said than done to embrace objective decision making."
Meanwhile, Yahoo this morning announced Genome, a new digital advertising platform that blends display inventory from Yahoo, AOL and MSN with a wide variety of research data and analytics. The platform was built using technology from N.Y.-based Interclick, which Yahoo last year purchased.
