Maybe the best known line on Farhan Zaidi’s resume is his skill for building roster depth. Back in 2013, Zaidi was on a panel at the Sloan Analytics Conference at MIT and talked about the A’s roster construction philosophy as it related to analytics:
“We called it managing the roster from the bottom. When you’re a team that’s pretty sabermetrically inclined and analytical in the decisions you make, if you follow those decisions there’s really a lower bound to how many wins,” Zaidi explained. “You can build a 75-win team just based on sound analytical principles, and you can do that year in, year out even with a $50 million payroll.