Reddit mentions of The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball

I've never seen Murray play baseball so I have no idea how he looks as a prospect, but I don't think this would have been a horrible move for the A's.

One of the things that people need to remember is that the strategies laid out in Moneyball no longer work (if they ever really worked at all, which is debatable). The biggest factor in who the A's drafted in Moneyball was signability, but the amateur draft is slotted now, so teams now just pick the guy they want. The A's also needed to strike gold in the amateur draft because they didn't have the money to sign international players, but now the international system has a capped pool as well.

On top of that, everything that the A's were doing during Moneyball has been copied by more well-financed teams, so the A's need different strategies than the ones they used to use, but competitive balance has been much improved in baseball since the new revenue sharing formula went into effect in 2011 - every team in MLB was guaranteed $91 million last year regardless of what happened on the field or in the stands from shared national revenue, and the shared local revenue ended up at $118 million per team. So while they have to change what they're doing, they don't have to come up with something completely wild to compete because the playing field is more level.

They picked a guy in the first round with the expectation that he would be in the organization for ~10 years. This just looks like an attempt to retain that investment.

It's on amazon.
If you have any questions, I will send them to him and post reply here.