Find Someone With the 'Body and Swing of a Grizzled Prospector'
They called him the Wonder Hamster.
To look at him, no one would figure Matt Stairs for an athlete.
As ESPN described the ballplayer, "Stairs looks like somebody you know, whether it's the guy who's dating your cousin or one in a group of buddies at the bar."
Others were more direct...
Sports writer David Zingler wrote in 2002...
Matt Stairs may have the most unathletic physique in all of baseball. He generously is listed at 5-9, his arms, while powerful, appear flabby, and the size of his stomach suggests that he favors "tastes great" over "less filling."
Even an article on MLB.com said he had the "body and swing of a grizzled prospector."
But Stairs was good. Besides "Wonder Hamster," his other nickname was "The Professional Hitter."
Stairs knocked out 265 homers over a 19-year career across a dozen different MLB teams. He had a career on-base percentage of 0.356, better than hitting stars like Jose Canseco and Sammy Sosa.
And that "grizzled prospector" description? It came from an article making the case that Stairs should be admitted to the Hall of Fame.
He's already in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame – and considered by many to be the third-best Canadian hitter of all time.
We heard about Stairs from his old boss, Billy Beane...
Beane was the general manager of the Oakland A's in the early 2000s. At the time, Beane and his assistant general manager, Paul DePodesta, had a problem to solve. And Stairs was a big part of the solution.
When Beane took over, the A's were lousy. That was in large part because the team's budget was much smaller than its rivals'. For instance, in 2001, during Beane's tenure, the A's player payroll totaled $41 million. That same year, the juggernaut Yankees signed just one player – shortstop Derek Jeter – to a $189 million, 10-year contract.
What Beane and DePodesta realized is they needed a different way to evaluate players... a way that uncovered value that traditional scouting missed. They weren't going to rely on the instincts of road-weary scouts. And they weren't going to trust traditional statistics like stolen bases, runs batted in, and batting averages.
They were going to let statistics prove what skills matter most for winning ballgames... and get players who had those skills, regardless of what anyone else saw...
What Stairs could do was get on base... a lot. And the data said that getting on base was the most valuable thing a ballplayer can do.
Beane spoke at Stansberry Research's annual conference last year, where he told us...
A lot of the guys that had that skill didn't pass the eye test. It was a skill. It wasn't necessarily athletic. And it didn't pass the eye test, because a lot of guys that have that skill didn't look particularly great in baseball uniforms. Do you remember Matt Stairs? He's one of my all-time favorite hitters.
Matt was about 5'9", 240 pounds. He didn't look good in a baseball uniform.
But when you stopped looking at Matt and looked at his data, you realized he does the most important thing a baseball player could do. He gets on base, and he hits homers. And we could afford him.
Most old-school baseball people dismissed Stairs because he didn't look like a ballplayer. Stairs bounced around the minor leagues. He even played in Canada and Japan until he finally caught on in Oakland under Beane.
Those old-school scouts and coaches then got to watch as Stairs became a star... on a team that was an unlikely perennial playoff contender.
Back in 2000, Stairs signed a one-year deal with Oakland for $3 million. Beane told us that a player with Stairs' stats today earns about $20 million a year.
The story of Beane and DePodesta is memorialized in the best-selling book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis. And baseball entirely changed.
Every team now has advanced analytics departments. Everyone knows what stats matter and how much each one is worth.
The story of Moneyball can be taken in several ways. Maybe it was about the skill of investing in undervalued assets... or perhaps the power of intelligence and careful thought.
Michael Lewis thought it was something else. He was also with us at last year's Stansberry conference. And he said...
Forget it's baseball. Think of it as just a business, and these are the employees. They've been doing the same job for a hundred years. They have millions of people watching them on the job. They have statistics attached to what they do on the job unlike most corporate employees.
And if these people can be misvalued because of the way they look... who can't be?
The beating heart of that book was how people get valued.
We'd say... who or what can't be misvalued?
We look at all these different ways to interpret Moneyball and distill it into a single insight...
People don't think very hard about what they actually want. They take shortcuts, like judging a ballplayer based on his appearance. And they end up worse off because of it.
That applies to investing as well.
Most investors look for the wrong things. They find high-growth, exciting stories... the stocks that everyone is talking about.
Instead, they should look for steady growth... and boring stories.
In my Retirement Millionaire newsletter, we hope to bore you...
We're not speculators trying to get in on the next big trend. In our experience, folks who do that type of "investing" end up burned more often than not.
Rather, we focus on cash generation and a company's ability to reward us with dividends and share repurchases. We want companies that make products that are essential to our daily lives, giving them an "economic moat." And we wait for these strong companies to trade at reasonable valuations.
We've found one such stock in Retirement Millionaire this month.
This is a company with a true economic moat. It receives little attention from the financial media. And it's on a dip today.
Retirement Millionaire subscribers will get all the details of this stock later today when our issue publishes.
If you aren't already subscribed to Retirement Millionaire, click here to learn more.
What We're Reading...
- Something different: Ancient Greece to Turner vs. Constable: Seven of the greatest rivalries in art history.
Here's to our health, wealth, and a great retirement,
Dr. David Eifrig and the Health & Wealth Bulletin Research Team
December 10, 2025