In the 1995 season the owners of the Oakland A's cut their payroll causing them to miss the playoffs for many years due to their inability to afford high quality players. This pushed Billy Beane to employ sabermetrics as a scouting technique by finding low cost players that had great advanced metrics. He received a lot of backlash initially because scouts believed there was more to baseball than a computer could tell. The A's proceeded to advance to the playoffs for 4 consecutive seasons with one of the lowest payrolls in the league. The began the widespread use of advanced metrics in the sport.