Moneyball by Lewis, Michael (mobile ebook reader txt) 📕

the average bear. He’s relentless—the most relentless person I have ever known.”

Billy moves back and forth between his wish list and Paul and Erik. Paul to check his judgments, Erik to execute his wishes. Like any good bond trader, he loves making decisions. The quicker the better. He looks up at the names of the players on the white board and listens to the speakerphone crackle. Three pitchers from the wish list (Francis, Brownlie, and Guthrie) go quickly. Sixteen players that he badly wants to own remain at large. The A’s second first-round pick is #24 (paid to them by the Yankees for the right to buy Jason Giambi), followed rapidly by #26, #30, #35, #37, #39. Billy has agreed with Erik and Paul to use #24 to get John McCurdy, a shortstop from the University of Maryland, the second hitter on the wish list. McCurdy was an ugly-looking fielder with the highest slugging percentage in the country. They’d turn him into a second baseman, where his fielding would matter less. Billy thought McCurdy might be the next Jeff Kent.

The White Sox come on the line. “Here goes Blanton,” says Billy.

When Kenny Williams told Billy an hour before that the White Sox were taking Blanton, Billy couldn’t but agree that it showed disturbingly good judgment. Blanton was the second best pitcher in the draft, in Billy’s view, behind Stanford pitcher Jeremy Guthrie.

A White Sox voice crackles on the speakerphone: “The White Sox selects redraft number 0103, Ring, Roger. Left-handed pitcher. San Diego State University. La Mesa, California.”

“You fucking got to be kidding me!” hollers Billy, overjoyed. He doesn’t pause to complain that Kenny Williams had told him he was taking Blanton. (Was he afraid Billy might take Ring?) “Ring over Blanton? A reliever over a starter?” Then it dawns on him: “Blanton’s going to get to us.” The second best right-handed pitcher in the draft. He says it but he can’t quite believe it. He looks at the board and recalculates what the GMs with the next five picks will do. “You know what?” he says in a surer tone. “Blanton’s going to be there at 24.”

“Blanton and Swisher,” says Erik. “That’s a home run.”

“The Giants won’t take McCurdy, right?” says Billy. The San Francisco Giants had the twenty-fifth pick, the only pick between the A’s next two. “Take Blanton with 24 and McCurdy with 26.”

“Swisher and Blanton and McCurdy,” says Erik “This is unfair.” He clicks the button on the speakerphone, and his voice shaking like a man calling in to say he holds the winning Lotto ticket, takes Blanton with the twenty-fourth pick, pauses while the Giants make their pick, then takes McCurdy with the twenty-sixth.

Everyone in the room, even the people in the back who have no real idea what is going on, a group that includes both the manager and the owner of the Oakland A’s, claps and cheers. The entire room assumes that if Billy gets what he wants it can only be good for the future of the franchise. This is now the Billy Beane Show, and it’s not over yet.

Billy stares at the board. “Fritz,” he says. “It’d be unbelievable if we could get Fritz too.” Benjamin Fritz, right-handed pitcher from Fresno State. Third best right-handed pitcher in the draft, in the opinion of Paul DePodesta’s computer.

“There’s no chance Teahen’s gone before 39, right?” says Paul quickly. He can see what Billy is doing. Having realized that he can get most of the best hitters, Billy is now seeing if he can also get the best pitchers, too. Paul’s view—the “objective” one—is that the hitters are a much better bet than the pitchers. He thinks the best thing to do with pitchers is draft them in bulk, lower down. He doesn’t want to risk losing his hitters.

“Teahen will be there at 39,” says Billy.

No one else in the room is willing to confirm it.

“Take Fritz with 30, Brown with 35, and Teahen with 37,” Billy says. Erik leans into the speakerphone, and listens. The Arizona Diamondbacks take yet another high school player with the twenty-seventh pick and the Seattle Mariners take another with the twenty-eighth. The Astros take a college player, not Fritz, with the twenty-ninth. Erik takes Fritz with the thirtieth.

“We just got two of the three best right-handed pitchers in the country, and two of the four best position players,” says Paul.

“This doesn’t happen,” says Billy. “Don’t think this is normal.”

As the thirty-fifth pick approaches, Erik once again leans into the speaker phone. If he leaned in just a bit more closely he might hear phones around the league clicking off, so that people could laugh without being heard. For they do laugh. They will make fun of what the A’s are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.

When asked which current or former major league player Jeremy Brown reminded him of, Paul stewed for two days, and finally said, “He has no equivalent.” The kid himself is down in Tuscaloosa, listening to the Webcast of the conference call, biting his nails because he still doesn’t quite believe that the A’s will take him in the first round. He’s told no one except his parents and his girlfriend and them he’s made swear they won’t tell anyone else, in case it doesn’t happen. Some part of him still thinks he’s being set up to be a laughingstock. That part of him dies the moment he hears his name called.

“Oakland selects redraft number 1172. Brown, Jeremy. Catcher. University of Alabama. Hueytown,