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

Minutes after Erik speaks his name, Jeremy Brown’s phone begins to ring. First it’s family and friends, then agents. All these agents he’s never heard of want to be in his life. Scott Boras suddenly wants to represent Jeremy Brown. The agents will tell him that they can get him at least half a million dollars more than the A’s have promised. He’ll have to tell them that he’s made a deal with the A’s on his own, and that he intends to keep his end of it. And he does.

The next two hours are, to Billy Beane, a revelation. When the dust settles on the first seven rounds, the A’s have acquired five more of the hitters from Billy and Paul’s wish list—Teahen, Baker, Kiger, Stavisky, and Colamarino. When in the seventh round Erik leans in and takes the last of these, an ambidextrous first baseman from the University of Pittsburgh named Brant Colamarino, Paul wears an expression of pure bliss. “No one else in baseball will agree,” he says, “but Colamarino might be the best hitter in the country.” That told you how contrary the A’s measuring devices were: they were able to draft possibly the best hitter in the country with the 218th pick of the draft. Then Paul says, “You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn’t matter.” When Brant Colamarino removes his shirt for the first time in an A’s minor league locker room he inspires his coaches to inform Billy that “Colammarino has titties.” Colamarino, like Jeremy Brown, does not look the way a young baseball player is meant to look. Titties are one of those things that just don’t matter in a ballplayer. Billy’s only question for the coaches was whether a male brassiere should be called a “manzier” or a “bro.”

Most every other team looks at the market pretty much the same way, or at any rate acts as if they do. Most teams, if they kept a wish list of twenty players, would feel blessed to have snagged three of them. The combination of having seven first-round draft picks, a deeply quirky view of baseball players, and a general manager newly willing to impose that view on his scouting department has created something like a separate market in Oakland. From their wish list of twenty they had nabbed, incredibly, thirteen players: four pitchers and nine hitters. They had drafted players dismissed by their own scouts as too short or too skinny or too fat or too slow. They had drafted pitchers who didn’t throw hard enough for the scouts and hitters who hadn’t enough power. They’d drafted kids in the first round who didn’t think they’d get drafted before the fifteenth round, and kids in lower rounds who didn’t think they’d get drafted at all. They had drafted ballplayers.

It was as if a big new market—moving Wall Street money manager had sprung into being, and bought shares only in vegetarian restaurants, or electric car manufacturers. With a difference. A revaluation in the stock market has consequences for companies and for money managers. The pieces of paper don’t particularly care what you think of their intrinsic value. A revaluation in the market for baseball players resonates in the lives of young men. It was as if a signal had radiated out from the Oakland A’s draft room and sought, laserlike, those guys who for their whole career had seen their accomplishments understood with an asterisk. The footnote at the bottom of the page said, “He’ll never go anywhere because he doesn’t look like a big league ballplayer.”

Billy Beane was a human arsenal built, inadvertently, by professional baseball to attack its customs and rituals. He thought himself to be fighting a war against subjective judgments, but he was doing something else, too. At one point Chris Pittaro said that the thing that struck him about Billy—what set him apart from most baseball insiders—was his desire to find players unlike himself. Billy Beane had gone looking for, and found, his antitheses. Young men who failed the first test of looking good in a uniform. Young men who couldn’t play anything but baseball. Young men who had gone to college.

The fat scout ambles in. He’s one of the older scouts, and like most of the others, he’ll leave the Oakland A’s at the end of the season, and find a team that cares about what he knows. All these misshapen players coming in will drive all of these old scouts out. But for now the older scouts are, mainly, amused. “Just talked to Kiger,” the fat scout says laconically. Mark Kiger plays shortstop for the University of Florida. A machine for wearing down opposing pitchers, and getting himself on base. Too small to play pro ball—or so they said. Now a fifth-round draft choice of the Oakland A’s.

“What did he say?” asks Billy

“‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you,’” says the fat scout, and then laughs. “He just wanted to get drafted.”

It counted as one of the happiest days of Billy Beane’s career. He can’t have known whether he had simply found a new way of fixing irrational hopes upon a young man, or if he had, as he hoped, eliminated hope from the equation. But he thought he knew. At the end of the day he actually looked up with a big smile and said, “This is maybe the funnest day I have ever had in baseball.” Then he walked out the back door of the draft room and into the Coliseum. He had another, bigger missile to fire at the conventional wisdom of major league baseball. It was called the Oakland A’s.

Chapter

VI

The Science of Winning an Unfair Game

There was no simple way to approach the problem that Billy Beane was trying to solve. It read like an