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

You might think the players would want to eliminate the need for the rich teams that signed free agents to compensate the poor ones that had lost them. The practice was a tax on free agency. But the practice also gave the players’ union veto power over any changes that the owners might want to make in the amateur draft, and this they valued even more highly.

He was right about the draft picks.

Whereupon he bent over to illustrate what the owner of a baseball team might look like, were he to play the farm animal.

Cliff Floyd was Ray Durham all over again. Floyd would be a free agent at the end of the season and so, like Durham, a ticket for two more first-round draft picks. The trouble with Floyd, from the point of view of an impoverished team looking to acquire him, was that he was the only big star still left on the market. “His value will only fall so far,” says Billy.

In the time he spent trying to nail down Rincon, he had lost Floyd. Or so it seemed. Now he notices he has a voice mail message. While he was talking to Gammons, someone else called. He’s thinking it might be Sabean or Phillips calling to take Venafro’s 270 grand paycheck off his hands. Money is what he needs, and he hits his telephone keypad as if there’s money inside. There isn’t. “Billy,” says the soft, pleasant, recorded voice. “It’s Omar Minaya. Call me back, okay?” Omar Minaya is the Montreal Expos’ GM. Omar Minaya controls the fate of Cliff Floyd.

Billy puts his head in his hands and says, “Let me think.” Which he does for about ten seconds, then calls Omar Minaya. He listens as Minaya tells him what he already knows from Peter Gammons; that his offer for Cliff Floyd is nowhere close to the Red Sox offer. In exchange for one of the best left-handed hitters in the game, Billy Beane had offered a Double-A pitcher who was promising but hardly a prized possession. The Red Sox, amazingly, have agreed to cover the $2 million or so left on Cliff Floyd’s contract, and offered a smorgasbord of major and minor league players for Montreal to choose from—among them Red Sox pitcher Rolando Arrojo and a South Korean pitcher named Seung-jun Song. Plus, according to Cliff Floyd’s agent, it is suddenly Cliff Floyd’s dream to play for the Boston Red Sox (the Red Sox are likely to pay him even more than he is worth at the end of the year, when he becomes a free agent) and his distinct wish not to play for the Oakland A’s (who will bill Cliff Floyd for the sodas he drinks in the clubhouse). Floyd has a clause in his contract that allows him to veto a trade to Oakland.

Billy listens to the many compelling reasons why Omar is about to trade Cliff Floyd to the Red Sox, and then says, in the polite tones of a man trying to hide his discovery of another’s idiocy, “You really want to do that, Omar?”

Omar says he does.

“I mean, Omar, you really like those guys you’re getting from Boston?”

Omar, a bit less certainly, says that he likes the guys he’s getting from Boston.

“You like Arrojo that much, huh?” He speaks Arrojo’s name with a question mark after it. Arrojo? The Toronto Blue Jays’ GM, J. P. Ricciardi, said that watching Billy do a deal was “like watching the Wolf talk to Little Red Riding Hood.”

It takes a full twenty seconds for Omar to apologize for his interest in Rolando Arrojo.

“So who is this other guy?” says Billy “This Korean pitcher. How do you say his name? Song Song?”

Omar knows how to say his name.

“Well, okay,” says Billy. Yet another shift in tone. He’s now an innocent, well-meaning passerby who has stopped to offer a bit of roadside assistance. “If you’re going to send Floyd to Boston,” he says, “why don’t you send him through me?”

And Billy Beane now attempts to do what he has done so many times in the past: insert himself in the middle of a deal that is none of his business.

“Omar,” he says. “You’re in the catbird seat here. All you need to do is let the market come to you.”

He then explains: Omar can have the Red Sox’s money and he can have the Red Sox’s players plus another player from the Oakland A’s minor league system. Just about any player he wants, within reason. All he has to do is agree to give Cliff Floyd to Billy Beane for a few minutes, and let Billy negotiate with the Red Sox. He is explaining, without putting too fine a point on it, that Omar is not getting all he could get out of the Red Sox for Cliff Floyd.

The Red Sox were in their usual undignified pant to make the play-offs. They had twisted themselves into a position in their own minds where they could not not get Cliff Floyd. They were among the many foolish teams that thought all their questions could be answered by a single player. Cliff Floyd was the answer. Cliff Floyd was a guy the Boston newspapers would praise them for acquiring. Cliff Floyd would bring false hope to Fenway Park. Cliff Floyd, in short, was a guy for whom the Red Sox simply had to overpay. And if Omar Minaya hasn’t the stomach to extract every last hunk of flesh the Boston Red Sox are willing to part with in exchange for Floyd, Billy will do it for him. And once he’s done it, he will give Omar the players he was going to get anyway plus a minor leaguer from the Oakland farm system.

Billy Beane never had the first hope of landing Cliff Floyd. For Cliff Floyd to become an Oakland A, the Montreal Expos would have had to agree to pay the rest of Floyd’s 2002 salary. The Expos were now