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

the A’s were playing a different game than everyone else. He decided that, whatever game they were playing, he wanted to play it too. He assumed that Billy Beane, who had a long-term contract in Oakland, was off-limits. So he’d offered the Blue jays’ top job to Paul DePodesta—but Paul didn’t want it. And so Godfrey went back into the Oakland A’s media guide and found the picture of the guy under DePodesta. His name was J. P. Ricciardi, the A’s director of player development. J.P. flew to Toronto for the interview—and had the job in about five minutes. “He had a reason for everything,” said Godfrey. “Of all the people I’d talked to, J.P. was the only one with a business plan and the only one who told me, ‘You are spending too much money.’ He basically went through the lineup and said, ‘These people are all replaceable by people you’ve never heard of.’ And I said, ‘You sure?’ And he said, ‘Look, if you can stand the heat in the media, I can make you cheaper and better. It’ll take a couple of months to make you cheaper and a couple of years to make you better. But you’ll be a lot better.’”

The first thing J. P. Ricciardi did after he took the job was hire Keith Law, a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard graduate who had never played baseball, but who wrote lots of interesting articles about it for baseballprospectus.com. That was partly Billy’s idea. Billy had told J.P. that, in order to find the fool at the poker table, “you need your Paul.” The second thing J.P. did was fire twenty-five Blue jays scouts. Then, over the next few months, he proceeded to get rid of just about every highly paid, established big league player and replace them with minor leaguers no one had ever heard of. By the end of the 2002 season J.P. had taken to watching every Blue jays game with Keith Law. By then he could turn to his pet sabermetrician in the middle of a game and gleefully shout, “Rain Man, we got a $1.8 million team out there on the field right now!”

That superior management armed with science could be had so cheaply was easily the greatest inefficiency in all of baseball, and the owner with the keenest sense of markets, and their follies, saw this. John Henry had just purchased the Boston Red Sox, and he was looking to overhaul his franchise in the image of the Oakland A’s. In late October he hired Bill James as “Senior Consultant, Baseball Operations.” (“I don’t understand how it took so long for somebody to hire this guy,” Henry said.) Just to be sure, he also hired Voros McCracken as a special adviser on pitching. Then he went looking for someone to run the show.

Only one guy had ever actually proved he could impose reason on a big league clubhouse, and that guy, two weeks after his team had been bounced from the play-offs, was now dissatisfied with his job. One thing led to another, and before long Billy Beane had agreed to run the Boston Red Sox. He would be guaranteed $12.5 million over five years, the most anyone had ever been paid to run a baseball team. Billy hadn’t yet signed the contract, but that was just a formality. He had already persuaded his owner to let him out of his contract, and started to overhaul the Red Sox. In his mind’s eye he had traded Red Sox third baseman Shea Hillenbrand to some team that didn’t understand that a .293 batting average was a blow to the offense when it came attached to a .330 on-base percentage. He’d signed Edgardo Alfonzo to play second base, and Bill Mueller to play third. Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek was gone and White Sox backup Mark Johnson was in his place. Manny Ramirez’s glove was requisitioned by general management, and the slugger would spend the rest of his Red Sox career as a designated hitter. All in his mind’s eye.

In Oakland, Billy Beane’s imminent departure quickly rippled through the organization. Paul DePodesta had agreed to become the new general manager of the Oakland A’s. He’d promoted his fellow Harvard graduate, David Forst, to be his assistant. Paul’s main concern was just how much Billy Beane’s Boston Red Sox should pay the Oakland A’s for poaching their general manager. Billy came to work one day to face a new situation. As he put it, “I’ve now got two Harvard guys on my sofa trying to figure out how they’re going to screw me.” It looked like the beginning of a new relationship. He and Paul argued back and forth until they settled on the player Paul would get in exchange for Billy Beane: Kevin Youkilis. The Greek god of walks. The player who, but for the A’s old scouting department, should have been an Oakland A. The player with the highest on-base percentage in all of professional baseball, after Barry Bonds. Paul wanted another minor leaguer too, but Youkilis was the real prize.

All that remained was for Billy to sign the Red Sox contract. And he couldn’t do it. In the forty-eight hours after he accepted John Henry’s job offer, Billy became as manic and irrational and incapable of sleep as he had been back in May, after the A’s had been swept by the Blue Jays. As decisive as he was about most things, he was paralyzed when the decision involved himself. He loved the idea of working for John Henry, with his understanding of markets and their inefficiencies. But you didn’t up and move three thousand miles and start a new life just to work for a different owner. Five days before, Billy had convinced himself he wasn’t taking the job just for the money. Since it was pretty clear he wasn’t doing it for the love of the Red Sox, it raised a question of why he was doing it at all. He