Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  For Billy Beane, it was a little different, a little less cerebral and a little more visceral. Billy intended to rip away from the scouts the power to decide who would be a pro baseball player and. who would not, and Paul was his weapon for doing it.

  Grady did not know about that. Grady had ignored Paul’s prodding to scout the players his computer flushed out. Paul had said the scouts ought to go have a look at a college kid named Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis was a fat third baseman who couldn’t run, throw, or field. What was the point of going to see that? (Because, Paul would be able to say three months later, Kevin Youkilis has the second highest on-base percentage in all of professional baseball, after Barry Bonds. To Paul, he’d become Euclis: the Greek god of walks.) Grady and his scouts had ignored Paul when he said they ought to check out a college pitcher named Kirk Saarloos. Saarloos was a short right-hander with an 88-mile-per-hour fastball. Why waste time on a short right-hander? (Because, Paul would be able to say less than a year later, Saarloos is one of only two players from the 2001 draft pitching in the big leagues.)

  Raw violence had gotten Grady’s attention. It was only baseball tradition that allowed scouting directors and scouts to go off and find the ballplayers on their own without worrying too much about the GM looking over their shoulders. And if there was one thing Grady knew about Billy, it was that he could give a fuck about baseball tradition. All Billy cared about was winning. A few days after the 2001 draft—with Billy away and still not speaking to him—Grady crept into Paul’s‘ office. In conciliatory tones, he allowed as how he still needed to sign a pitcher to fill out the A’s rookie league roster in Arizona. There was this kid Paul had mentioned who, along with Youkilis and Saarloos, Grady had ignored. David Beck was his name. Beck had gone completely undrafted. Thirty big league teams, each with fifty draft picks, had passed on him. Oddly enough, Paul’s computer had spit out Beck’s name only because one of Beck’s teammates at Cumberland University in Tennessee, a big kid with a 98-mile-per-hour fastball, had made everyone’s list as a potential first-round draft pick. Paul had noticed that on the same pitching staff as this consensus first-round pick was this complete unknown, a six foot four lefthander, who had even better numbers than the first rounder. A lower earned run average, fewer home runs allowed, more strikeouts, and fewer walks per nine innings. And Paul just wondered: maybe the kid had something going for him that the scouts were missing.

  He was left wondering. Months passed without any word of Beck from the scouting department. Paul finally asked Grady about him. And Grady said, “Oh yeah, I forgot, I’ll have one of the scouts go have a look.” But he didn’t do it, at least not seriously. When Paul asked again, Billy Owens, the A’s scout responsible for covering Tennessee grudgingly came back to him with the word that Beck was “a soft tosser.” Soft tosser was scouting code for not worth my time. Paul still had the impression that no one had bothered to scout David Beck.

  When he came to see Paul after the draft, Grady was in a different mood about David Beck. Should we sign your guy? he asked.

  What guy? asked Paul. He’d forgotten about Beck.

  Beck, said Grady.

  Grady, he’s not my guy, said Paul. I just asked you to check him out.

  Grady was eager to make peace with the front office, and he thought he could do it by throwing Paul a bone. He ran off and signed David Beck, sight unseen. A few days later, Beck reported for duty at the A’s training facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. Most of the scouts, and Paul, happened to be there when Beck warmed up in the A’s bullpen. It was one of the most bizarre sights any of them ever had seen on a pitcher’s mound. When the kid drew back his left arm to throw, his left hand flopped and twirled maniacally. His wrist might as well not exist: at any moment, it seemed, his hand might disengage itself and fly away. The kid was double-jointed, maybe even crippled. At that moment David Beck ceased to be known to the scouts as David Beck and became, simply, “The Creature.” A scout from another organization came right up to Billy Owens, chuckling, and asked how he came to sign The Creature. Billy O pointed over to Paul and said, “I didn’t sign him. Paul made me do it.”

  Whereupon The Creature went out and dominated the Arizona rookie league. He and his Halloween hand and his 84-mph fastball shut down the opposition so completely that the opposition never knew what happened. In the short season The Creature pitched eighteen innings in relief, struck out thirty-two batters, and finished with an earned run average of an even 1.00. He was named the closer on the rookie league All-Star team.

  The Creature was the first thing to come out of Paul’s computer that the A’s scouting department signed. There were about to be a lot more. The 2002 draft was to be the first science experiment Billy Beane performed upon amateur players.

  * * *

  It wasn’t quite ten in the morning and everyone in the draft room except the Harvard graduates had a lipful of chewing tobacco. The snuff rearranged their features into masks of grim determination. Anyone whose name wasn’t two syllables, or didn’t end in a vowel or a spitable consonant, has had it changed for the benefit of baseball conversation. Ron Hopkins is “Hoppy,” Chris Pittaro is “Pitter,” Dick Bogard is “Bogie.” Most were former infielders who had topped out someplace in the minor leagues. A handful actually made it to the big leagues, but so briefly that it almost hadn’t happened at all. John Poloni had pitched seven innings in 1977 with the Texas Rangers. Kelly Heath had played second base in the Royals organization, and had exactly one major league at bat, in 1982, after the Royals regular second baseman, Frank White, decided in the middle of a game that his hemorrhoids were bothering him. As one of the other scouts put it, Kelly was the only player in history whose entire big league career was made possible by a single asshole. Chris Pittaro had played second base for the Tigers and Twins. Back in 1985, during Pitter’s rookie year, Detroit’s manager Sparky Andersen was quoted saying Pitter “has a chance to become the greatest second baseman who ever lived.” It hadn’t turned out that way.

  All of them had lived different versions of the same story. They were uncoiled springs, firecrackers that had failed to explode. The only bona fide big league regular in the room was Matt Keough, who’d won sixteen games for the A’s in 1980. In his rookie year, 1978, he’d pitched in the All-Star Game. Matty, as he is known, easily was the most detached of the group. He had the air of a man taking a break from some perpetual Hawaiian vacation of the soul to stop by and chat with his old buddies. The rest of them weren’t like that.

  There was no avoiding just how important the 2002 amateur draft was for the future of the Oakland A’s. The Oakland A’s survived by finding cheap labor. The treatment of amateur players is the most glaring of the many violations of free market principles in Major League Baseball. A team that drafts and signs a player holds the rights to his first seven years in the minor leagues and his first six in the majors. It also enjoys the right to pay the player far less than he is worth. For instance, the Oakland A’s were able to pay their All-Star pitcher Barry Zito $200,000 in 2000, $240,000 in 2001, and $500,000 in 2002 (when he would win the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in the American League) because they had drafted him in 1999. For his first three years of big league ball, Zito was stuck; for his next three years he could apply for salary arbitration, which would bump him up to maybe a few million a year but would still keep him millions below the $10-$15 million a year he could get for himself on the open market. Not until 2007, after he had been in the big leagues for six years, would Barry Zito, like any other citizen of the republic, be allowed to auction his services to the highest bidder. At which point, of course, the Oakland A’s would no longer be able to afford Barry Zito. That’s why it was important to find Barry Zito here, in the draft room, and obtain him for the period of his career when he could be paid the baseball equivalent of slave’s wages.

  This year was the best chance they might ever have to find several Barry Zito’s. In 2001, the A’s had lost all three of their top free age
nts to richer teams. First baseman Jason Giambi had left for the Yankees for $120 million over seven years. Outfielder Johnny Damon had gone to the Red Sox for $32 million over four years. Closer Jason Isringhausen had signed with the Cardinals for $28 million over four years. The $33 million the three players would make each year was just $5 million less than the entire Oakland team. The rules of the game granted the A’s the first-round draft picks of the three teams that had poached their top talent, plus three more “compensation” picks at the end of the first round. Together with their own first round pick the A’s had, in effect, seven first-round draft picks. In the history of the draft going back to 1965 no team had ever held seven first-round picks. The question for Billy Beane was what to do with them. What he wasn’t going to do with them was what Grady had done last year, or what old baseball men had done with them for the past thirty-seven years. “You know what?” Billy said to Paul, before the draft-room meetings. “However we do it we’re never going to be more wrong than the way we did it before.”

  Already the scouts had whittled, or thought they had whittled, the vast universe of North American amateur baseball down to 680 players. They’d pasted all the names onto little magnetic strips. They now had one week to reduce that pile of magnetic nameplates to some kind of order. They would do this, more or less, by a process of elimination. Erik would read a kid’s name off a sheet. The scout who knew the kid then offered up a brief, dispassionate description of him. Anyone else who had seen the kid play might then chime in. Then the floor was open for general discussion, until everyone was satisfied that enough had been said.

  They begin that first morning by weeding out the pile. Some large number of amateur ballplayers were, for one reason or another, unworthy of serious consideration.

  “Lark,” says Erik, for instance. Erik is Erik Kubota, the new young scouting director Billy hired to replace Grady. Erik used a giant wad of Copenhagen to disguise the fact that he was a brainy graduate of the University of California Berkeley, whose first job with the Oakland A’s had been as a public relations intern. That Erik had never played even high school ball was, in Billy Beane’s mind, a point in his favor. At least he hasn’t learned the wrong lessons. Billy had played pro ball, and regarded it as an experience he needed to overcome if he wanted to do his job well. “A reformed alcoholic,” is how he described himself.

  Lark is a high school pitcher with a blazing fastball. He’s a favorite of one of the older scouts, who introduces him in a language only faintly resembling English. “Good body, big arm. Good fastball, playable slider, so-so change,” he says. “A little funk on the backside but nothing you can’t clean up. I saw him good one day and not so good another.”

  “Any risk he’ll go to college?” asks Erik.

  “He’s not a student type,” says the older scout. “I’m not sure he’s even signed with a college.”

  “So is this guy a rockhead?” asks Pitter. Pitter (Chris Pittaro) is a graduate of the University of North Carolina who roomed with Billy when they both played for the Minnesota Twins and who Billy had long ago identified as a person willing to rethink everything he learned, or thought he had learned, playing baseball.

  “Ah,” says the older scout, thinking about how to address the question. It’s possible for a baseball player to be too stupid for the job. It’s also possible for him to be too smart. “He may be too smart,” is a phrase that will recur several times over the next week.

  “He’s a confident kid. But—”

  “But,” says Erik.

  “There might be some, uh, family issues here,” says the old scout. “I heard the dad had spent some time in prison. Porno or something.”

  No one on either side of the room seems to know what to make of that. You can see thirty men thinking: is porno a crime?

  “Can he bring it?” someone finally asks. The air clears.

  “I can see this guy in somebody’s pen throwing aspirin tablets someday,” says the older scout. “The guy has a cannon.” This old scout is pushing fifty-five but still has a lean quickness about him, as if he hadn’t completely abandoned the hope that he might one day play the game. The old scout likes high school kids and refuses to apologize for that fact.

  “I’m worried about the makeup,” says someone.

  “What does his profile say?” asks someone else.

  A young man sits quietly off to one side at the room’s lone desktop computer. He punches a few keys. He’s looking for Lark’s results on the psychological test given by Major League Baseball to all prospects.

  “Not good,” he says, at length. “Competitive drive: one out of ten. Leadership: one out of ten. Conscientiousness: one out of ten.” He keeps on reading down the list, but no matter what the category the kid’s score is always the same.

  “Shit,” Bogie finally says, “does he even have a two in anything?” Bogie is the oldest scout. In 1972, scouting for the Houston Astros, Bogie administered what he believes to have been the first ever baseball psychological test, to a pitcher named Dick Ruthven. (He passed.)

  “Bad makeup,” says someone else and no one disagrees.

  The scouts used several catch phrases to describe what they need to avoid. “Rockhead” clearly isn’t a good thing to be, but the quality can be overcome. “Soft” is also fairly damning—it connotes both “out of shape” and “wimp”—but it, too, is inconclusive. “Bad makeup” is a death sentence. “Bad makeup” means “this kid’s got problems we can’t afford to solve.” The phrase signaled anything from jail time to drinking problems to severe personality disorders. Whenever a player is convicted of “bad make-up” another young man, reaches into a cardboard box for a tiny magnetized photograph of a former A’s employee named Phil Milo. Milo had worked as one of Billy Beane’s assistants for a brief spell and in that time offended pretty much everyone in the organization. When I ask Paul how it was possible for one man to personify so many different personality disorders, Paul says, “Put it this way. On the day I was hired, Milo came over to meet me. The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I got to be honest with you. I’m really not pleased we hired you.’” Milo was just that kind of guy.

  During the first few days of the draft meetings the tiny photos of Phil Milo fly like confetti. And the conversations that ended with Milo’s picture plastered beside a prospect’s name told you something: not just what baseball men distrusted in a player’s character, but how little they really knew the people they were about to rain money on.

  A high school pitcher:

  “Where’s he going to college?” asks Billy, idly.

  “He’s not,” says the scout who knows him best. “He’s a Christian kid and he was given a free ride to UC Irvine. Coach set him up with a couple of his players. Took him to a party and all it was was drinking. Kid was offended and he left and said, ‘I’m not going to school.’”

  “Oh, then he’ll fit right into pro ball, won’t he?” says Billy.

  “Put a Milo on him,” says Erik.

  A collegiate right-handed pitcher:

  “He’s a cocky guy,” says Matt Keough, who is arguing on the pitcher’s behalf. “He’d shove it up your ass. And taunt you. So you hate the guy. He’s had a couple of ejections.”

  “But no drugs?” asks Erik.

  “No drugs,” says Matty, then thinks about it. “There are rumors of some hash.”

  An old scout laughs. “Corned beef hash?”

  “It’s unsubstantiated,” Matty protests.

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, ” says another old scout.

  Erik looks up: “Is he the guy who was selling wacky tobacky in high school?”

  “Hell,” says Matty, now genuinely indignant. “That was three years ago!”

  Everyone groans. “Put a Milo on him, ” says Erik, and spits tobacco juice.

  A power-hitting outfielder:

  “I’m not sure he wants to sign. He said he’d like to go to law school. ”


  “Law school?”

  “He’s getting pressure from his girlfriend, I think.”

  “He’s looking for love, it sounds like.”

  “Put a Milo on him. ”

  Another collegiate left-handed pitcher:

  “The guy’s got no grades, ” says a scout.

  “You mean bad grades?” asks another.

  “No, I mean no grades, ” says the first.

  “How can a guy have no grades at Chico State?” asks the other.

  “He really has no desire at all to be in college,” says the first scout, almost admiringly. “This guy was designed to play ball. ”

  “I’m not really jazzed about a guy who has no desire whatsoever to go to college, ” says Billy. “That’s not a badge of honor.”

  “Put a Milo on him.”

  Billy doesn’t interfere much in the search for bad makeup, and Paul says nothing at all. The meetings, from their point of view, are all about minimizing risk. They can’t afford to have guys not work out. There’s no point in taking risks on players temperamentally, or legally, unsuited to pro ball. At one point Billy looks up and asks, “Who’s that fucking guy we took last year we had to release because he robbed a bank?” The others are too absorbed in weeding out the bad makeup to reply, or to even consider how remarkable the question is.