Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  Most of the first few days were devoted to culling the original pile of 680 players. Other than an excessive affection for one’s girlfriend, or a criminal record, or other signs of bad makeup, there were just two reasons why the Oakland A’s did not waste further time on a player. One was age: with rare exceptions the new scouting directors toss all high school players immediately onto the dumping ground, leaving the younger scouts who spent their days following them wondering why they bothered. The other is what is delicately known in the draft room as “expectations.”

  “What are his expectations?” Erik Kubota asks, of a promising college pitcher.

  The scout who knows him best says, “His dad said, and I quote, ‘$4.2 million is a good place to start.’”

  “Put him over there,” Erik will say. When his name is tossed onto the dump heap nobody in the front office cares.

  * * *

  By the end of the third day the scouts have organized the players into two groups: the prospects not worth considering further, and everyone else. The second group, maybe four hundred players, they parse further by position. They’ll rank 120 right-handed pitchers; they’ll list 37 catchers, 1 through 37, and 94 outfielders, 1 through 94. But before they do, they turn their attention from eliminating players to selecting them. Billy’s already made it clear that this year he has only a secondary interest in pitchers. The past few years he has stocked up on arms. It’s the bats he needs. On the white board closest to Billy, the “Big Board,” there was space for sixty players. Only one slot had been filled, the first:

  SWISHER

  Nick Swisher, a center fielder from Ohio State. For the past six months, Billy’s been sure about Swisher, and he knows he won’t get the slightest disagreement from his scouts. Swisher is a rare point of agreement between Paul’s computer and the internal compass of an old baseball guy. He has the raw athletic ability the scouts adore; but he also has the stats Billy and Paul have decided matter more than anything: he’s proven he can hit, and hit with power; he drew more than his share of walks.

  Oddly enough, Billy has never actually seen Swisher play. He had wanted to fly across the country to watch a few of Swisher’s games, but his scouting department told him that if he did, word would quickly spread to the rest of Major League Baseball that Billy Beane was onto Nick Swisher, Swisher’s stock would rise, and the odds that he’d still be around when the A’s made this first pick—the sixteenth of the draft—would plummet. “Operation Shutdown,” the scouts called their project to keep Billy as far away from Swisher as they could.

  Operation Shutdown has had some perverse effects. One of them is to lead Billy to speak of Swisher in the needy tone of a man who has been restrained for too long from seeing his beloved. Swisher is his picture bride.

  “Swisher is noticeable, isn’t he?” says Billy, hoping to hear more about what Swisher looks like. How Swisher really is.

  “Oh, he’s noticeable,” says an old scout. “From the moment he gets off the bus he doesn’t shut up.”

  “His background is interesting,” says Billy. “His dad was a major league player. That’s huge. A great chip in his favor. Those guys succeed.” (Swisher’s dad is Steve Swisher, who caught for the Cubs, Cardinals, and Padres.)

  “He does have a presence,” agrees an old scout.

  “Did Operation Shutdown work?” asks Billy.

  “Too well,” says an old scout. “Guy from the White Sox called me yesterday and said he knows you must be in love with Swisher because you haven’t been to see him.”

  Billy laughs. “Out of this room, Swisher is hush-hush,” he says.

  The conversation turns from Nick Swisher, and the moment it does it becomes contentious. Not violently so—these are people with an interest in getting along. The tone of the conversation is that of a meeting in a big company that has just decided to drop a product line, or shift resources from marketing to R&D. Still, it’s a dispute with two sides riven by some fundamental difference. The two sides are, on the one hand, the old scouts and, on the other, Billy Beane. The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball. The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profitby ignoring them.

  One by one Billy takes the names of the players the old scouts have fallen in love with, and picks apart their flaws. The first time he does this an old scout protests.

  “The guy’s an athlete, Billy,” the old scout says. “There’s a lot of upside there.”

  “He can’t hit,” says Billy.

  “He’s not that bad a hitter,” says the old scout.

  “Yeah, what happens when he doesn’t know a fastball is coming?” says Billy.

  “He’s a tools guy,” says the old scout, defensively. The old scouts aren’t built to argue; they are built to agree. They are part of a tightly woven class of former baseball players. The scout looks left and right for support. It doesn’t arrive.

  “But can he hit?” asks Billy.

  “He can hit,” says the old scout, unconvincingly.

  Paul reads the player’s college batting statistics. They contain a conspicuous lack of extra base hits and walks.

  “My only question is,” says Billy, “if he’s that good a hitter why doesn’t he hit better?”

  “The swing needs some work. You have to reinvent him. But he can hit.”

  “Pro baseball’s not real good at reinventing guys,” says Billy.

  Whatever happened when an older man who failed to become a big league star looks at a younger man with a view to imagining whether he might become a big league star, Billy wanted nothing more to do with it. He’d been on the receiving end of the dreams of older men and he knew what they were worth. Over and over the old scouts will say, “The guy has a great body,” or, “This guy may be the best body in the draft.” And every time they do, Billy will say, “We’re not selling jeans here,” and deposit yet another highly touted player, beloved by the scouts, onto his shit list. One after another of the players the scouts rated highly vanish from the white board, until it’s empty. If the Oakland A’s aren’t going to use their seven first-round draft picks to take the players their scouts loved, who on earth are they going to take? That question begins to be answered when Billy Beane, after tossing another name on the slag heap, inserts a new one:

  TEAHEN

  The older scouts lean back in their chairs, spittoons in hand. Paul leans forward into a laptop and quietly pulls up statistics from college Web sites. Erik Kubota, scouting director, holds a ranked list of all the amateur baseball players in the country. He turns many pages, and passes hundreds and hundreds of names, before he finds Teahen. “Tell us about Teahen,” says Billy.

  Mark Teahen, says Erik, is a third baseman from St. Mary’s College just down the road in Moraga, California. “Teahen,” says Erik. “Six three. Two ten. Left right. Good approach to hitting. Not a lot of power right now. Our kind of guy. He takes pitches.”

  “Why haven’t we talked about this guy before?” asks the old scout.

  “It’s because Teahen doesn’t project,” says Erik. “He’s a corner guy who doesn’t hit a lot of home runs.”

  “Power is something that can be acquired,” says Billy quickly. “Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don’t become good hitters.”

  “Do you see him at third base or shortstop?” asks another old scout, like a prosecuting attorney leading a witness.

  “Let’s forget about positions and just ask: who is the best hitter?” says Billy.

  Paul looks up from his computer. “Teahen: .493 on base; .624 slug. Thirty walks and only seventeen strikeouts in one hundred ninety-four at bats.” It’s hard to tell what the scouts make of these numbers. Scouts from other teams would almost surely say: who gives a shit about a guy’s numbers? It’s college ball. You need to look at the guy. Imagine what he might become.

  Everyone stares silently at Teahen’s name for about thirty seco
nds. Erik says, “I hate to say it but if you want to talk about another Jason Giambi, this guy could be it.” Giambi was a natural hitter who developed power only after the Oakland A’s drafted him. In the second round. Over the objections of scouts who said he couldn’t run, throw, field, or hit with power. Jason Giambi: MVP of the American League in 2000.

  More silence. Decades of scouting experience are being rendered meaningless. “I hate to piss on the campfire,” one of the scouts finally says, “but I haven’t heard Teahen’s name once all year. I haven’t heard other teams talking about him. I haven’t heard his name around here all year. It wasn’t like this guy was a fifty-five we all liked.” The scouts put numbers on players. The numbers are one of the little tricks that lend scouting an air of precision. A player who receives a “55″ is a player they think will one day be a regular big league player.

  “Who do you like better?” asks Billy.

  The old scout leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “What about Perry?” he says. “When you see him do something right on a swing, it’s impressive. There’s some work that needs to be done. He needs to be reworked a bit.”

  “You don’t change guys,” says Billy. “They are who they are.”

  “That’s just my opinion,” says the old scout, and folds his arms.

  Once Teahen has found his slot high up on the Big Board, Billy Beane takes out a Magic Marker and writes another name:

  BROWN

  The four scouts across from him either wince or laugh. Brown? Brown? Billy can’t be serious.

  “Let’s talk about Jeremy Brown,” Billy says.

  In moving from Mark Teahen, whoever he is, to Jeremy Brown, whoever he is, Billy Beane, in the scouting mind, had gone from the remotely plausible to the ridiculous. Jeremy Brown made the scouting lists, just. His name appears on the last page; he is a lesser member of the rabble regarded by the scouts as, at best, low-level minor league players. He’s a senior catcher at the University of Alabama. Only three of the old scouts saw him and none of them rated him even close to a big leaguer. Each of them has about a thousand players ranked above him.

  “Jeremy Brown is a bad body catcher,” says the most vocal of the old scouts.

  “A bad body who owns the Alabama record books,” says Pitter.

  “He’s the only player in the history of the SEC with three hundred hits and two hundred walks,” says Paul, looking up from his computer.

  It’s what he doesn’t say that is interesting. No one in big league baseball cares how often a college players walks; Paul cares about it more than just about anything else. He doesn’t explain why walks are important. He doesn’t explain that he has gone back and studied which amateur hitters made it to the big leagues, and which did not, and why. He doesn’t explain that the important traits in a baseball player were not all equally important. That foot speed, fielding ability, even raw power tended to be dramatically overpriced. That the ability to control the strike zone was the greatest indicator of future success. That the number of walks a hitter drew was the best indicator of whether he understood how to control the strike zone. Paul doesn’t say that if a guy has a keen eye at the plate in college, he’ll likely keep that keen eye in the pros. He doesn’t explain that plate discipline might be an innate trait, rather than something a free-swinging amateur can be taught in the pros. He doesn’t talk about all the other statistically based insights—the overwhelming importance of on-base percentage, the significance of pitches seen per plate appearance—that he uses to value precisely a hitter’s contribution to a baseball offense. He doesn’t stress the importance of generalizing from a large body of evidence as opposed to a small one. He doesn’t explain anything because Billy doesn’t want him to. Billy was forever telling Paul that when you try to explain probability theory to baseball guys, you just end up confusing them.

  “This kid wears a large pair of underwear,” says another old scout. It’s the first time in two days that this old scout has spoken. He enjoys, briefly, the unusual attention accorded the silent man in a big meeting. The others in the room can only assume that if the scout was moved to speak it must be because he had something earth-shatteringly important to say. He doesn’t.

  “Okay,” says Billy.

  “It’s soft body,” says the most vocal old scout. “A fleshy kind of a body.”

  “Oh, you mean like Babe Ruth?” says Billy. Everyone laughs, the guys on Billy’s side of the room more happily than the older scouts across from him.

  “I don’t know,” says the scout. “A body like that can be low energy.”

  “Sometimes low energy is just being cool,” says Billy.

  “Yeah,” says the scout. “Well, in this case low energy is because when he walks, his thighs stick together.”

  “I repeat: we’re not selling jeans here,” says Billy.

  “That’s good,” says the scout. “Because if you put him in corduroys, he’d start a fire.”

  Clutching Jeremy Brown’s yellow nameplate, Billy inches toward the Big Board with the “Top 60″ names on it. The scouts shift and spit. The leading scouting publication, Baseball America, has just published its special issue devoted to the 2002 draft, and in it a list of the top twenty-five amateur catchers in the country. Jeremy Brown’s name is not on the list. Baseball America has more or less said that Jeremy Brown will be lucky to get drafted. Billy Beane is walking Jeremy Brown into the first five rounds of the draft.

  “Billy, does he really belong in that group?” asks the old scout plaintively. “He went in the nineteenth round last year and he’ll be lucky to go there this year.” The Red Sox had drafted Brown the year before, and Brown had turned down the peanuts they’d offered and returned to the University of Alabama for his senior year. It was beginning to look like a wise move.

  The older scouts all share their brother’s incredulity. One of them, the fat scout, when he returned from the trip Billy made him take to the University of Alabama, called Billy and told him that he couldn’t recommend drafting Jeremy Brown. Period. There were fifteen hundred draft-eligible players in North America alone that he would rather own than this misshapen catcher. Like all the scouts, the fat scout had the overriding impression that Brown was fat and growing fatter. He had the further impression that Brown didn’t look all that good when he did anything but hit. “Behind the plate he’s not mobile,” the fat scout now says. “His throws are all slingshot throws.” Throws from catchers with a slinging motion tend not to follow a straight line but to tail off toward the first-base side of second base.

  Billy takes a step toward the Big Board, sticks Brown’s name onto the top of the Big Board’s second column, the seventeenth slot, and says, “All right, push him down, guys.” Jeremy Brown is now a high second-round, or even low first-round, draft pick. If baseball scouts were capable of gasping, these men would have gasped. Instead, they spit tobacco juice into their cups. That was the moment when the scouts realized just how far Billy Beane was willing to go to push his supposedly rational and objective view of things.

  “Come on, Billy,” the vocal scout says.

  “Finding a catcher who can hit—there’s not one of them out there who can hit,” says Billy. “This guy can hit.”

  Erik looks across the table and says, “This guy’s a senior with, like, a huge history.”

  The scouts don’t see the point of history. In their view history isn’t terribly relevant when you’re talking about kids who haven’t become who they will be.

  “Come on,” says Erik, “you guys have all played with guys who were bad bodies and good baseball players.”

  “Yeah,” says Billy. “I played with Pitter.” Everyone laughs, even Pitter. “Another thing about Brown,” says Billy; “he walks his ass off.”

  “He’s leading the country in walks,” says Paul. Walks!

  “He better walk because he can’t run,” says one of the scouts.

  “That body, Billy,” says the most vocal old
scout. “It’s not natural.” He’s pleading now.

  “He’s got big thighs,” says the fat scout, thoughtfully munching another jumbo-sized chocolate chip cookie. “A big butt. He’s huge in the ass.”

  “Every year that body has just gotten worse and worse and worse,” says a third.

  “Can he hit, though?” asks Billy Beane.

  “Wanna hear something,” says Paul, gazing into his computer screen at the University of Alabama Web site. “In the past two years: 390 at bats; 98 walks; 38 Ks. Those numbers are better than anyone’s in minor league baseball. Oh yeah, 21 jacks.” Jacks are home runs. So are dongs, bombs, and big flies. Baseball people express their fondness for a thing by thinking up lots of different ways to say it.

  The fat scout looks up from his giant chocolate chip cookie and seeks to find a way to get across just how unimpressed he is. “Well,” he says, exaggerating his natural drawl, “I musta severely unnerestimated Jeremy Brown’s hittin’ ability.”

  “I just don’t see it,” says the vocal scout.

  “That’s all right,” says Billy. “We’re blending what we see but we aren’t allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see.”

  This argument had nothing to do with Jeremy Brown. It was about how to find a big league ballplayer. In the scouts’ view, you found a big league ballplayer by driving sixty thousand miles, staying in a hundred crappy motels, and eating god knows how many meals at Denny’s all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you. Most of your worth derived from your membership in the fraternity of old scouts who did this for a living. The other little part came from the one time out of two hundred when you would walk into the ballpark, find a seat on the aluminum plank in the fourth row directly behind the catcher, and see something no one else had seen—at least no one who knew the meaning of it. You only had to see him once. “If you see it once, it’s there,” says Erik. “There’s always been that belief in scouting.” And if you saw it once, you, and only you, would know the meaning of what you saw. You had found the boy who was going to make you famous.