Moneyball

by Lewis, Michael

  When the Library of America published its wonderful anthology of America’s great baseball writing in 2001, it included pieces by Robert Frost and John Updike and other fancy literary types, none of whom ever said anything as interesting about baseball as Bill James, and yet, inexplicably, nothing at all by James.

  The trouble was that baseball readers were not ready for what he had to say. The people who found him worth reading struck him, increasingly, as ridiculous. His skeptical detachment from the world around him helped him to become a writer but it left him ill-suited to be a best-selling one. “I hate to say it and I hope you’re not one of them,” he wrote in his final, 1988 Baseball Abstract, “but I am encountering more and more of my own readers that I don’t even like, nitwits who glom onto something superficial in the book and misunderstand its underlying message…. Whereas I used to write one ‘Dear jackass’ letter a year, I now write maybe thirty.” The growing misunderstanding between himself and his readership was, he felt, not adding to the sum total of pleasure or interest in the universe. “I am no longer certain that the effects of my doing this kind of research are in the best interests of the average baseball fan,” he explained. “I would like to pretend that the invasion of statistical gremlins crawling at random all over the telecast of damn near every baseball game is irrelevant to me, that I really had nothing to do with it…. I know better. I didn’t create this mess, but I helped.”

  Intelligence about baseball had become equated in the public mind with the ability to recite arcane baseball stats. What James’s wider audience had failed to understand was that the statistics were beside the point. The point was understanding; the point was to make life on earth just a bit more intelligible; and that point, somehow, had been lost. “I wonder,” James wrote, “if we haven’t become so numbed by all these numbers that we are no longer capable of truly assimilating any knowledge which might result from them.”

  His final essay in his final Baseball Abstract James entitled “Breakin’ the Wand.” “To most people it no doubt seemed that I was writing about statistics,” he said, “but I wasn’t, not ever; in the years I’ve been doing this book I have written no more than a couple of articles about baseball statistics. The secret of the success of this book is that I was dead in the center of the discussion. I was writing about exactly the same issues that everybody else was talking about, only in a different way.”

  With that, he quit. Claimed he was through being a sabermetrician. “It is a wonderful thing to know that you are right and the world is wrong,” he concluded. “Would God that I might have that feeling again before I die.” He never had a clue—not then, not later—that the world was not entirely wrong. No one ever called James to say that an actual big league baseball team had read him closely, understood everything he had said along with the spirit in which he had said it, and had set out to find even more new baseball knowledge with which to clobber the nitwits who never grasped what Bill James was all about.

  Chapter V

  The Jeremy Brown Blue Plate Special

  What I have tried to do with my work is to make baseball more fun.

  —The Bill James Newsletter, 1985

  When you think of intellectuals influencing the course of human affairs you think of physics, or political theory, or economics. You think of John Maynard Keynes’s condescending line about men of action—how they believe themselves guided by their own ideas even when they are unwittingly in the thrall of some dead economist. You don’t think of baseball, because you don’t think of baseball as having an intellectual underpinning. But it does; it had just never been seriously observed and closely questioned, in a writing style sufficiently compelling to catch the attention of the people who actually played baseball. Once it had been, it was only a matter of time—a long time—before some man of action seized on newly revealed truths to gain a competitive advantage.

  By the time he became the general manager of the Oakland A’s, in 1997, Billy Beane had read all twelve of Bill James’s Abstracts. James had something to say specifically to Billy: you were on the receiving end of a false idea of what makes a successful baseball player. James also had something general to say to Billy, or any other general manager of a baseball team who had the guts, or the need, to listen: if you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done. A full decade after James stopped writing his Abstracts, there were still two fresh opportunities for a team willing to take them to heart. One was simply to take the knowledge developed by James and other analysts outside the game, and implement it inside the game. The other was to develop and extend that knowledge. The Oakland A’s had done both, though it would be wrong to say that, in using James’s ideas, they aped James. As the Elias Sports Bureau had proven when they tried to rip off the Abstract, it was impossible to ape James. The whole point of James was: don’t be an ape! Think for yourself along rational lines. Hypothesize, test against the evidence, never accept that a question has been answered as well as it ever will be. Don’t believe a thing is true just because some famous baseball player says that it is true. “Anyone who thinks he is aping me, isn’t,” said James.

  As late as June 4, 2002, the day of that year’s amateur player draft, there were still big questions about baseball crying out for answers; a baseball diamond was still a field of ignorance. No one had established the most efficient way to use relief pitchers. No one had established to the satisfaction of baseball intellectuals exactly which part of defense was pitching and which fielding, and so no one could say exactly how important fielding was. No one had solved the problem of fielding statistics. And no one had figured out how to make the amateur draft any more than the madness it had always been. James hadn’t worried too much about the amateur draft—probably because the players’ statistics, before the Internet came along, weren’t available to him to analyze. But in a newsletter he wrote for eighteen months in the mid-1980s, to a tiny audience of subscribers, he had argued persuasively that the South was overscouted and the Great Lakes region was underscouted. He also looked into the history of the draft and discovered that “college players are a better investment than high school players by a huge, huge, laughably huge margin.” The conventional wisdom of baseball insiders—that high school players were more likely to become superstars—was also demonstrably false. What James couldn’t understand was why baseball teams refused to acknowledge that fact. “Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions,” he wrote, advancing one theory. “Refusing to draft college players might have been one of them.”

  Still, James had never tried to show how the statistics of a high school or a college player might be used to make judgments about his professional future. The question of whether college performance translated into a professional career simply hadn’t been answered, at least not publicly. Privately, Paul DePodesta, the head of R&D for the Oakland A’s, had made his own study of it.

  As a result of that study, the Oakland A’s front office, over the silent shrieks of their own older scouts, were about to implement a radical new idea about young men and baseball. Lives were about to change, of people who had no clue that they were on the receiving end of an idea. As the scouts poured into the draft room, and stuffed their lower lips with chaw, a catcher with a body deemed by all of baseball to be unsuited to the game sat waiting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Jeremy Brown had no idea why what was about to happen to him was about to happen to him.

  The morning of the amateur draft, Billy Beane arrived at the Coliseum earlier than usual and took the place he had occupied for the previous seven days. At dawn the room seemed more glaringly impersonal than usual; its cinder-block walls were the bright white of an asylum cell. The only hint of a reality outside were the four cheaply framed posters of former A’s stars: Rickey Henderson, Mark McGwire, Dennis Eckersley, Walt Weiss.

  It was still early, a full hour before the draft, and the younger scouts
trickled in to report their savings. It’s actually against Major League Baseball rules for teams to negotiate with players before the draft, but every team does it anyway, though not, perhaps, with the A’s enthusiasm. One of the first scouts to arrive is Rich Sparks (“Sparky”), who covers the Great Lakes region for the A’s. Sparky has just finished a conversation with Steve Stanley, a center fielder from Notre Dame, and he’s pleased. Steve Stanley was yet another example of the strange results you obtained when you ceased to prejudge a player by his appearance, and his less meaningful statistics, and simply looked at what he had accomplished according to his meaningful stats. The Major League Scouting Bureau lists Stanley at five foot seven and 155 pounds, but that’s wildly generous. Despite his size—or perhaps because of it—Stanley has a gift for getting on base. To judge crudely, with the naked eye, he already plays a better center field than Terrence Long, the A’s big league center fielder. And yet the scouts long ago decided Stanley wasn’t big enough to play.

  Stanley has told Sparky that he expected to go after the fifteenth round of the draft. In other words, he expects to be taken by a team simply to fill out its minor league roster, not because the team thinks he has a chance of making it to the big leagues. Sparky has just informed Stanley that the A’s are willing to make him a second-round draft pick—and a genuine big league prospect—on the condition that he agree to sign for $200,000, or about half a million dollars less than every other second-round pick will sign for. Other teams will assume that Billy Beane is interested in all these oddballs because he can’t afford normal players, and Billy encourages the view. And it’s true he can’t afford anyone else. On the long cafeteria table in front of Billy sat an invisible cash register, and inside it the $9.4 million his owner had given him to sign perhaps as many as thirty-five players. The A’s seven first-round picks alone, paid what their equivalents had received the year before, would cost him more than $11 million. Billy uses his poverty to camouflage another fact, that he wants these oddballs more than the studs he cannot afford. He views Stanley as a legitimate second-round pick. Since no one else does, he might as well save money on him.

  “Sparky, we all right?” asks Billy.

  “Yeah, sure,” says Sparky. “I thought he was going to jump through the phone when I told him.”

  Billy laughs. “Pumped, are we?”

  “I think he’d play for free,” says Sparky.

  After Sparky comes Billy Owens (“Billy O”), the young scout who covers the Deep South and is thus responsible for all communication with the University of Alabama catcher, Jeremy Brown. “Billy O looks like a Jamaican drug lord, doesn’t he?” shouts Billy Beane, as Billy O ambles into the draft room. Billy O doesn’t bother to smile. Too much trouble. He somehow conveys the idea of a smile without moving a muscle.

  “We’re all right, huh?” says Billy.

  “Yeah, we all right,” says Billy O.

  “Does he understand?”

  “Oh he understands.”

  Billy O is what you’d get if you hammered Shaquille O’Neal on the head with a pile driver until he stood six foot two. He’s big and wide and moves only when he is absolutely certain that movement is required for survival. He’s shrewd, too, and can see what you mean even if you don’t. Over the past few days Billy O has come to see that he has a novel task: giving Jeremy Brown a new opinion of himself. He took it in small steps; he didn’t want to shock the kid. “That boy told me he’d be happy to go in the first nineteen rounds,” says Billy O. “I told him, ‘think top ten.’ I’m telling you, that guy was so happy when I told him that. Next day I called him back and say, ‘shrink that to five.’ I’m not sure he believed me. Yesterday, I called him and said, ‘You got a chance to make six figures and the first number is not going to be a one.’ The boy had to sit down.”

  But it was what happened late the night before that really struck Billy O. He’d called Jeremy Brown to tell him that the Oakland A’s were thinking of drafting him with the fifth of their seven first-round picks, the thirty-fifth overall pick. To that, Brown hadn’t said anything much at all. Just “Thank you very much but I need to call you back.” Seconds later he’d called back. It turned out he thought the guy who had just called him wasn’t Billy Owens, Oakland A’s scout, but a college teammate of his masquerading as Billy O. “He thought it was a crank call,” says Billy O. “He said he wanted to make sure it was me, and that I was serious.”

  Jeremy Brown, owner of the University of Alabama offensive record books as a catcher, has been so perfectly conditioned by the conventional scouting wisdom that he refused to believe that any major league baseball team could think highly of him. As he eased himself into the radically new evaluation of his talents, he heard Billy O lay down the conditions. There were two. One was that he would sign for the $350,000 the A’s were offering, which was nearly a million dollars less than the thirty-fifth pick of the draft might expect to receive. The other was he needed to lose weight. “I said this is the Oakland A’s speaking to you, and the Oakland A’s do things differently,” said Billy O, fresh from the strangest pre-draft chat he’d ever had with an amateur player. “I told him how this was the money and it was as much as he was ever gonna get and it was non-negotiable. I said the Oakland A’s are making a commitment to you. You gotta make a commitment to us, with your body.”

  It had to be the most energizing weight loss commercial in history, even if it was delivered by an unlikely pitchman. At the end of it, Brown had sounded willing to agree to anything. At the same time, he still didn’t really believe any of it. And that worries Billy Beane.

  “You wanna go home tonight?” he now asks Billy O. What he’s really asking is: Do you think you need to be there in the flesh, to keep Jeremy Brown sane? To remind him that the Oakland A’s have just radically increased his market value, and that he should remain grateful long enough to sign their contract. Once Jeremy Brown becomes a first-round pick, the agents, heretofore oblivious of his existence, would be all over him, trying to persuade him to break the illicit verbal agreement he’d made with the A’s.

  “No,” says Billy O, and takes his seat in the ring of scouts . “I told him those agents are going to be calling him and telling him all kinds of shit. The boy’s all right.”

  “Hey,” says Sparky, brightly, to Billy O, “your guy could eat my guy for dinner.”

  “And would,” says Billy O, then shuts his mouth, to achieve perfect immobility.

  Billy Beane’s phone rings.

  “Hey Kenny,” he says. Kenny Williams, GM of the Chicago White Sox. Williams has been calling a lot lately. He wants to trade for the A’s starting pitcher, Cory Lidle. But this morning it isn’t Lidle he wants to talk about. He’s calling because the White Sox hold the eighteenth pick in the draft, two behind the A’s first selection, and he wants to find out who the A’s plan to draft. He doesn’t come right out and say it; instead, he probes Billy about players, thinking he might trick Billy into tipping his hand. “We’re in front of you so don’t try to play secret agent man,” Billy finally says. “Don’t worry, Blanton might get to you.” Joe Blanton is a pitcher at the University of Kentucky. Billy likes him too.

  Billy hangs up. “He’s going to take Blanton,” he says. A useful tidbit. It fills in the white space between the A’s first pick and their second, the twenty-fourth of the entire draft.

  No one is thinking about the twenty-fourth pick of the draft, however. The twenty-fourth pick of the draft feels years away, and irrelevant. With the twenty-fourth pick of the draft, and all the other picks they have after that, the A’s will pursue players in whom no one else has seen the greatness. Jeremy Brown is the extreme example of the phenomenon, but there are many others.

  Nick Swisher is a different story; Swisher many teams want. No one utters Swisher’s name, but everyone knows that Billy’s obsessed with the kid. Here in the asylum cell Swisher already feels owned. The scouts were already sharing their favorite Swisher stories. The Indians�
� GM, Mark Shapiro, goes to see Swisher play, and instead of sticking to his assigned role of intimidated young player under inspection by big league big shot, Swisher marches right up to Shapiro and says, “So what the hell’s up with Finley’s old lady?” (Chuck Finley is an Indians pitcher who had filed assault charges against his wife.) Great story! The kid has an attitude.

  Billy has to work to hide how much he likes the sound of that descriptive noun. Attitude is “a subjective thing.” Billy’s stated goal is to remain “objective.” All these terribly subjective statements about Swisher keep popping out of his mouth anyway. Swisher has an attitude. Swisher is fearless. Swisher “isn’t going to let anything get between him and the big leagues.” Swisher has “presence.” The more you listen to Billy talk about Swisher, the more you realize that he isn’t talking about Swisher. He’s talking about Lenny Dykstra. Swisher is the same character as the one that had revealed Billy’s shortcomings to himself—made it clear to him that he was never going to be the success everyone said he was born to be. That he’d need to figure out all by himself how to be something else. No wonder that on the subject of Nick Swisher Billy sounds somewhat less than “objective.” He’s talking about a ghost.

  At first, there’s no hint of trouble. The scouts have called around and have a fair idea of who will draft whom with the first fifteen picks. All is clear for the A’s to draft Nick Swisher with the sixteenth pick of the draft. It’s Billy’s best friend in baseball, J. P. Ricciardi, the GM of the Blue jays, who, twenty minutes before the draft, calls to tell Billy that all is no longer so clear. The sound of J.P.’s voice initially causes Billy to brighten but whatever he says causes Billy to say, “Fuck! I got to go.” He punches his cell phone off and hurls it onto the table.